21st Century Learners

I often argue the case for dialogue as a medium through which young people can learn about curriculum subjects more deeply (see my series ‘A Teacher’s Guide to Dialogic Pedagogy‘, for example). In this post I want to make an argument for dialogue as an endpoint of education. I’ll argue that it offers us a better way to be, that it enables a person to gain a richer understanding of him or herself, of other people, and of the world, and that it offers hope for the future. Let’s start with some everyday experiences.

Following the closure of schools in March 2020, Diane Swift, Director of Keele and North Staffordshire Teacher Education (KNSTE, where I am a tutor), took the decision to engage our Associate Teachers (ATs) with Thinking Moves A-Z, an approach to teaching for metacognition. It proved to be a very positive experience for all, as I will attempt to explain below.

Posts 2 and 3 of this series focus on the role of the teacher in dialogic pedagogy. In Post 2 Mortimer and Scott’s categorisation of the different communicative approaches available to the teacher are offered as a basis for reflection on the different types of classroom talk and their purposes. In Post 3 the role of the teacher in facilitating dialogic / interactive talk (or Thinking Together) is explored.  In this post we turn our attention to the role of the students in creating an environment in which Thinking Together becomes possible and can flourish, allowing them to make meaning of what they have been taught.

In the previous post I suggested that Eduardo Mortimer and Philip Scott’s categorisation of classroom talk offers a useful tool for teachers as they reflect on the different ‘communicative approaches’ they use. I also suggested that it would be useful for many teachers to increase the proportion of dialogic / interactive talk (or Thinking Together) in their classrooms, and perhaps to reduce the proportion of authoritative / interactive talk (characterised by IRE sequences) used. In this post I will retain the focus on teacher talk and offer some suggestions as to how the transition from authoritative to dialogic interaction could be made.

Introduction

In the previous post I described dialogic pedagogy as involving teachers and students talking and thinking in a way that seeks out and values different perspectives, and uses them to develop understanding. The broad term ‘dialogic pedagogy’ encompasses diverse approaches to its enactment in the classroom. Notable approaches include Professor Robin Alexander’s Dialogic Teaching; Thinking Together as developed by Professor Rupert Wegerif, Professor Neil Mercer and Dr Lyn Dawes; Professor Lauren Resnick’s Accountable Talk; Roger Sutcliffe’s Philosophical Teaching and Philosophy for Children (P4C) as developed by Professor Matthew Lipman. Follow the links or see the bibliography to find out more about them.

In this short series of posts, I want to explore what dialogic pedagogy is, why it might be valuable and how a classroom teacher or school might get started with it. It’s written in part to help me to clarify my own thinking (or at least to keep me thinking!) during the lockdown, though I do hope others will find it interesting and useful too. Any feedback would be most welcome.

“All real living is meeting”

Martin Buber, I and Thou

During the days before Christmas, while shopping in a busy arcade in Chester, I stopped to listen to a male voice choir as they sang carols. It was one of a few occasions this year when I felt infused with the ‘Christmas Spirit’; I was, for a short time, a part of a community of people sharing a difficult-to-define feeling of togetherness and good will. It was one of those occasions when, fleetingly, the boundary that divides ‘me’ from ‘the world’ seems to dissolve. A similar relationship with others can be experienced when a person is drawn into dialogue and I want to argue that one way in which this is made possible is through ‘care’, which I will relate to the notion of ‘caring thinking’ as advocated in philosophical communities of enquiry. 

“Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.” Noam Chomsky

I think the notion of progress is essential to all forms of dialogic teaching (including Philosophy for Children /P4C), and is easily forgotten. Too often progress towards good dialogue ‘plateaus’ at a relatively superficial level, where conversation is polite and ideas and questions (some of them profound) are shared, but there is no active attempt to seek to deeply understand other points of view, to synthesise them, to challenge and test them or to explore alternatives.  In this post I want to discuss one approach to planning for progress with dialogue (or perhaps I should use the term ‘dialogic enquiry’ to refer to practice that uses talk that is recognisably dialogic but is focused on a question or problem), and to share a resource that I hope teachers will find useful (You can download it for free here). Continue Reading »

It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak at the 10th Festival of Education at Wellington College. My talk was entitled ‘Teaching through and for Dialogue’. You can download the slides with some brief notes here, and a more detailed set of notes here. Please do let me have any feedback. Continue Reading »

What follows is the text of my article for the Summer 2018 issue of Teaching Citizenship.

The dialogue of humanity

I spend a lot of time arguing that teaching young people how to engage in dialogue is profoundly important. I go as far as to argue that one of the purposes of education is to draw young people into dialogue. This can draw fire from those persuaded that education is all about giving young people knowledge, but I think this is due to a misunderstanding of the argument; I think dialogue is essential to the meaningful development of knowledge. I also think it’s essential to becoming a better citizen and a better human being. Continue Reading »