- Title: Analysing student talk moves in whole class teaching
- Authors: Jan Hardman
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Paper summary
This research paper examines student talk in whole-class teaching, analyzing its role in a dialogic pedagogy. It introduces a discourse-analytical framework to analyze student talk moves and act types, differentiating between brief and extended contributions. The framework is applied to lesson transcripts from a professional development program aimed at promoting dialogic teaching, comparing student talk in intervention and control schools. Results reveal significantly richer and more dialogic student talk in intervention schools, characterized by increased argumentation, justification, and elaboration. The study concludes by suggesting the framework’s use for teacher professional development and highlighting the need for longitudinal research on dialogic pedagogy.
What are the key implications for teachers in the classroom?
The sources suggest that teachers should strive to create a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom to improve student learning outcomes. Teachers can achieve this by broadening their repertoire of questioning approaches to include more open-ended questions that encourage a range of possible answers. In turn, teachers can extend student responses by probing for evidence and elaboration. They can also ask other students to comment and build students’ answers into subsequent questions, creating thematic coherence across dialogic sequences.
The sources identify several key implications for teachers who want to implement dialogic pedagogy. These include:
- Encouraging student talk as a key indicator of classroom quality: The quality of student talk can indicate how well a class is learning. Teachers should pay attention to the types of student talk they hear.
- Using monitoring and self-evaluation: Teachers should make time to reflect on and assess their own pedagogical practices.
- Theorizing their teaching: Teachers should make informed choices about how they interact with their students.
- Collaborating with other teachers: Teachers can benefit from learning from each other. They can model teaching methods and provide feedback to help each other implement dialogic pedagogy.
- Using videos and transcripts: Video and audio recordings can be powerful tools for reflection. Teachers can use recordings of their own classrooms to identify moments for improvement.
The sources note that teachers who encourage students to talk more during class will observe students achieving deeper conceptual understanding and higher levels of evaluation, justification, and argumentation.
Quote
Extended student contributions can be regarded as a key indicator of the quality of classroom talk
