Supporting Teachers’ Facilitation of Classroom Discussion: Where Teacher Education and Improvisational Theatre Intersect

• In Event: Roundtable Session 121
  In Roundtable Session: Drama-Based Pedagogies in Teacher Education and Classroom Learning

Abstract

Research has shown that classroom talk is characterized by lecture, and opportunities for content-related conversations most often take the form of teacher-centered recitation (e.g., Mehan, 1979; Cazden, 1986). Limiting student talk to recitative participation structures is detrimental to students’ development of oral and written argumentation – essential skills for college readiness. Co-constructed, dialogic interaction between teachers and students and among students is important because it increases student engagement with subject matter, improves student achievement (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1997), and models powerful social norms and academic discourse skills such as listening, adding to others’ contributions, tactful disagreement, and turn-taking. Moreover, opportunities to orally craft arguments may carry over into students’ writing.
This paper discusses the specific features of students’ written and oral work that demonstrate ‘argument literacy’ in high-school humanities classrooms (Graff, 2003), reviews research that describes teacher discourse moves that have been linked to student achievement in secondary settings (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1997), and makes the case for teacher professional learning that includes opportunities for teachers to, first, recognize their discourse patterns and, second, practice breaking these patterns. This paper argues that this second objective of professional learning can be fostered through training in improvisational theatre because the central moves of improv theatre – active listening, shared control, and strategic response, including the embracing of mistakes – overlap with the contingent, interactive skills teachers need to critically engage young people through meaningful classroom discussion.
The study described in this paper follows eight high school English and history teachers before, during, and after their participation in two separate professional learning interventions – one focused on classroom discussion and one focused on improvisational theatre. This study seeks to answer a set of three interrelated questions: To what extent does explicit training in classroom discussion and key improvisational theatre skills affect (1) how teachers understand discussion, (2) the nature of teachers’ verbal offers during their facilitation of classroom discussion, and (3) students’ oral argument literacy as defined by the extent of their uptake and their use of claims, evidence, and reasoning? Data sources per participating teacher include: five rounds of videotaped classroom observations; six interviews designed to understand each teacher’s philosophy and enactment of discussion; and questionnaires that ask teachers to reflect on their experiences in the two interventions. In addition to these data sources, the investigator maintained annotated lesson plans and selected audio and video recordings from the two interventions.
This study adds to the literature on classroom discourse by examining the skills teachers need to effectively facilitate discussion, the ways in which teacher educators can best develop these capacities, and the impact a teacher’s moves may have on students’ development of oral argument literacy. Findings from this study will be used to revise a coding scheme for uptake in order to investigate which kinds of teacher uptake have the most leverage in terms of garnering student engagement and achievement, and which kinds of teacher and student uptake have the most leverage in terms of developing students’ oral and written argument literacy.

Author

• Lisa Barker, SUNY - College at New Paltz