Towards Dialogic Teaching Rethinking Classroom Talk

Towards Dialogic Teaching

Towards Dialogic Teaching

With dialogue and dialogic teaching as upcoming buzz-words, we face a familiar mix of danger and opportunity. The opportunity is to transform classroom talk, increase pupil engagement, and lift literacy standards from their current plateau. The danger is that a powerful idea will be jargonised before it is even understood, let alone implemented, and that practice claiming to be dialogic will be little more than re-branded chalk and talk or ill-focused discussion. Dialogic teaching is about more than applying tips such as less hands-up bidding. It demands changes - in the handling of classroom space and time; in the balance of talk, reading and writing; in the relationship between speaker and listener; and in the content and dynamics of talk itself.

Towards Dialogic Teaching

This publication presents the case for dialogic teaching not as another transient educational fad, but as the necessary outcome of decades of research on language, thinking, learning and teaching, by scholars working in diverse disciplines and cultures. The publication then sets out the principles on which dialogic teaching is based, identifies specific classroom indicators to guide the development and evaluation of professional practice, resports interim findings from classroom-based development projects, and offers suggestions for further reading and support