How Is Teacher-Student Dialogue Related to Student Participation?

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

Abstract

For at least two millennia, the form of dialogue that occurs in classrooms has been spotlighted as critical for teaching and learning. Hypotheses have been proposed about productive forms by many scholars, especially those drawing on sociocultural perspectives and dialogic theory. They highlight a need for open questions; extended responses (optimally involving justifications); cumulative building upon others' contributions; articulation, discussion and critical evaluation of competing viewpoints; and gradual resolution of differences in a productive direction (Alexander, 2008; Bakhtin, 1981; AUTHORS, 2008). While a small number of studies have related dialogue to learning outcomes, they have been mainly concerned with small-group interaction amongst students rather than whole class teaching (AUTHORS, 2013) in which power relationships are very different. More research is thus needed.

Our ongoing ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) funded project focuses on whole-class discussions during mathematics, literacy and science lessons involving children aged 10-11 in English primary (elementary) schools. It explores naturally occurring variation in teachers’ use of classroom dialogue, and investigates whether some forms of interaction are more productive for learning. Published research and the team’s previous experience suggested that teachers will vary markedly. Outcome measures will ultimately include performance on national standardized tests of subject knowledge, reasoning skill, and students’ attitudes to school.

We are videotaping three successive lessons (each c.60 minutes in duration) in around 80 classrooms and transcribing all teacher talk, and student talk that occurs during interaction with teachers. All lessons are then systematically coded for presence of “dialogic moves” at the turn level, using a coding scheme adapted from the Cam-UNAM Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (SEDA). This scheme was developed by AUTHORS (2016) during a 3-year UK-Mexico collaboration, and offers a strong theoretical model and extensively piloted coding categories. These include both teacher and student moves; the adapted coding scheme will be presented in detail in the session. We are also rating all lessons for levels of student participation in dialogue and learning activities, metacognitive reflection on learning processes and explicit focus on dialogue.

Our poster will present data from the first year’s cohort of classrooms (n=27 teachers x 3 = 81 lessons), collected in 2015-16. We will focus on teacher variation in practice across diverse classroom contexts, reporting incidence within teacher-orchestrated dialogue of key dialogic moves – specifically use of our invitational codes (such as Invite elaboration, Invite reasoning, Invite coordination) and the degree of take-up. We use these categorisations to characterize teachers along a ‘dialogic spectrum’. Validation includes blind ratings of divergent transcripts by expert researchers in the field. We model any systematic patterns – categories mostly/sometimes/rarely observed across classrooms – and additionally examine the relationship between dialogic interaction and student participation levels. Here we investigate the influence of socioeconomic status, ethnicity and language background and relate these findings to the issue of equitability of educational opportunities. Implications for policy and practice will be discussed.

Authors

• Sara Hennessy, University of Cambridge

• Christine Howe, University of Cambridge

• Neil McKay Mercer, University of Cambridge

• Maria Vrikki, University of Cambridge

• Lisa Wheatley, University of Cambridge