Dialogic Education

Mastering core concepts through thinking together

Neil Phillipson, Rupert Wegerif

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317221289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Dialogue has long been used in primary classrooms to stimulate thinking, but it is not always easy to unite the creative thinking of good dialogue with the need for children to understand the core concepts behind knowledge-rich subjects. A sound understanding of key concepts is essential to progress through the national curriculum, and assessment of this understanding along with effective feedback is central to good practice.

Dialogic Education builds upon decades of practical classroom research to offer a method of teaching that applies the power of dialogue to achieving conceptual mastery. Easy-to-follow template lesson plans and activity ideas are provided, each of which has been tried and tested in classrooms and is known to succeed.

Providing a structure for engaging children and creating an environment in which dialogue can flourish, this book is separated into three parts:

• 
  
  

• Establishing a classroom culture of learning;

• 
  
  

• Core concepts across the curriculum;

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• Wider dialogues: Educational adventures in the conversation of mankind.

Written to support all those in the field of primary education, this book will be an essential resource for student, trainee and qualified primary teachers interested in the educational importance of dialogue.

PART 1
Establishing a classroom culture of learning

In this, the first part of the book, we offer comprehensive guidance with detailed lesson plans for how you can teach ‘Thinking Together’ and the 4Cs of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and caring in your classroom. Once established as part of the default culture of the classroom, Thinking Together with the 4Cs can be applied to any area of the curriculum. In Part 2 we show how Thinking Together with the 4Cs can be applied to gaining a mastery of core concepts across the curriculum.

CHAPTER 1

The 4Cs of Thinking Together

Overview

In this chapter we offer you a framework for developing effective dialogue in your classrooms. Our approach is based upon two existing and well-researched strategies for teaching dialogue. The first of these is the Thinking Together project developed by Lyn Dawes, Neil Mercer and Rupert Wegerif.¹ The second is Philosophy for Children, a pedagogical approach that has been successfully used to develop philosophical thinking and dialogue for many years and in many countries. Below we outline both these approaches briefly, followed by a discussion of how elements of each can be combined to support dialogic learning across the curriculum. The ‘4Cs’ framework for developing effective dialogue is introduced and explained.

Thinking Together

The aim of the original Thinking Together project was to develop children’s capacity to use language as a tool for reasoning and constructing knowledge and understanding. This was founded on the belief that an important role of schooling is to explicitly teach children how to ‘use language more effectively as a means for learning, pursuing interests, developing shared understanding and – crucially – reasoning and solving problems together’.² Achieving this means extending the range of language genres encountered by children in their everyday lives.

A genre of talk that the project sought to encourage is ‘exploratory talk’; this label was first used by Douglas Barnes³ to describe talk in which ideas are tentatively aired, allowing the speaker to re-organise and develop his or her thoughts. Exploratory talk is characterised by hesitant and broken speech involving dead ends and changes of direction, and is distinct from ‘presentational talk,’ which is a ‘final draft’ of the speaker’s ideas designed to meet the needs of a specific audience, often a teacher. Presentational talk is of course valuable, and children should be given opportunities to express their considered thoughts in a polished and articulate manner. However, they first need opportunities to take ownership of new knowledge and construct meaning by sharing their emerging understandings and developing them through dialogue. Exploratory talk has been described by Mercer as having the following characteristics:

• partners engage critically but constructively with each other’s ideas;

• relevant information is offered for joint consideration;

• proposals may be challenged and counter-challenged, but if so reasons are given and alternatives are offered;

• agreement is sought as a basis for joint progress;

• knowledge is made publicly accountable and reasoning is visible in the talk.⁴

Such talk provides a medium through which partners involved in problem solving can share, re-organise and build on their ideas to construct a better shared understanding – they can think collectively or ‘think together’.

In developing the Thinking Together materials, the authors were responding to research that suggested that schools around the world rarely teach genres of talk such as exploratory talk proactively, with the consequence that much pupil–pupil talk in small-group formats (and indeed in a whole class format) is unproductive. When solving problems in groups children were found to be much more likely to be involved in ‘disputational talk’ (characterised by individuals egotistically trying to impose their views on others, perhaps to protect their identity, which they defined in terms of their abilities relative to those of others) or ‘cumulative talk’ (characterised by individuals uncritically agreeing with each other in order to maintain group harmony, perhaps to protect an identity defined in terms of belonging to the group). Central to the Thinking Together approach is the use of ground rules (usually negotiated with the class) to establish a framework for effective discussion and to promote exploratory talk. The authors intended that the ground rules should embody these key ideas:

• all relevant information is shared among the group;

• assertions and opinions should be backed up by reasons;

• it is important to challenge and discuss assertions and opinions;

• alternative options are carefully considered before any decision is made;

• everyone in the group should be encouraged to speak by the other members;

• contributions are treated with respect;

• the group should try to reach agreement;

• the group accepts collective responsibility for decisions made and actions taken because of those decisions.⁵

The approach has been evaluated and found to have a positive impact on a variety of indicators, including learning in mathematics and science as measured by standard attainment tests,⁶ the inclusion of children with English as an additional language and quiet children,⁷ the quality of collaborative creative writing⁸ and the ability to reason and solve problems in a group.⁹ Interestingly, the research also suggests an enhancement of the ability to reason and solve problems alone, suggesting that better ‘thinking together’ supports better thinking individually; this might be explained both in terms of Vygotsky’s ideas around the internalisation of language and other cultural tools, but also in terms of children developing a dialogic relationship with other perspectives.¹⁰

Philosophy for Children and the ‘4Cs’ framework

Philosophy for Children (P4C) is an educational approach originally developed by Matthew Lipman in the 1960s; it is now practised in approximately sixty countries worldwide with a demonstrable impact on a range of educational outcomes.¹¹ In the most recent study, a year of P4C practice for children in years 4 and 5 of English primary schools (aged eight to ten) led to two additional months of progress in reading and maths (on average children experienced one period of P4C per week).

Like Thinking Together, P4C has aims that extend beyond academic progress: it seeks to develop children’s capacity to communicate, to reason and to think by drawing them into dialogue (in this case around expressions of philosophical puzzlement originating from the children themselves in response to a stimulus). The approach is enquiry based and seeks to develop ‘communities of enquiry’ in classrooms; in other words environments in which different perspectives are sought out, shared and explored, and participants remain open to finding a better ‘truth’ through dialogue. Matthew Lipman reminds us of the wider aims of the approach when he says: ‘The aim of a thinking skills programme such as P4C is not to turn children into philosophers or decision-makers, but to help them become more thoughtful, more reflective, more considerate and more reasonable individuals.’¹²

Lipman considered excellent thinking to be multi-dimensional. While acknowledging the importance of critical thinking (involving questioning ideas, demanding reasons and evidence and making judgements), he regarded it as only one of three ‘modalities’ of thought. Of equal importance were creative thinking (involving putting forward hypotheses, finding examples and alternatives and synthesising ideas) and caring thinking (involving valuing the contributions of others and showing concern for the joint endeavour). According to Lipman, these three modes of thought are not to be considered independent of each other – all three must be present and in harmony for thinking to be described as excellent. A classroom committed to getting pupils...