Course Description

Classroom dialogue refers here to productive forms of student-teacher talk that stimulate students critical thinking and help to develop students deep knowledge and understanding in different subject areas.

Our recent large-scale course encouragingly demonstrated that certain features of whole-class dialogue are strongly linked to student learning and positive attitudinal outcomes. This significant finding calls for widespread teacher professional development to promote this practice. We are now scaling up impact by employing a custom-designed set of guidelines to support teachers working independently of a research team. The impact course includes primary schools and secondary schools and networks. The Teacher-Scheme for Dialogue Analysis pack is an extensive resource that supports teachers in leading their own inquiry and impact activities. It focuses on identifying key features of classroom dialogue using a teacher-friendly version of the Scheme for Dialogue Analysis (SEDA) derived from British Academy funded research with Mexican collaborators.

A summary of the Course contents is as follows:

Teacher-Scheme for Dialogue Analysis:

• Teacher-Scheme for Dialogue Analysis Resources
• Coding framework
• Developing dialogic practice
• Identifying aims, interests and inquiry focus
• Observation methods including technical guidance for audio/video recording and transcribing
• Templates for observing and coding
• Case studies
• References to other research on dialogue and links to related resources

Program activities to cascade impact and dissemination will include introductory impact workshops, remote support for professional development, and further engagement with a wider audience of practitioners. While our previous research has confirmed the value of working with teachers as research participants and co-researcher colleagues, we now aim to engage in wider capacity building in schools. This impact course relates to the current public policy push for teacher inquiry. Our approach is in line with what is already known about factors that support impact, including the furthering of existing networks and relationships with teachers, acknowledging the expertise and active role of teachers, developing good understanding of policy/practice contexts and encouraging teachers, as users, to bring their knowledge of context to enhance impact.

Anticipated outcomes include:

• Overview of dialogic practice
• evidence of improvements in practice (higher quality dialogue features shown by our recent study to correlate with student attainment); increased teacher understanding of dialogue
• Developing dialogic practice
• insights into influence of teachers initial understandings and levels of dialogic practice
• impact case study materials including illustrative video exemplars
• reports from schools and journal publication