This volume provides informed arguments, theory and practical examples based on research about what it looks like when educators, policy makers, and even students, try to rethink and change their practices by engaging in evidence-based conversations to challenge and inform their work. It allows the reader to experience these conversations. Each story reveals the depth of thinking that change requires and gives important insights into the challenge associated with changing thinking and practice. Some of the stories are encouraging and others are frustrating. Taken together, they give tremendous insight into "what it takes" for conceptual change that will fundamentally shift educational practice.

Acknowledgements and Contributing Authors,-- Acknowledgements,-- Contributing Authors,-- Chapter 1: Understanding How Evidence and Learning Conversations Work,-- Chapter 2: Raising Student Achievement in Poor Communities Through Evidence--Based Conversations,-- Chapter 3: Structuring Talk about Teaching and Learning: The Use of Evidence in Protocol--Based Conversation,-- Chapter 4: Leadership for Evidence--Informed Conversations,-- Chapter 5: A Cross Grade Learner Conversation,-- Chapter 6: Evidence Informed Conversations Making a Difference to Student Achievement,-- Chapter 7: Honey, Wooden Spoons and Clay Pots: The Evolution of a Lithuanian Learning Conversation,-- Chapter 8: Learning to Think and Talk from Evidence: Developing System--Wide Capacity for Learning Conversations,-- Chapter 9: Learning Conversations Stillborn: Distrust and Education Policy Dialogue in South Africa,-- Chapter 10: Using Conversations to Make Sense of Evidence: Possibilities and Pitfalls.-- References,-- Index.