Indicators and Principles of Dialogic Teaching in Teacher Professional Development

• In Event: 53.026 - Broadening Opportunities for Classroom Learning With Dialogic Pedagogies

Abstract

Theoretical framework
The classic definition of the concept of dialogic teaching comes from Alexander (2006) who states that spoken language should play a central role in teaching as it provides an opportunity to influence students’ cognitive processes through their involvement in the classroom discourse. Theory of dialogic teaching contains various conceptual tools from which we discuss indicators and principles of dialogic teaching. Indicators are observable phenomena that represent dialogic teaching – for example, authentic questions, uptake, higher order teacher feedback, open discussion (Nystrand, 1997), total student talk time during interactive sequences, triadic interaction (Molinari & Mameli, 2013), occurrence of student questions (Nystrand et al., 2001), student reasoning (Pimentel & McNeill, 2013), the presence of elaborated explanation in student talk (Sotter et al., 2008) etc.

However, it has been also argued that the presence of indicators itself does not guarantee the dialogic nature of teaching (see eg. Boyd and Markarian, 2011; 2015). Alexander (2006) argues that the crucial role is in epistemology of classroom interaction. He therefore suggests the following set of principles. Dialogic teaching should be: (1) collective, (2) reciprocal, (3) supportive, (4) cumulative, (5) purposeful. Indicators are often used as tools for the analysis of empirical data gathered in classroom environment. However, the principles of dialogic teaching are rarely used for these purposes. This can be explained by difficult operationalization of principles itself.

Objectives
In this paper, we answer the question of how to monitor if the principles of dialogic teaching are implemented during lessons. We focus on two different principles – collectivity that we operationalize through a number of students engaged in a certain communication situation, and purposefulness that we operationalize through relationship between the content of specific learning activities and educational goals of the teacher. Also, we investigate the mutual relationship between principles and indicators. We ask if either principle is reached by fulfilling indicators or if they are actually in conflict.

Method
We use data from interventional research during which teachers (n=8) participated in a professional development program and tried to implement the indicators and principles of dialogic teaching. The teacher development programme consisted of several components: 1) workshops for teachers which included group discussion; 2) documentation of lessons by means of video recordings; and 3) reflective interviews conducted between a researcher and a teacher in which video recordings of individual lessons were viewed and discussed.

Results
We examined the developmental trajectory of change identified in individual teachers' practices – we used indicators as well as principles as tools for measuring the change. The fundamental finding was that the change was not linear in the sense that there would be a gradual rise in indicators as well as in principles. We noticed a succession of phases of acceleration of change with phases of stagnation and regression. According to our interpretation, phases of regression are caused by the fact that indicators and principles come into conflict. Once these conflicts are overcome, however, the change towards dialogic teaching is accelerated.

Authors

• Klara Sedova, Masaryk University

• Roman Švaříček, Masaryk University