Dialogic teaching in the primary Science classroom

Mercer, N., Dawes, L., & Staarman, J. (2009). Dialogic teaching in the primary science classroom. Language and Education, 23(4), 353-369. doi:10.1080/09500780902954273

Background

• Some believe ‘dialogic teaching’, with its emphasis on the active, influential and sustained participation of pupils in classroom talk, will achieve the best educational results.

• A key indicator of dialogic teaching is that classroom talk should have a cumulative quality. Teacher-student communication should build up over time to create a coherent body of knowledge which captures the students’ learning.

Aims

The study examined how two teachers used dialogue to:

• explore pupils’ current understandings of topics;

• make explicit a learning trajectory for pupils, by relating past activities to those in the present and future;

• build links between the content of earlier discussions and current concerns; and

• model and make explicit to pupils ways of using talk for sharing ideas, reasoning and developing a shared understanding.

Sample

The participants were two primary school teachers and their pupils in grades 5, 6 and 7.

Method

The data collected were video and audio recordings of three consecutive Science lessons for each teacher, pupils’ written work including the teachers’ assessments, and interviews with the teachers and six pupils from each class.

Findings

The findings showed that:

• Both teachers referred to the temporal organisation of events, both within and across lessons. For example, in one lesson, the teacher made a link to a previous lesson by asking a student when the lesson theme was first started.

• Both teachers used questions to encourage pupils’ active involvement in lessons. The teachers regularly generated some interactive/authoritative dialogue. Interactive dialogue involves communication with the teacher and pupils making contributions with pupils’ points of view being represented, while authoritative dialogue involves the teacher and pupils making contributions without pupils’ points of view.

• In both the classes, the dynamic progress of the talk in the whole-class sessions depended on teacher-generated IRF exchanges. The authors state IRF exchanges can be used effectively to sustain dialogue and for a variety of pedagogic purposes.

• Both teachers elicited pupils’ existing ideas about the topics under discussion, but they did not pick up what was offered by pupils and use it to make connections between the various ideas and contrast it with the scientific perspective on the topic.

Implications

The researchers propose that initial teacher training and professional development should include more specific tuition in the effective use of talk for learning. The study supports the view that better motivation and engagement are found amongst children whose views are sought and valued through dialogue.

Original article retrieved from Taylor & Francis.