classroom dialogue

For further information about developing strategies that promote Classroom Dialogue and links to resources for use in mathematics and science (primary and secondary), please visit the ORBIT website:

http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/Teaching_Approaches/Dialogue

Students can be encouraged to reflect on how well they, and their group, are doing when using the ground rules for talk using the Thinking Together ‘Talk Tally’ (Dawes, 2010). This could form part of an Assessment for Learning activity in which students award themselves and/or their group ‘two stars and a wish’ to identify what they are currently doing well and what they might do next time to improve:

Different types of talk have been identified in the classroom, some of which are more educationally effective than others. ‘Monologic’ talk is dominated by the teacher and is exemplified by an Initiation-Response-Feedback’ (IRF) pattern. The IRF pattern, which may be repeated several times during whole-class teaching, is typified by the teacher asking a closed question (initiation), a child answering (response) and the teacher offering feedback on that answer (feedback).

The University of Oslo (Norway) and the University of Cambridge are currently developing resources to support teachers developing their dialogic classroom pedagogy and use of digital technology. Their international research project focuses on the use of a free, web-based microblogging tool called ‘Talkwall’. Talkwall has been developed to enhance, and possibly transform, classroom interactions by encouraging genuine ‘thinking together’, as students are easily able to share, and build upon, each other’s ideas. 

One way to facilitate the development of a supportive environment where children can articulate their ideas freely is through the negotiation of ‘ground rules’ for talk. The Thinking Together website (Dawes, 2010) has some very useful resources for encouraging children to consider how talk is used in classrooms and activities for developing ground rules for talk with your students.

https://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/resources/

The importance of language to learning is evident even from children’s earliest interactions with their carers. Hart and Risley (1995) argued that the amount and quality of the dialogue that young children experience at home is one of best predictors of their eventual academic attainment. The conversational style of carers has been shown to be critical to children’s long-term retention; children have more organised and detailed memories if their carers frequently use elaboration and evaluation (Reese, Haden & Fivush, 1993).

Recent research has explored how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) can be used to encourage dialogue with primary and secondary children across subject areas (Hennessy, Warwick, Brown, Rawlins & Neale, 2014). An overview of the project can be found here:

http://dialogueiwb.educ.cam.ac.uk/about/

The ‘resource bank and templates’ section of the project website provides a variety of ideas for IWB activities designed to promote dialogue:

The first stage in developing a more dialogic approach to learning and teaching would be to consider the type of language that is already in use in your classroom. One way of doing this would be to undertake a ‘talk audit’. Produced by ‘The Inquiry Project’, the talk audit identifies four ‘goals’ for productive discussions and nine associated ‘talk moves’ in the form of a checklist. This enables teachers to examine how frequently such talk moves are used in their classroom.

From a sociocultural perspective, there is an important relationship between language and cognitive development. Vygotsky (1962, 1978) was one of the first theorists to recognise the importance of social interaction and language in cognitive development. For Vygotsky, language is both a cultural tool (for the development and sharing of knowledge) and a psychological tool (for the development of individual thought).

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