Theme: principles of teaching dialogical and monological speech

Cumulative

Dialogic teaching involves ongoing talk, with the teacher and students building on each other’s contributions, weaving them into coherent and logical lines of enquiry and allowing for a deeper exploration of learning. This is built upon open-ended questions and responses between the teacher and students which are designed to enhance problem-posing and problem-solving rather than simple explanation and recall.

Purposeful

The teacher has certain learning goals in mind rather than the lesson being a ‘free for all’. Choosing the right topic can really enhance the dialogue by engaging and enthusing students to want to contribute more to the lesson. I have found a dialogic teaching to be a powerful approach in the classroom, especially when teaching citizenship education, where enquiry questions such as ‘are all human rights universal?’ lend themselves quite naturally to collective, reciprocal and cumulative dialogue. This must be well planned, implemented and skillfully facilitated, with due thought given to time, space, organization and relationships.If classroom talk does not mirror these principles then it cannot claim to be truly dialogic. These principles of dialogic teaching are very much underpinned by effective questioning and feedback techniques. This can involve such strategies as allowing sufficient time for student responses, replying to questions with additional questions, seeking to understand the logic and rationale of students’ responses, encouraging the connection of points and treating all answers as needing further development. Indeed, dialogic teaching is based on authentic open questions, designed to promote inquiry and reasoning, encourage thinking and move learning forward.

The importance of dialogue

Dialogic teaching can be particularly beneficial in helping students to develop core skills of listening and responding to others, forming questions, exploring and evaluating ideas, reasoning and justifying opinions . Also, dialogue can move discussions onto philosophical levels where students are able to engage in higher and more critical levels of thinking. Consequently, dialogue has the potential to energize, motivate and enhance students’ critical and creative thinking through collaboration, interaction, cumulative questioning, argumentation, cognitive processing and self-regulatory behaviour . Indeed, in a recent large-scale it was found that focusing on meaningful dialogue had a positive impact on primary school children’s attainment, engagement and overall learning. With careful implementation and facilitation dialogic teaching can transform learning in the classroom and beyond. As Kazepides observes,‘nothing else will improve our educational institutions and the character of our civilization so much as our efforts to cultivate genuine rational dialogue within all our schools as well as within our world’. It really is good to talk. The purpose of a focus on dialogue is more than simply moving away from an approach where the educator positions themselves as the ‘expert’, the authoritative voice, the one to whom learners look to and look at as they transmit knowledge for learners to acquire. Rather, dialogue about authentic issues is a critical means of preparing for, encouraging, facilitat ing, and extending learners’ capacity and capability for interpretation, critique and rigor, and thus contributing to their journey towards being knowledgeable, professional practitioners. For Bakhtin, the expression and creation of meaning in dialogue is never complete, never closed and always oriented toward the future. In educational settings (be it educational institution, work or community settings) an important purpose of participants being involved in dialogue is that the process contributes to knowledge building and deep understanding. Participants’ journey towards deep understanding manifests itself in further action, for example, how they deal with a new challenge in their social world or in the extension or modification of ideas. In addressing the key curriculum design question of what an educator wants their learners to be and become, an essential tool is dialogue. Stack suggests that good dialogue requires bringing a “state of being” to the process of dialogue and inquiry which she defines as “a state of tentativeness a state of willingness to look deeply, to be open to surprise, to nurture those who are tentative.” ‘Good’ dialogue also involves an engagement in “insight making”. Stack describes aspects of ‘good’ dialogue as:

 Ability and commitment to create shared meaning – construct understandings, shared language, using humour and small talk, creating shared spaces, moving into perspectives of others, engaging in hermeneutic process;
 Rigour in process and thinking – moving around the map of dialogical inquiry into different voices and modes of inquiry, applying critical thinking, eterativeness;
 Tuning into the different stages of idea development, using openness to new ideas and criticality appropriately;
 Being inclusive and caring of others – listening, empathising, giving time, recognizing and meeting the different needs of others; and
 Being self-reflective of the discourse process – meta-cognition, recognising the limitations, naming and challenging what is happening and moving to alternative discourse methods. The dialogical process involves the whole person in learning through engaging in authentic activities. The process influences identity and self-image and how participating individuals are regarded by others . Wells argues that it is important that dialogical processes and experiences be a positive one for participants. Similar to Stack Wells notes that, “students should be encouraged to ensure that all contributions to the dialogue are formulated as clearly and coherently as possible, and accepted and treated with respect – even if this takes the form of disagreement”. Gunawardena, Lowe & Anderson argue that points of dissonance and even disagreement are important in contributing to knowledge building. This will be discussed further in a later section on knowledge building and knowledge co-construction. Human cognition has a dialogical basis. As dialogue is internalized so are alternative perspectives expressed in the dialogue, contributing to a restructuring of cognition to enable accommodation of multiple perspectives Thus, in dialogical processes, participants encounter difference; a degree of comfort with being uncomfortable with multiple perspectives and difference contributing to meaning making and thus the potential for restructuring of cognition. The quality of the dialogue improves thinking . Wells suggests that provision needs to be made for multiple occurrences for goal oriented dialogue for participants to engage in “progressive discourse”, where they propose, explore and evaluate alternative ideas, explanations and problem solutions and, together, to construct the most satisfactory outcome of which they are capable would add critical evaluation of ideas, the marshaling of evidence to support or disconfirm them as part of the process of knowledge building. This process of building higher level structures of ideas entails the mental state that Csikszentmihalyi and Stack call flow. Inquiry is an explicit aspect of knowledge building.