Dialogic Teaching, Learning & Assessment
Submitted by:
Marta Gràcia
Abstract:
The symposium presents four projects targeting professional development towards dialogic education. A dialogic approach calls for new knowledge and practices for the teacher to widen the awareness of the dialogic possibilities and vary the dialogic forms to a greater extent in classroom conversations.
We have a focus on the possibilities for creating new spaces and give room for new voices by involving and providing dialogues between teachers/student teachers and students between students. This also means a focus on the teacher's awareness of what significance his scaffolding has for the classroom dialogues.
The symposium will discuss how student teachers use academic language in their teaching practice, how their group discussions contribute positively to the student teachers' meta reflections of their use of academic dialogues in the classroom, teachers’ discussions and reflections upon their experiences of opening dialogic spaces in their classrooms, what are the changes in classes and in students’ oral language competence during and at the end of teachers’ participation in a Professional Development Program (PDP) of a reflective and transversal nature to generate more participatory classes.
We are also interested in exploring the lack of student participation and reflect on what new spaces and relations can be created when new languages, voices and technologies are incorporated into L1 education?
This calls for focus and collaboration. Practices lie mentally and culturally in us and between us in our everyday life, and teachers/ student teachers who want to change the classroom dialogues need support for a longer time, i.e., collaborative supervision from researchers, colleagues and from teacher educators.
In the symposium, we want to discuss different projects that approach the dialogic changes as collaborative interventions among teachers, student teachers, students and researchers to explore examples of which circumstances and interventions are needed and how and why they succeed according to their different goals and in their different scales of interventions.
- Marta Gràcia & Ana L. Adam-Alcocer & Verónica Quezada Hernandez & María Teresa Zarza Díaz & Priscila Garza
In Secondary Education classrooms a continuum can be identified in relation to teaching methodologies: 1) the traditional teacher-dominated transmission approach, which is roughly described as that in which teachers transmit content to students unidirectionally; 2) and the dialogical, bidirectional teaching approach that encourages students to adopt a critical vision of the information provided by the teacher or that is generated through students’ discussion of knowledge (Concannon-Gibney, 2021; Cristillo, 2010; Guzmán & Larrain, 2021). In this context, the EVALOE-DSS (Assessment Scale of Oral Language Teaching in the School Context – Decision Support System) (Author et al., 2023) digital instrument emerged to help teachers ensure that classes become spaces for communication, dialogue, reflection and evaluation of the process of learning and teaching all contents, including oral language.
Research questions: What are the changes in classes and in students’ OLC during and at the end of three teachers’ participation in a Professional Development Program (PDP) of a reflective and transversal nature to generate more participatory classes?
Methods
Participants: The sample consisted of 3 teachers and 80 students of Secondary Education (12-15 years). Instruments: The self-reflective digital instrument EVALOE-DSS. Other instruments are used by teachers such as a test to evaluate the oral language competence of the students, questioner to reflect about their participation in the TDP, reflective seminars, focus group, scale to evaluate students perceptions of the class dynamics and their own OLC.
Procedure: teachers participated in a PDP using EVALOE-SSD that included meetings with each other. Teachers and students use different scales and tests during and at the end of the PDP teachers participate in a FG to reflect jointly about the process.
Findings
The results showed changes in teaching strategies, which had clearer language objectives, and in the dynamics of the classes, which were more interactive and self-managed by the students. The three teachers and their students identified elements that involved the transformation of classes into spaces for communication, discussion and reflection on the language, its development, and its use as a key instrument to develop the curricular competencies.
Key words: Secondary Education, Professional Development Program, Individual reflection, Collaborative reflection, Oral Language.
References
Concannon-Gibney, T. (2021). Moving beyond the transmission of knowledge in the
lecture hall: a self study. Professional Development in Education, 1-13.
https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2021.1876152
Cristillo, L. (2010). Struggling for the centre: Teacher centered vs. learner-centered
practices in Palestinian higher education. Higher Education and the Middle East,
2, 37-40.
Author et al. (2023)
Guzmán, V., & Larrain, A. (2021). The transformation of pedagogical practices into
dialogic teaching: towards a dialogic notion of teacher learning. Professional
Development in Education, 1-14.
- Eva Hultin & Atle Skaftun
The aim of this study is to contribute with knowledge on teachers’ experiences of igniting dialogic spaces in their L1 classrooms (classes in Norwegian) during participation in a research project, Partners in Practice. Creating spaces for dialogue in classroom discourse has since long been promoted by educational researchers both for better learning possibilities but also for a more democratic education (see i.e., Alexander, 2008, Wegerif, 2013). However, earlier research has reported on several obstacles in developing dialogic features in classroom discourse, which both seem to stem from resilient monologic school traditions and the top-down design of the research projects which has hindered teachers to attain ownership of their changing practice (cf. Hennessy & Davies, 2020).
Thus, as the concept partnership indicates, developing dialogic features in classroom discourse has been a joint enterprise of the researchers and the teachers involved in the project to enable sustainable change within classroom practices. In this presentation a part study of the project is focused, namely the involved teachers’ discussions and reflections upon their experiences of opening dialogic spaces in their classrooms. These discussions took place in ten meetings during three semesters (2021-2022) and were recorded and transcribed. A thematic analysis was conducted (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Four major themes were analytically discerned: dialogic participation, student positions, students and the literary texts, and teachers’ reflections on igniting dialogue. The first three themes cover possibilities and challenges that teachers experience during the project, while the fourth theme covers their reflections on both how to evaluate different challenges and, quite often, how to overcome them. Furthermore, the analysis shows how the teachers gradually during the ten meetings take didactical ownership of the dialogic space, not the least through using their professional judgement when searching for new ways of igniting dialogue.
Key words: Researcher-practitioner partnership; dialogic space ; literary conversations
References
Alexander, R. (2008). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk. Dialogos.
Hennessy, S. & Davies, M. (2020). Professional development for dialogue. In The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education. Routledge.
- Eva Dam Christensen
The aim of this project is to explore and develop student teachers’ awareness in relation to reflected use of academic language and dialogues in their teaching practice, their peer-to-peer discussions when analysing video and whether this focus contributes positively to their awareness of dialogical use of academic language in the subject Danish (L1)
The research questions are:
How do student teachers use academic language in their teaching practice?
And how can their group discussions, when analysing video using scaffolding coding, contribute positively to the student teachers' meta reflections of their use of academic dialogues in the classroom?
Research indicates that the use of scaffolded reflection through video recordings of teaching situations can develop student teachers’ professional understanding of the subject they teach in and the dialogical potential within relation to the pupils’ learning prerequisites (Grossmann, 2015; Howe, Hennessy and Mercer, 2020). However, few studies have focused on how student teachers use academic language and concepts in their dialogue with pupils, and whether scaffolded video reflection through coding of the recordings of students own teaching contributes to the quality of their use of dialogue (Howe, Hennessy and Mercer, 2020; Kershner, 2020).
By filming themselves when teaching, the student teachers deliver one part of the used data. The second part is voice recordings of group dialogues on analysis of the video material. By using social cultural discourse analysis as a framework for analysing audio recordings of student teachers peer-to-peer dialogues, interviews and PLATO as a videographic tool (Grossmann, 2015) in the scaffolding process of the students' analytical work, the preliminary findings show that it requires a concrete dialogical scaffolding. However, our preliminary results also indicate that student teachers' videographic coding and video analysis of their own teaching practice leads to increased awareness in relation to developing a reflected use of dialogical academic language.
Keywords: classroom dialogue, video as analysing methods, collaborative meta dialogues, student teacher education
References
Grossmann (2015). Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO 5.0). Palo Alto: Stanford University.
Howe, C., Hennessy, S. and Mercer, N. (2020). Classroom dialogue and student attainment: Distinct roles for teacher-led and small-group interaction? In The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education. Routledge.
Kershner, R. (2020). Dialogue, Participation and Social Relations. In Research Methods for Educational Dialogue. Bloomsbury
- Tina Høegh & Michael Jensen
The data presented in this paper is a sample of photos, video clip and transcriptions from an L1-lesson, grade 8 (14 years old), where students in pairs produce an aesthetic product upon their previous work with two poems by the author Tove Ditlevsen. The students are producing their aesthetic product in an app on mobile phones, and the recordings are focused to capture (micro studies) dialogues and shared reading and writing.
The method for shaping the dataset is a video ethnographic approach (Kjærsgaard & Buur; 2018) and micro-studies (verbal and gestural) of the dialogues student-teacher as well as student-student (Author 2017), but also student-technology (Author et al.; forthcoming). Analysis through the lens of the practice architecture (Kemmis et al. 2014) of this literature exploring classroom makes it possible to describe the teacher’s teaching path (Author 2018), the student development in a microscale (Lemke 2000), and the participatory rhythms (Blue 2019; Leander & Hollett 2017). We explore the classroom-data with the teachers involved in the project through selected video clips we discuss in focus groups with teachers as well as students. This is part of a longitudinal project in QUINT/CCN[1] with a focus on the consequence of digitalisation for teaching quality.
The aim of this study is to describe connections between interactions, student activities, and the unfolding of aesthetic awareness and explicit literary sharing. The hypothesis is that a dialogic and student-centred approach qualifies the productive phases of aesthetic productions, but the dilemma is still how to support and qualify the student’s text-exploration and -interpretation and aesthetic production. We see a discrepancy between tacit knowledge displayed among the students and explicit subject specific language and aesthetic awareness.
What is the balance between the progression in the dialogues, subject specific language and knowledge, and the teacher’s scaffolding?
Keywords: Literature teaching, classroom dialogue, group work, teacher knowledge, aesthetic production.
References
Blue, Stanley (2019) Institutional rhythms: Combining practice theory and rhythm analysis to conceptualise processes of institutionalization. Time & Society, Vol. 28(3) 922–950.
Author (2018)
Author (2017)
Authors (forthcoming)
Kemmis, S.; Wilkinson, J. ; Edwards-Groves, C.; Hardy, I.; Grootenboer, P. and Bristol, L. (2014) Changing Practices, Changing Education. Springer Singapore.
Kjærsgaard, M. & Buur, J. (2018) Videoetnografi og design [Eng. Video Ethnography and Design] in Videoanalyse af social interaction [Eng: Video Analysis of Social Interaction] edited by J. Davidsen & M. Kjær. Samfundslitteratur.
Leander, Kevin M. & Hollett, Ty (2017) The embodied rhythms of learning: From learning across settings to learners crossing settings. International journal of educational research, Vol. 84 Page 100-110. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijer.2016.11.007
Lemke, J. L. (2000). Across the Scales of Time: Artifacts, Activities, and Meanings in Ecosocial Systems. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(4), 273-290.