Prof. O’Connor is Professor of Education and Linguistics at Boston University. She has studied classroom discussion and academically productive talk by teachers and students for over 20 years. She has focused especially on the role of talk in promoting student reasoning in literacy and mathematics learning in a variety of school settings. Recent publications include Classroom Discussions: a book, facilitator’s guide, and 5 hours of mathematics classroom video (Anderson, Chapin & O’Connor, 2011). A recent paper she co-authored (Noble et al., “I never thought of it as freezing”: How students answer questions on large-scale science tests… JRST, 2012) won an award from the National Science Teachers Association. Another strand of her research centers on language description and documentation, including work on Northern Pomo, a dormant language of Northern California, and Medumba, a Grassfields language of Cameroon. Her BA (Stanford University) and PhD (UC Berkeley) are in Linguistics. From 2017 to 2018, Prof. O’Connor served as Dean ad interim of the Boston University School of Education, and played a significant role in the merger that created Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.