Classroom Interactions and Social Learning

From Theory to Practice

Kristiina Kumpulainen, David Wray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134580613
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Today's classroom presents a wealth of opportunities for social interaction amongst pupils, leading to increased interest in teachers and researchers into the social nature of learning.
While classroom interaction can be a valuable tool for learning, it does not necessarily lead to useful learning experiences. Through case studies, this book highlights the use of new analytical methodologies for studying the content and patterns of children's interactions and how these contribute to their construction of knowledge.
Classroom Interaction and Social Learning will be of interest to students and in service teachers and researchers concerned with classroom discourse and learning.

Part I

Studying classroom interaction and learning

1 Classroom interaction, learning and teaching

Research focusing on the social interactions of the classroom is generally thought to have begun in the 1950s and 60s (see e.g. Bales, 1951; Bellack et al., 1966; Flanders, 1970). During its early phase, educationally oriented research into classroom interaction focused mostly on whole-class interactions between the teacher and students. Among other things, these studies revealed typical classroom interaction patterns, of which the most widely known is the Initiation–Response–Feedback/Evaluation (IRF/E) sequence (Cazden, 1986, 1988; Mehan, 1979; Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975). In this interaction sequence, during which the teacher often tightly controls the structure and content of classroom interaction, the teacher initiates the discussion by posing questions. After the student has responded to the question, the teacher finishes the interaction sequence by giving feedback on the student's response.

Although the identification of typical sequences in classroom settings has increased our understanding of the interactional exchanges between the teacher and students, and highlighted the unequal communicative rights often present in transmission classrooms, it has, nevertheless, been criticised for shedding little light on the communicative functions of interactions and on their consequences for the construction of meaning in the social context of the classroom (Orsolini and Ponte-corvo, 1992). Wells (1993) has also shown that, although the exchange structure between the teacher and students may be constant in whole-class discussions, its communicative functions, that is, the purposes for which language is used, may vary widely. Consequently, the triadic interaction sequence may also be identified in teaching episodes conducted according to a view of learning and teaching as a collective meaning-making process.

The gradual change in focus from a transmission model of teaching to learner-sensitive instruction, emphasising collective negotiation in classroom interaction, went hand in hand with the theoretical shift in perspectives on learning and teaching that began to emphasise the active role of individuals in meaning-making and knowledge construction (Wells, 1999). This shift in the theoretical conceptions of learning also began to affect the nature of social interaction in classrooms, transforming classroom interactions from structured discourse patterns to dynamic teaching and learning conversations more typically found in everyday settings. In the latter type of classroom interactions, the role of the student as an active participant in social learning began to be emphasised.

Contemporary views of learning and their pedagogical applications have begun to change traditional classroom interaction patterns, shaping the communicative roles of the teacher and students as participants in a classroom learning community. Post-Vygotskian notions of teaching and learning as assisted performance (Tharp and Gallimore, 1988), or as a process of guided participation (Rogoff, 1990), suggest that learning arises both as the result of deliberate guidance of the learner by a more capable other and, incidentally, through participation in collective activities with the members of the learning community. The central focuses in these metaphors of learning and teaching are on calibrated assistance and the nature of the interactional support that adults or peers can offer to learners.

In following these notions of learning and teaching, Palincsar and Brown (1984) have developed an instructional procedure they call reciprocal teaching, in which students are scaffolded in classroom interaction towards improved reading comprehension. Realised in social interaction between the teacher and students within the context of a small-group activity, reciprocal teaching is supported by four concrete strategies related to text comprehension, namely, questioning, clarifying, summarizing and predicting. In the ongoing interaction, the teacher and the students share the expertise and responsibility of leading the discussion on the contents of the sections of text that they jointly attempt to understand. In the flow of the group discussion, the teacher gives guidance and provides feedback according to the varying needs of the participants. When students are more experienced in participating and leading the discussion, the repetitive structure is gradually given up (Brown and Campione, 1990) and the students can be provided with practice in more complicated argument structures (Brown and Palincsar, 1989). The potential of reciprocal teaching has been widely explored in classroom teaching and learning across various classroom contexts (see e.g. Rosenshine and Meister, 1994). It is also one component of the ‘guided discovery in a community of learners’ designed by Brown and Campione (1990) to enhance socially shared expertise in the classroom.

Other researchers, such as Orsolini and Pontecorvo (1992), have also investigated the communicative strategies of the teacher and students in classroom settings, emphasising joint negotiation and meaning-making. In their research, they discovered that in these classrooms the communicative strategies used in whole-class discussions were much wider than during traditional, transmission modes of teaching. For example, the communicative strategies used by the teacher were found to consist of repetition and rephrasing of students’ contributions instead of mere questioning and evaluation activity. These strategies seemed to give students more space to participate in classroom discussions and to initiate topics.

Another pedagogical model for classroom interaction and learning, grounded in the sociocultural perspective, is called collective argumentation. This was developed by Brown and Renshaw (2000) in order to create more diverse communicative spaces in the elementary classroom than the conventional interactive practices of teacher-centred classrooms allow. The idea of collective argumentation draws on a number of principles that are required for co-ordinating different perspectives in classroom interaction. These are the principles of generalisability, objectivity and consistency adapted from the work of Miller (1987). In drawing on these principles, a key format of collective argumentation is introduced to the students. The skills of representation, comparison, explanation, justification, agreement and validation are to be used in co-ordinating the phases of their interaction in small groups. The use of these strategies is realized in small group situations in which the teacher first guides the students in sharing their personal views or interpretations of the problem or task in question. This is followed by comparing, explaining and justifying various perspectives in small groups, by establishing a joint agreement, and then by presenting the group's joint representation to the whole class for validation. The teacher's participation in the interactions of the small groups includes allocating management of the problem-solving process to the group, reminding the students about the norms of participation, supporting the development of conjectures and refutations, modelling ways of constructing arguments and the use of appropriate domain-specific language, encouraging the class to engage in the evaluation of co-constructed arguments or perspectives, and providing strategies for dealing with interpersonal conflicts (Brown and Renshaw, 2000).

In their study, Pylvänäinen, Vasama and Kumpulainen (in press) illuminate the modes of teacher participation during whole-class discussions, following the notions of community of inquiry in which value is placed on dialogic and transformative meaning-making between members of the classroom community. In this study, the authors argue for the need to widen the view of the role of the teacher in participating and orchestrating classroom interaction. As their study demonstrates, the teacher's discursive modes in a community of inquiry do not concentrate only on providing cognitive support for the students but also on social and socio-emotional processes. The authors elaborate this argument by identifying four modes of teacher participation in collective inquiry. These are defined as evocative, facilitative, collective and appreciative modes of teacher participation in classroom interaction. In the following, we shall elaborate these modes of participation in some detail, since they also highlight the pedagogical context and its theoretical underpinnings in classroom practice.

In the study of Kovalainen, Kumpulainen and Vasama (in press), the teacher's evocative mode of participation was found to reflect one main principle of the community of inquiry, in which the students were invited and encouraged to ask questions and propose initiations as well as to share and negotiate their opinions and approaches in the classroom community. The evocation of the students’ initiations appeared to give the students the opportunity to have local control in choosing the topic for joint inquiry. By evoking the students’ views and perspectives, the teacher appeared to make the classroom community co-responsible for their learning, in which there was space for free expression and its communal elaboration. The freedom of choice, including the legitimate control of topics and lines of inquiry, appeared to promote the students’ intrinsic motivation for active participation in classroom interaction and learning (Paris and Turner, 1994).

The facilitative mode of participation was found to illuminate the nature of the teacher's scaffolding of the students’ reasoning processes in communal inquiry. Among the situated strategies the teacher was observed to use when facilitating classroom interaction were re-voicing questions and interpretations, drawing together perspectives and initiations, modelling and monitoring reasoning processes, and passing on culturally established knowledge and practices. The latter was often highlighted with the active use of cultural metaphors that gave the classroom community tools to approach and conceptualise abstract entities from their own perspectives. The nature of the teacher's facilitation of classroom interaction demonstrates that the interpretative authority of ideas and solutions was distributed in the classroom. Here, all members of the classroom community were responsible for negotiating and evaluating the processes and outcomes of joint problem solving. In fact, it appeared that argumentation and intellectual collaboration were seen as more important than the solution to a problem. The teacher participated as a legitimate member in this process by sensitively calibrating his level of participation from an active listener to that of a guiding tutor. In this study, the teacher did not appear to be an agent whose task was to instil new skills and understanding into the students. Instead, the nature of scaffolding in this classroom was more bi-directional and meanings were socially negotiated, shaped by the students’ views and perspectives. Furthermore, in this classroom the reasoning processes and rules that underlay them were made continuously transparent through joint negotiation.

The collective mode of teacher participation reflects the teacher's support of equal participation in joint inquiry as well as tolerance towards different opinions and perspectives. Among the strategies the teacher was found to use for strengthening collectiveness in the classroom were orchestrating turns to speak, promoting collective responsibility and active participation, as well as recalling the rules of participation in the community of inquiry. These means were embedded in the flow of classroom discourse and shaped by the domain-specific topics under investigation. In addition to ensuring the students’ equal participation in classroom interaction, the teacher's collective mode of participation appeared to work as an important tool for promoting the students’ view of themselves as legitimate members of the learning community.

Another means that seemed to play an important role in community building and scaffolding the students’ reasoning processes was the teacher's appreciative mode of participation. The teacher's appreciativeness of the students’ initiations, ideas and approaches was reflected in his participation in communal inquiry throughout the study. Another interesting feature relating to the teacher's sensitiveness towards the students was that he paced the tempo of interaction according to the needs of the students. Moreover, in his participation the teacher signalled to the classroom community that he also felt that he could learn from the ongoing discourse. By doing this, the teacher made it explicit that he enjoyed and found reward in being a member of the classroom community.

These analyses of the teacher's participation in classroom interaction also highlighted the nature of the students’ roles as learners during a community of inquiry. In this learning community, the students were provided with many opportunities to take initiatives and an active role in initiating and organizing the topics to be investigated. The students also had opportunities to practise various social skills as they jointly worked out problems and co-constructed knowledge in the learning community. In this learning community, the students did not see their teacher as the knowledge-giving authority but instead proudly presented their own ideas and also questioned the assumptions presented by the teacher.

Collaborative interaction in peer groups

Although teacher–student interaction also plays an important role in contemporary classrooms, collaborative working modes with small groups of students have increased in many classrooms as the result of the new conceptions of learning and their pedagogical implications. Consequently, it has become important for teachers and researchers to understand better how meanings and knowledge are constructed between students while working in peer groups on various learning activities. Furthermore, it has become important to understand the kinds of opportunities provided for learning in such classrooms, and the possible obstacles that may hinder effective problem solving and learning in peer groups. In addition to understanding the dynamics and nature of the social and cognitive processes that underlie interactions in collaborative peer groups, it is also important to understand what kind of instructional support students need in these activity settings.

Social interaction among student groups tends to differ from traditional teacher–student interaction in its degree of reciprocity (Forman, 1989). In teacher–student interactions, it is often the teacher who controls the content of interaction and the distribution of speaking turns. In peer interaction, turn taking and selection of content is distributed among the students (Rommetveit, 1985). Students who have the responsibility for managing their own talk must cope with silences, negotiate how, when and who talks, and assess the relevance and quality of communication (Barnes and Todd, 1977, 1995). Consequently, classroom interaction among students, in which different opinions, definitions and interpretations are expressed and created, is usually complex and dynamic in nature (Cohen, 1994; Hicks, 1995; Maybin, 1991). Moreover, in peer interaction, the communicative options available to students, during which each may take turns at instructing the other, are much wider (Forman, 1989). These extended opportunities for using language and participating in classroom interactions seem to give students ample opportunities for joint meaning-making and knowledge construction. Yet, the dynamic and free-flowing nature of interaction in peer groups also poses new challenges and responsibilities...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Studying classroom interaction and learning
• PART II Classroom interaction in action Case studies of classroom talk and collaborative learning
• PART III Classroom interaction and learning Implications for classroom practice
• Conclusion
• References
• Index