Commentary: Analyzing classroom dialogue to create changes in school

In this commentary, the articles of the special issue will be discussed in relation to how they address classroom dialogue to promote new forms of education. The articles present possibilities to rethink learning and education through the analysis of classroom dialogue. The commentary will address how the outcomes of the included papers lead to reflections about how practitioners and researchers may rethink school and society in a more emancipating, revolutionary, and transformative way.     

The Seeds of Time: Why Classroom Dialogue Needs a Temporal Analysis

The process of teaching and learning in school has a natural long-term trajectory and cannot be understood only as a series of discrete educational events. Classroom talk plays an important role in mediating this long-term process, and in this article I argue that more attention should be given to the temporal dimension of classroom dialogue, both empirically and theoretically, if we are to appreciate how children gain an education from their classroom experience. I explore this topic using data from recent applied, interventional research in United Kingdom primary schools and examine how classroom talk is used to represent past shared experience, carry ideas forward from one occasion to another, approach future activities, and achieve learning outcomes. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical, methodological, and educational implications of making this kind of temporal analysis.     

The effects of room design on computer-supported collaborative learning in a multi-touch classroom

While research indicates that technology can be useful for supporting learning and collaboration, there is still relatively little uptake or widespread implementation of these technologies in classrooms. In this paper, we explore one aspect of the development of a multi-touch classroom, looking at two different designs of the classroom environment to explore how classroom layout may influence group interaction and learning. Three classes of students working in groups of four were taught in the traditional forward-facing room condition, while three classes worked in a centered room condition. Our results indicate that while the outcomes on tasks were similar across conditions, groups engaged in more talk (but not more off-task talk) in a centered room layout, than in a traditional forward-facing room. These results suggest that the use of technology in the classroom may be influenced by the location of the technology, both in terms of the learning outcomes and the interaction behaviors of students. The findings highlight the importance of considering the learning environment when designing technology to support learning, and ensuring that integration of technology into formal learning environments is done with attention to how the technology may disrupt, or contribute to, the classroom interaction practices.     

Operational,interpersonal, discussional and ideational dimensions of classroom norms for dialogic practice in school mathematics

While research suggests that interactive pedagogy drawing on students’ ideas can improve learning outcomes, it has been found difficult to change mathematics classroom practice in this direction. The reasons for this difficulty remain poorly understood, hindering change at scale. This article focuses on the under‐researched normative aspect of such practice which shapes participants’ actions and expectations. Drawing on theories of social practice and interaction, we define norms as recurrent and socially obligating patterns of, and rationales for, behaviour in a particular social practice. We then examine empirically what and how (new) norms associated with this type of pedagogy are manifest in classroom discursive activity by examining talk across 21 school mathematics lessons by 12 teachers implementing a dialogic intervention. While there is a clear distinction between surface norms and underlying rationales, and a consistent set of surface norms relating to classroom talk can be identified, deeper analysis finds norms to be multi‐dimensional. We illustrate how a surface norm, such as ‘Respect others’ ideas’, can be enunciated in terms of multiple underlying rationales which we term operational, interpersonal, discussional and ideational. Our findings shed new light on why the dialogic intentions of such interventions are often realised in a superficial way. We further examine the ways in which teachers hold students and themselves accountable to the ideational dimension—the dimension that relates to taking students’ ideas seriously in classroom dialogue.     

Searching for evidence of curricular effect on the teaching and learning of mathematics: Lessons learned from the two projects

The two research projects described and discussed in the special issue provided much needed longitudinal empirical data to show the curricular influence on classroom instruction and student learning outcomes. The findings have helped to advance our understanding of whether the reform curricula can bring about positive changes in classroom instruction and student learning outcomes and how such changes might be sustained. In this article we synthesize the results from the two studies and discuss several lessons learned from the projects about investigating and understanding curricular effects on the teaching and learning of mathematics.     

Student Thought and Classroom Language: Examining the Mechanisms of Change in Dialogic Teaching

Dialogue, as a communication form characterized by its commitment to inclusiveness and rationality, has long been advocated by educators as a mechanism for helping students become better thinkers. Unfortunately, numerous claims about the educational potential of participating in dialogue have not resulted in substantial changes in classroom practices. Studies have consistently shown that in today's schools the dominant discourse remains largely monologic. In this article, we present a testable theory of change that suggests how sociocultural processes in a dialogic classroom influence students’ development. We identify and discuss three learning outcomes of dialogic teaching, including epistemological understanding, argument skills, and disciplinary knowledge. We then critically review empirical research related to the proposed theory, highlighting unsolved questions, inconsistencies, and directions for future studies. Finally, we focus on the implications of the proposed integrated theory and reviewed research for teachers and their language use in a classroom.     

Building upon synergies among self-regulated learning and formative assessment research and practice

ABSTRACT

The synergies that result from synthesising conceptual models and findings from self-regulated learning and formative assessment research are launching a new era of scholarship. They drive new questions about how to help students to internalise complimentary self-regulatory and assessment knowledge, skills, and dispositions as well as how to prepare teachers and education systems to prioritise and support this work. The articles in this special issue illustrate the power and importance of studying how self-regulation and classroom assessment emerge from social, contextual, historical, and cultural factors. Four themes emerged from the articles in this special issue, including new conceptualisations of self-regulated learning and formative assessment, insights regarding teachers’ dual role in enacting and promoting self-regulation, recognition of the critical role of students’ ability to productively use assessment information, and the need to instantiate self-regulated learning and assessment literacy as formal and valued curricular outcomes.     

Interactive Teaming (book)

The constraints and complexity entailed in the provision of comprehensive special education services at a school site argue for the importance of using whole schools as a unit of analysis in special education efficacy research. The case studies summarized in this special issue represent an important step forward in understanding how schools that support positive academic outcomes for all students are configured. All studies found support for the importance of collaboration (although the forms varied by school). Other common themes were peer support, shared responsibility for student learning, administrative support for collaboration, and informal communication mechanisms that supplemented more formal contacts between general and special education. The case studies can serve as a stimulus for further debate about how to define exemplary outcomes in special education and the critical dimensions for characterizing schools' services to students with disabilities. They also provide directions for future research in understanding the processes that contribute to positive outcomes for students in special education.     

Case studies of teachers' understandings of the pedagogy of classroom talk: some critical moments explored

This case study research is informed by Vygotsky's view that talk is essential to organise our thoughts and extend our thinking and that, as Barnes suggested, the teacher needs to use the social situation effectively in the classroom to promote talk for learning. This article focuses on pedagogy and teachers' understandings of how talk works in the classroom, as I sought to illuminate teachers' intuitions and insights and their views of what they find challenging in organising classroom talk. Three case studies of ‘critical moments’ in a lesson suggest that teacher knowledge about talk is located in concrete practices. The three teachers viewed a recorded lesson and chose a moment they defined as ‘critical’ because the moment helped them to learn something about the way they use talk in the classroom. They then discussed this moment with me. These collaborative but critically evaluative processes are particularly useful for exploring and probing teachers' knowledge about talk for learning, an area of pedagogy that has proved so resistant to change over quite a long period. These three teachers suggest that such talk is becoming more marginal under the impact of performativity and the new cultural restorationist English curriculum.     

Changing classroom culture,curricula, and instruction for proof and proving: how amenable to scaling up,practicable for curricular integration,and capable of producing long-lasting effects are current interventions?

This paper is a commentary on the classroom interventions on the teaching and learning of proof reported in the seven empirical papers in this special issue. The seven papers show potential to enhance student learning in an area of mathematics that is not only notoriously difficult for students to learn and for teachers to teach, but also critically important to knowing and doing mathematics. Although the seven papers, and the intervention studies they report, vary in many ways—student population, content domain, goals and duration of the intervention, and theoretical perspectives, to name a few—they all provide valuable insight into ways in which classroom experiences might be designed to positively influence students’ learning to prove. In our commentary, we highlight the contributions and promise of the interventions in terms of whether and how they present capacity to change the classroom culture, the curriculum, or instruction. In doing so, we distinguish between works that aim to enhance students’ preparedness for, and competence in, proof and proving and works that explicitly foster appreciation for the need and importance of proof and proving. Finally, we also discuss briefly the interventions along three dimensions: how amenable to scaling up, how practicable for curricular integration, and how capable of producing long-lasting effects these interventions are.     

Classroom peace circles: Teachers’ professional learning and implementation of restorative dialogue

Teachers’ professional learning about how to facilitate dialogue about conflicts is a core element of both peacemaking and democratic citizenship. Dialogue enables students to develop relationships and skills for handling conflict, proactively in classroom pedagogies and in response to disputes. Yet, such practices are challenging to fully implement and sustain in schools. Drawing on classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students, this article shows how four middle-grade public school teachers in Southern Ontario, Canada facilitated peace circles and how their students responded. The research sheds light on key principles and challenges in facilitating restorative dialogue in diverse classrooms.     

More than just a group: teacher collaboration and learning in the workplace

Teaching is often characterized as an isolated activity, yet opportunities for teachers to work and learn together in schools are increasing. Underlying this shift is the view that as teachers work on new practices and teaching challenges together, they will express varied perspectives, reveal different teaching styles and experiences, and stimulate reflection and professional growth. Despite strong research interest in teacher learning groups, few studies have looked at the relationship between teachers' conversations and collaboration outside the classroom and their actual classroom teaching. Drawing on data from a larger study of literacy instruction with middle‐school teachers, this article describes how three teachers participated in an ongoing literacy program with a research group. Two were seventh‐ and eighth‐grade language‐arts teachers, the third was a special‐education teacher who taught a substantially separate class of cognitively delayed and learning‐disabled students. Case studies of each teacher draw on meeting observations, classroom observations and interviews to describe how each participated in after‐school meetings, how they used the work of the group in the classroom, and how they brought teaching successes and challenges back to the group. Although each of the teachers participated actively in the teacher learning group and changed their practice, the teachers with the most advanced teaching of literacy practices did not bring that expertise into the teacher group as fully as they might have. The analysis raises questions about how teachers participate and learn and how to structure teacher groups to maximize teacher learning.     

The Interplay of Teacher and Student Actions in the Teaching and Learning of Geometric Proof

Proof and reasoning are fundamental aspects of mathematics. Yet, how to help students develop the skills they need to engage in this type of higher-order thinking remains elusive. In order to contribute to the dialogue on this subject, we share results from a classroom-based interpretive study of teaching and learning proof in geometry. The goal of this research was to identify factors that may be related to the development of proof understanding. In this paper, we identify and interpret students' actions, teacher's actions, and social aspects that are evident in a classroom in which students discuss mathematical conjectures, justification processes and student-generated proofs. We conclude that pedagogical choices made by the teacher, as manifested in the teacher's actions, are key to the type of classroom environment that is established and, hence, to students' opportunities to hone their proof and reasoning skills. More specifically, the teacher's choice to pose open-ended tasks (tasks which are not limited to one specific solution or solution strategy), engage in dialogue that places responsibility for reasoning on the students, analyze student arguments, and coach students as they reason, creates an environment in which participating students make conjectures, provide justifications, and build chains of reasoning. In this environment, students who actively participate in the classroom discourse are supported as they engage in proof development activities. By examining connections between teacher and student actions within a social context, we offer a first step in linking teachers' practice to students' understanding of proof.     

Developing interactive mathematical talk: investigating student perceptions and accounts of mathematical reasoning in a changing classroom context

In recent years there has been an increased focus on the need for teachers to develop learning communities where all students have opportunities to engage in interactive discourse. However, there are few studies that focus on student perceptions and accounts of mathematical reasoning in classrooms with interactive mathematical talk as a focus of reform. A framework of teacher actions to develop classroom and mathematical practices was developed from classroom observations. Photo-elicitation interviews were used to investigate student perception and accounts of mathematical explanations and reasoning. The professional development programme, shifts in the teacher actions, and subsequent shifts in student perception and their recall of their own and peers’ mathematical reasoning over a school year are highlighted. Developing interactive dialogue in the classroom took considerable time and attention. Facilitating change to the way students both participated and understood their obligations required constant, ongoing attention to both the classroom and mathematical practices.     

Immersion Learning in Social Work Education: A Pedagogical Tool for Enriching Knowledge and Practice Skills among BSW Students

Immersion learning is one form of experiential education and has great utility in social work education. However, there is limited research on student learning outcomes from immersion learning courses in social work education. This ethnographic research describes an immersion learning course offered to BSW students (N = 9) and the learning outcomes gained. This semester-long course focused on macrolevel practice with people experiencing poverty, homelessness, and the sexual exploitation of women. As part of this course, students went on a weeklong immersion trip, where they visited a dozen human service organizations and interacted with people experiencing poverty and homelessness. Qualitative analysis produced three findings. First, students reported that these interactions helped them realize their biases and impacted their understanding of poverty. Second, students reported enhanced social work practice skills, such as cultural competency, self-awareness, and interpersonal expertise. They also gained a better appreciation for macrolevel practice. Third, students reported a better understanding of how to deploy classroom knowledge in practice and how to apply what they learned back in the classroom. These findings have implications for undergraduate social work education and how immersion learning programs can be a tool for enriching both knowledge and practice skills.     

Dimensions of dialogue: large classes in China

This chapter focuses on ways in which talk and culture mediate learning in large classes in China. We suggest reasons why classes are kept large and show how language teachers use pair and group work but seem to scaffold dialogue with the whole class. We argue that teaching large classes is successful in China partly because of interactive techniques in classroom dialogue, but mainly because of the underlying culture of learning. The Chinese culture of learning is elaborated using questionnaire data with both British and Chinese students and interviews with Chinese teachers. The dialogue about large classes needs to take cultures of learning into account and in the Chinese case to consider collectivist and Confucian values. Classroom events are illustrated using visual ethnography, particularly the stages in a large-class language lesson in a primary school.     

Collaborative Action Research on Technology Integration for Science Learning

This paper briefly reports the outcomes of an action research inquiry on the use of blogs, MS PowerPoint [PPT], and the Internet as learning tools with a science class of sixth graders for project-based learning. Multiple sources of data were essential to triangulate the key findings articulated in this paper. Corresponding to previous studies, the incorporation of technology and project-based learning could motivate students in self-directed exploration. The students were excited about the autonomy over what to learn and the use of PPT to express what they learned. Differing from previous studies, the findings pointed to the lack information literacy among students. The students lacked information evaluation skills, note-taking and information synthesis. All these findings imply the importance of teaching students about information literacy and visual literacy when introducing information technology into the classroom. The authors suggest that further research should focus on how to break the culture of “copy-and-paste” by teaching the skills of note-taking and synthesis through inquiry projects for science learning. Also, further research on teacher professional development should focus on using collaboration action research as a framework for re-designing graduate courses for science teachers in order to enhance classroom technology integration.     

Collaborative epistemic discourse in classroom information-seeking tasks

The authors discuss the relationship between information seeking and epistemic beliefs – beliefs about the source, structure, complexity and stability of knowledge – in the context of collaborative information-seeking discourses. They further suggest that both information seeking, and epistemic cognition research agendas, have suffered from a lack of attention to how information seeking as a collaborative activity is mediated by talk between partners – an area they seek to address in this article. A small-scale observational study using sociocultural discourse analysis was conducted with eight 11-year-old pupils who carried out search engine tasks in small groups. Qualitative and quantitative analysis were performed on their discussions using sociocultural discourse analytic techniques. Extracts of the dialogue are reported, informed by concordance analysis and quantitative coding of dialogue duration. The authors find that: (1) discourse which could be characterised as ‘epistemic’ is identifiable in student talk; (2) it is possible to identify talk which is more or less productive; and (3) epistemic talk is associated with positive learning outcomes.     

Just like my nanny: troubling teacher’s social identities in the classroom

Teacher-researcher narrative accounts are essential and insightful for the science education field, yet they are few and far-between. In this forum, I engage in dialogue with Nicole Grimes’s auto-ethnographic narrative on the affordances her femme-Carribean identity allowed for some students to engage more deeply in science. While I agree with and applaud Grimes’s reflection on how her perceived social identity had positive effects on some students’ engagement in science, I trouble the notion of such a social identity being framed solely as an asset to student learning by examining the power dynamics inherent in the enacted nanny-child relationship. I also propose the need for deeper analyses on how a teacher’s social identity can impact students’ learning experiences in the science classroom by looking at how the boundaries of the science classroom are redefined and what additional resources are recruited that can foster deeper engagement.