This qualitative case study provided insights into the journey of two first grade teachers as they attempted to negotiate learning goals and refine their practice to facilitate whole group text-based discussions while supporting ELL students. This study shares the voices, perceptions, and experiences of these two teachers as they planned, implemented, and reflected on their lessons, thus, sharing their challenges and successes along their journey. The teachers selected areas within the Dialogic Instruction Tool (DIT) (Reznitskaya, 2012) as professional development goals. The findings revealed that although both teachers made progress in working towards their professional goals as identified by the DIT Teaching Indicators, neither teacher moved beyond the beginning stages of shifting from monologic toward dialogic teaching during the study. However, the gains that they were able to accomplish did influence the opportunities for their students to engage in different levels of thinking (Costa, 2001). Unfortunately, the ELL students in both of the two teachers’ classes did not appear to actively benefit from this increase by taking up opportunities to speak and share their thoughts and ideas through different levels of thinking.
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