1. Dialogue in classrooms – questioning conventional wisdom
Thanks for coming: New Zealand vs. Slovakia (12:30) Ivory Coast vs. Portugal (3:00pm)
The story in brief:
Increasing attention being paid to dialogue and classroom discourse, but are the “best practices” being offered all that useful?
Review of some of the chief ideas in policy and practice, and what may be wrong with them; introduce an alternative view, also problematic, but embraces its problems rather than trying to hide them.
Throughout, I’ll try to practice what I preach, engaging in dialogue, and grounding the discussion in real classroom practice.
Handouts.
Papers available.
Adam Lefstein

2. -- from Plato’s Gorgias
Socrates: Now, if you are the sort of person I am, I would like to cross-examine you. But if not I prefer to let the matter rest. And what sort of person am I? I am ready to be refuted if I say something untrue, and ready to refute anyone else who speaks wrongly. But I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for I believe that the former poses the greater benefit, since it is better
to be cured of an evil than to cure another. And I imagine that there is no greater evil than to be mistaken in the matters about which we speak.
-- from Plato’s Gorgias
Dialogue: inspired by Socrates
Who was Socrates, what did he do?
Adopted by many as model, but is it appropriate to classrooms? And, also, it got Socrates killed.
The Gorgias as example.
“You, Gorgias, like me, have much experience in arguments, and have undoubtedly noticed that they don’t always end well. Disagreements arise, each accuses the other of misrepresentations, passions erupt, they begin to quarrel. Both sides think that the other is guided by personal animosity rather than interest in the actual question in dispute. And sometimes they abuse one another such that everyone present regrets having been privy to the discussion.
Why do I mention this? Because I cannot help feeling that what you just said is inconsistent with your initial statements about rhetoric. But I’m afraid to point this out, lest you think that I harbour ill will toward you, and that I am motivated by jealousy rather than pursuit of truth.
Now, if you are the sort of person I am, I would like to cross-examine you. But if not I prefer to let the matter rest. And what sort of person am I? I am ready to be refuted if I say something untrue, and ready to refute anyone else who speaks wrongly. But I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for I believe that the former poses the greater benefit, since it is better to be cured of an evil than to cure another. And I imagine that there is no greater evil than to be mistaken in the matters about which we speak. So if you claim to be like me, let us continue the discussion. But if you would rather be done, no matter – let’s stop here.

3. Why is everyone so excited about dialogue?
Fashion (and tradition)
Speaking and listening skills
A respectful way of relating to pupils
Preparation for democracy
Developing argumentation & critical thinking
An effective means of learning
Dissatisfaction with current classroom culture

4. Current classroom culture
How do you think the pupils are answering the teacher’s questions in text #1 ?
IRE: Initiation-Response-Evaluation
Serves some purposes (control, assessment, examination preparation), but... Well, let’s look at an example
Context:
Year 5, NLS lesson on apostrophes:
Exercises about adding apostrophes. Teacher questions: where do you need to put an apostrophe? Possession or contraction? Before or after the ‘s’?
How answering the teacher’s questions:
Line 4 hint: answer will involve a word ending with an “s”: Its hundreds animals bones
Line 7 pause = wrong answer // bones is eliminated
Line 12: 7 second pause = outwaiting the teacher  line 13 easier question (includes incredulity as hint)
Line 27 another pause = wrong answer // hundreds is eliminated, so animals remains
All the possible answers were guessed, right answers were immediately ratified, wrong answers were rejected by being probed.
Pupils can get through the lesson without thinking; teachers can get a record of correct answers in their pupils’ books for inspection.

5. Initiation (line 3) Response #1: “bones” (line 6)
Response #2: “it’s” (line 20)
Response #3: “hundreds” (line 26)
Initiation: plural or possessive? (lines 8-11)
Initiation: “Does anything belong to those bones?” (line 13)
Response: silence (line 12)
Response: “no” (line 14)
Positive evaluation: “no” (line 15)
Negative evaluation: “it’s not one” (line 16)
Negative evaluation: “that’s just an “s”…” (line 17-18)
Positive evaluation: “it’s is the first one” (line 21)
Initiation: “which is short for?” (line 22)
Response: “it is” (line 23)
Positive evaluation: “it is made of…” (line 24)
Negative evaluation: silence (line 27)
Response: “no” (line 28)
Initiation: “what belongs to the hundreds?” (lines 29)
Response: “no, animals’” (line 30)
Positive evaluation: “animals, good” (line 31)
IRE:
- Predictable, closed questions (e.g. Galton: 60% of all teacher questions closed, either requiring a factual answer or one correct solution to a problem, while only 10% were open questions, in which more than one response was acceptable; the remaining 30% of questions posed were concerned with task supervision and classroom routine)
- Disjointed
- Teacher doing most of the work
How answering the teacher’s questions:
Line 4 hint: answer will involve a word ending with an “s”: Its hundreds animals bones
Line 7 pause = wrong answer // bones is eliminated
Line 12: 7 second pause = outwaiting the teacher  line 13 easier question (includes incredulity as hint)
Line 27 another pause = wrong answer // hundreds is eliminated, so animals remains
All the possible answers were guessed, right answers were immediately ratified, wrong answers were rejected by being probed.
Pupils can get through the lesson without thinking; teachers can get a record of correct answers in their pupils’ books for inspection.

6. So, attention is being directed toward classroom discourse, and dialogue is offered as solution.
From numerous disciplines.
Dialogue, dialogic teaching, dialogic pedagogy, dialogic inquiry, exploratory talk, etc.

7. Different dimensions of “dialogue”
Structural: equitable interactional structures, reciprocity
Epistemic: critical stance toward knowledge
Interpersonal: collaborative & supportive community
Substantive: responding to & building on other’s ideas
Political: empowerment and voice
Not IRE, ground rules CLICK
Questioning, criticality -- CLICK
Respect, caring – disputational vs. exploratory talk -- CLICK
Alexander: cumulation; Resnick, Accountable Talk: knowledge, reasoning, community. -- CLICK

8. What’s wrong with us current thinking about classroom dialogue?
In what ways do the following examples reflect dialogic or otherwise good practice? In what ways are they problematic?
Blaming the teachers…
but maybe something’s wrong with the dialogical ideal.
Two short clips: Taken from Key Stage 3 National Strategy materials on “Teaching speaking and listening”
Year 7 class, reading the novel, Underground to Canada. First clip, from very beginning of the lesson, the teacher has just told them the lesson objectives, and I quote: “our main aims today are to explore the language used by the author to create empathy in the reader... to understand how our sympathies change and develop throughout the novel towards the characters”. This is labelled “Questioning and prompting pupils”.
Second clip, from later in the lesson, labelled “dialogic talk”

10. Text #2: In what ways does this reflect dialogic or otherwise good practice? In what ways is it problematic?
1. Desirable?
2. Realistic?
Dialogic: extended responses, cumulation, structurally – not all via teacher, attentive to one another
Problematic: teacher role: either interrogator or not present, fake (“disbelief”) – ironing over the difficulties and tensions in dialogue

11. What’s wrong with this way of thinking about dialogue?
Ignores non-academic aspects of talk: identity, power, aesthetics
Ignores institutional constraints
Still based on teacher interrogation
“Best practice” view of dialogue-as-solution
Focus on last two.

12. Common sense about teacher questions
Why ask questions?
• To extend pupils’ thinking from the concrete to the more abstract.
• To challenge pupils to apply the key ideas to a range of observations and findings.
• To promote the use of thinking skills, for example, reasoning, evaluation.
• To promote pupils’ thinking about what they have learned and how they have learned.
- Key Stage 3 National Strategy (2004) Strengthening teaching and learning in science through using different pedagogies - Unit 2: Active questioning.
Questions critical to learning: meaningful learning involves perplexity, cognitive disequilibrium, i.e. the experience of a question
Extract from KS3 document. The original also included:
Why ask questions?
• To extend pupils’ thinking from the concrete to the more abstract.
• To check prior knowledge and understanding of key ideas.
• To clarify misconceptions.
• To challenge pupils to apply the key ideas to a range of observations and findings.
• To lead pupils through a sequence which establishes their understanding of certain enquiries.
• To promote the use of thinking skills, for example, reasoning, evaluation.
• To develop a systematic approach to scientific enquiry and problem solving.
• To promote pupils’ thinking about what they have learned and how they have learned.

13. Common sense or common nonsense?
Displaced inferences
Questioning in other enterprises: opinion-polling, cross-examination, psychotherapy
Questioning and social relations
Equivocal research evidence
- Dillon, J. (1982) The Effect of Questions in Education and Other Enterprises. Journal of Curriculum Studies 14 (2):
Dillon:
Logical fallacy:
“first projects a hypothetical response; next it makes an inference as to the cognition of any student who might speak it; and then, by retrojection, attributes to the question the quality of the presumed response.” (p. 131)
Practical pursuit of questions
The cross-examiner's case is endangered when a witness begins to think, to elaborate, to explain, to clarify, and to speculate.
“In the face of a verbose witness the advice is: Step up the questioning. Curiously, that same advice has been given to teachers faced with a hesitant student. The questioning is held to delimit the witness’ output and to enhance the student’s.” (p. 137)
The authorities are unanimous in warning: Never ask a question unless you already know the answer.
In psychotherapy, personnel interviewing and group discussions, practitioners are instructed to avoid questions – instead using statements or silence – in order to stimulate thinking and elicit expression.
Research evidence:
Nystrand, oblique effects, student questions positively correlated with dialogic spells, challenging teacher questions negatively correlated

14. Questioning in classrooms
How many questions do teachers ask in 30 minutes?
How many questions are asked by students?
What kinds of questions are asked by each?
What is the significance of these questioning practices?

15. A pedagogy of answers
Teachers ask questions per half-hour lesson…
but estimate asking questions.
67%-95% of the questions involve straight recall.
Students ask 2 or fewer questions per lesson.
Teacher recall questions are negatively correlated with student questions.
- Review of research by Susskind, discussed in Sarason (1996) Revisiting The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change

16. A pedagogy of answers: what are we teaching
Try to guess the answers to the questions in text #3
The “correct” answers:
1. (E) [this novel] should be read with sensitivity and an open mind
2. (C) disapproval
3. (A) universality of human experience truthfully recorded
So what are the implications? A certain attitude to knowledge and learning, to the role of questions and how to address them.
The point: students become attuned to the logic of questioning and answering in school – sometimes more than to the actual content being considered.

17. Text #4: In what ways does this reflect dialogic or otherwise good practice? In what ways is it problematic?
Text #4

19. Dialogical tensions and the teacher’s role
Structural: Establishing and maintaining communicative norms...
Epistemic: Questioning orthodoxies, challenging pupil ideas, strengthening minority positions, highlighting points of contention...
Substantive: Maintaining conversational cohesion, summarizing threads, making explicit developing argument(s)...
Interpersonal: Building classroom community, encouraging participation, protecting ‘weak’ pupils...
Political: Undermining own authority, empowering pupils...
Aesthetic: Orchestrating an engaging & informative discussion...
Dilemmas:
Should Ms. James have stayed with Sean, insisting that he participate in the discussion and/or heavily “scaffolding” his answer? Or was turning to Ben in order to move the discussion forward the best course of action? Should she have focused more attention on Ben’s conjecture (#1), by opening it up for discussion? Or was the injection of a second conjecture the best way to ignite the conversation? What about explicitly disagreeing with Brian? Did that advance the dialogue, by modelling respectful disagreement and by effacing her teacherly authority, or did it ruin Brian’s day?

20. Better than “Best Practice”:
Dialogue as a problem
Classroom culture, not teaching technique
Attending to audience
Focusing on content and tasks
Dilemmas:
Should Ms. James have stayed with Sean, insisting that he participate in the discussion and/or heavily “scaffolding” his answer? Or was turning to Ben in order to move the discussion forward the best course of action? Should she have focused more attention on Ben’s conjecture (#1), by opening it up for discussion? Or was the injection of a second conjecture the best way to ignite the conversation? What about explicitly disagreeing with Brian? Did that advance the dialogue, by modelling respectful disagreement and by effacing her teacherly authority, or did it ruin Brian’s day?

21. Any questions? Thank you, Adam a.lefstein@ioe.ac.uk
Institute of Education
University of London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Tel +44 (0)
Fax +44 (0)
Web

22. Fertile questions? Attending to text #4:
Which questions, if any, do you find most fertile? Which, if any, do you find problematic?
Why? What are the characteristics of fertile questions?
In what contexts (e.g. year group, disciplinary field) might you use these questions?

23. Fertile questions?
Open: in principle has no one definitive answer; rather, several different, competing possible answers
Undermining: challenges basic assumptions, the “self-evident”
Rich: necessitates grappling with important and rich ideas; cannot be answered without careful and sustained inquiry
Connected: relevant to the learners, society and disciplinary field
Charged: contains an ethical dimension; is charged with emotional, social, and political implications
Practical: in the given context of learners and resources
Open:
4. Does Progress advance what’s important to us?
Undermining:
1. Does competition make us better?
8. Are children short adults?
Rich:
9. Who’s “free” in Israeli democracy?
Connected:
6. Why did the serfs accept the authority of the nobility and church in medieval Europe?
Charged:
2. Can betrayal be forgiven?
Practical:
7. Which is preferable, to be a house-pet or a wild animal?
Text #3 – Fertile questions?
3. Is beauty mathematical?
5. Is it possible and/or desirable to destroy all micro-organisms?
10. How can we ensure a sustainable future for our blue planet?

24. Robin Alexander’s “dialogic teaching”
Collective
Reciprocal
Supportive
Cumulative
Purposeful
But what about…?
collective: teachers and children address learning tasks together, whether as a group or as a class;
reciprocal: teachers and children listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints;
supportive: children articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over ‘wrong’ answers; and they help each other to reach common understandings;
cumulative: teachers and children build on their own and each others’ ideas and chain them into coherent lines of thinking and enquiry;
purposeful: teachers plan and steer classroom talk with specific educational goals in view.
Critical
Meaningful

25. Toward a pedagogy of questions: the community of thinking programme

26. Toward a pedagogy of questioning
Fertile questions
Culture of inquiry
Posing rather than asking
Celebrating questions
Tying knowledge to the questions that gave rise to it