Week 4: Sara Hennessy - Visualising classroom dialogue through dialogic moves

‘Three aspects of teacher-student dialogue strongly predicted performance on SATs (standardised tests) when they occurred in combination (but not alone):

• Elaboration - where building on/elaborating/evaluating/clarifying of a previous contribution was invited or provided)
• Querying - where a previous contribution was doubted/challenged/rejected,
• Student Participation (where across the lesson multiple students were seen to engage with each other’s ideas, and not merely respond to their teacher’s questions).’

- Classroom Dialogue: Does it really make a difference to children’s learning? (ESRC / Cambridge Research Project)

This week we will look at research that enables educators to ‘see’ and evaluate the quality of classroom dialogue through dialogic moves. These are descriptors that qualify what kind of statement has been made. They are used by educational researchers to understand what types of dialogic practices and moves support children’s learning. Sara Hennessy has led work on developing our understanding of how dialogic moves operate and how we can identify them in the classroom. We will also look at how Talking Points can be used to generate high quality dialogue.

Reflective Journal Template

Use the Week 4 reflective journal template to make notes as you work through the following tasks.

Watch

Watch the following video for an overview of the week’s theme:

You can download the video transcript here.

Watch this video where Sara Hennessy joins us to discuss her work:

Note that this interview is also available as an audio resource (you may prefer to listen to the interview whilst on a walk!):

Read

This week’s readings and resources for you to review are as follows:

• Core Reading - Read Sections b and c (pages 5-14) of the Teacher-SEDA (T-SEDA) Pack. This pack will form the basis of Course 2 in this series of courses. In this course (Course 1 of the Educational Dialogue online course series) we are introducing you to the theory and practice of Educational Dialogue. Course 2 will support you to conduct your own inquiry using T-SEDA.

Optional further resources:

• Video - Dr Sara Hennessy: Dialogue and Group Work
• Research Project - Classroom Dialogue: Does it really make a difference to children’s learning?
  
  

  Do

  Activity 1: Which dialogic moves can you identify in your setting?

• Consult the table on page 6 of the T-SEDA pack with the different dialogue categories. Consider which of these (if any) are easy to identify in your own setting and which you think are missing.
• In your reflective journal, consider the extent to which you see these dialogic moves happening in your classroom. Which moves tend to happen more than others? Which dialogic moves do not seem to happen at all? And which do you think are particularly impactful for student learning?

Activity 2: Using Talking Points to support dialogue

• Watch Video 4 on Talking Points on the edudialogue.org website.
• Think of ways to incorporate Talking Points in one of your lessons.

In your reflective learning journal for Week 4, write a reflective account of how you used Talking Points with your class. What happened? How did learners respond? Did participation increase? What went well? What could you do better? Could you see elaboration and/or querying/challenging happen? Reminder: the weekly accounts you are asked to write in your reflective journals do not need to be submitted. Rather, they are meant to help you record your thoughts and should be drawn on when writing your final learning product. Your final learning product is the only piece of writing you are asked to officially submit for this course.

Discuss

In the Week 4 channel, please post a response to at least one of these questions.

• In what ways can we help learners to become aware of how elaboration and querying/challenging help their learning?
• Talking Points generate more/richer dialogue than questions. Do you agree? If so, why?
• Having reviewed the table of dialogic moves, which do you anticipate would be the most challenging to encourage in your setting? Please explain.

Now, read through others’ responses to these questions and reply with your ideas to at least one person.

Discussion forum

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