Challenging Learning Through Dialogue

Strategies to Engage Your Students and Develop Their Language of Learning

James Nottingham, Jill Nottingham, Martin Renton

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781506376523
• eBook ISBN: 9781506376509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Using classroom discussions to teach good habits of thinking 

Classroom discussion has a major effect on student learning. In fact, dialogue is one of the best vehicles for learning how to think, make moral decisions, and understand another person's point of view. Research also indicates that most teachers talk too much in the classroom and don't wait long enough for students to respond. How do we improve the quality of classroom discussion? Challenging Learning Through Dialogue transforms the most up-to-date research into practical strategies that work. Readers will learn

• How to build in more "wait-time" for better quality thinking and questioning from students
• How to use dialogue to teach reasoning, collaboration, and good habits of thinking
• The three types of dialogue and how to teach the most effective version: exploratory talk
• Dozens of practical strategies for exploratory dialogue
• Global examples of fun ways to teach dialogue
• An innovative new instructional strategy called Classroom Mysteries

Written by an internationally known team of educational innovators, this book is for all educators who aim to use effective classroom dialogue to engage students in learning. 

"This valuable book is a must for teachers and families who wish to have their children learn to think and communicate with greater precision and clarity."
Arthur L. Costa, Ed. D., Professor Emeritus
California State University Sacramento and Co-Director, International Institute for Habits of Mind

"James Nottingham's work on Challenging Learning is a critical element of creating Visible Learners. This new series will help teachers hone the necessary pedagogical skills of dialogue, feedback, questioning, and mindset."
John Hattie, Professor & Director, Melbourne Education Research Institute
University of Melbourne

1 Why Dialogue?

1.0 Why Dialogue?

Dialogue is one of the best vehicles for learning how to think, how to be reasonable, how to make moral decisions and how to understand another person’s point of view. It is supremely flexible, instructional, collaborative and rigorous. At its very best, dialogue is one of the best ways for participants to learn good habits of thinking.

At its best, dialogue is one of the best vehicles for teaching good habits of thinking.

Robin Alexander, a professor in the United Kingdom, is one of the main advocates for teaching through dialogue, with many influential publications to his name. In one of his books, Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk (2006), he makes the following argument:

Dialogue allows us as teachers, leaders or support staff to intervene in the learning process by giving instant feedback, guidance and challenge to our students.

Robin Alexander’s research shows dialogue leads to gains in international tests such as PISA.

1. Dialogue is undervalued in many schools when compared with writing, reading and math.
2. Dialogue does not get in the way of ‘real’ teaching. In fact, by comparing PISA and other international tests, Alexander shows it is possible to teach more through dialogue and yet still be ‘at or near the top’ of the tables.
3. Dialogue is the foundation of learning because it allows interaction and engagement with knowledge and with the ideas of others. Through dialogue, teachers can most effectively intervene in the learning process by giving instant feedback, guidance and stimulation to learners.
4. Dialogue in education is a special kind of talk, in that it uses structured questioning to guide and prompt students’ conceptual understanding.

Dialogue gives teachers a valuable insight into their students’ beliefs, questions and misconceptions.

Some of the other benefits of dialogue include the opportunity to ask appropriate questions, articulate problems and issues, imagine life’s possibilities, see where things lead, evaluate alternatives, engage with each other and think collaboratively. A wide-scale improvement in such abilities would be no panacea, but can you think of many more significant educational achievements than these?

1.1 Reasons For Dialogue 1: Learning How To Think

(James) In 2003, Jill and I attended an international conference in Bulgaria. The focus was Philosophy for Children. In addition to the two hundred delegates from around the world, the organisers also invited some local teenagers to take part in proceedings. Midway through the four-day event, I was asked to facilitate a community of inquiry with these teenagers for the other delegates to observe.

I began the session with a fictional story about two hunters, Hank and Frank, who are chased by a talking bear. The teenagers then created a number of philosophical questions from which they chose their favorite: Why sacrifice yourself for others? After a short pause for quiet reflection, I invited an eager young man to start us off by giving his first thoughts. This is what he said:

It seems to me that ‘sacrifice’ is the most important concept in this question. I think someone might sacrifice themselves based on instinct, impulse or intuition. Of course, two of these are in the cognitive domain and one is in the affective domain, so I suppose we need to determine which of these is more likely in any given situation before we can answer the question effectively.

All the other delegates were nodding approvingly at the boy’s apparent confidence in thinking about and analysing the concept of sacrifice. As for me, I was like a rabbit caught in the headlights; I certainly had not been expecting that response!

To grab some thinking time for myself, I asked the teenagers to decide what these terms – instinct, impulse and intuition – had in common. Whilst they did that, I asked a friendly philosopher to suggest what I might do next.

Reconvening, I asked one girl to give her group’s answer. She will forevermore be a favorite of mine after replying: ‘Instinct, impulse and intuition have one thing in common … they are all names of perfumes.’ (At last: someone on my wavelength!)

Once the hour-long discussion had finished, I made a beeline for the organisers and moaned that they had staged all this: ‘You could’ve told me you’d invited only the most talented philosophers from across Bulgaria to join us!’ They laughingly explained they had simply invited volunteers from the local area to take part – there had been no selection process.

‘So how come they’re so adept at thinking?’ I inquired.

‘Because they’ve been taught how to think from an early age,’ they said.

‘But so have children in the United Kingdom, and yet I haven’t come across young teenagers as skilled in thinking as your students,’ I countered.

Their response was something that initially vexed, then intrigued and ultimately emboldened me: ‘From what we’ve seen in Western countries, you don’t seem to teach children how to think; instead you only teach them what to think.’

Students benefit from being taught how to think, and dialogue is one of the best ways to achieve this.

The more I work in schools around the world, the more I think these Bulgarian teachers may have been right.

For example, if I ask children at the end of primary school (nine- to eleven- year-olds) if they think stealing is wrong, they all answer yes. But if I then ask why Robin Hood is thought of as a good man if stealing is wrong, they always retort: ‘Because he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor.’ Perhaps there’s nothing too controversial there yet, but if I press them to decide if it would be okay for me to steal, let’s say from a bank, and give the proceeds to poor people, they almost always say yes. Rarely do the children seem troubled by the fact that stealing from anybody, no matter what the funds are used for, is against the law.

I wonder if this suggests the Bulgarian teachers might be right – that too many children are being taught what, rather than how, to think.

Yet teaching students how to think feels like something of an abstract concept. Perhaps the simplest way to picture it is to consider one strategy for thinking that we all use when faced with a difficult choice: to list advantages and disadvantages. Creating this structure in our head is common to all of us. But it is not a structure we were born with – we were taught it, and it has become one of our ‘thinking tools’. Dialogue allows us to model structures for thinking, for example, by asking questions, giving counter-examples, asking for reasons, justifying answers, adding to the last idea you heard. All of these are new thinking structures, and you are explicitly modelling and teaching them with students.

Another example: I often notice teachers and parents praising children for saying the ‘right’ thing: ‘it is wrong to kill’, ‘we must always be nice’, ‘you should never lie’ and so on. And on the face of it, this might seem reasonable. After all, we want children to be moral and to do the right thing. However, what happens if they are faced with a dilemma but, up to that point, have only ever followed instructions? Such dilemmas might include eating meat whilst maintaining that killing is wrong, always telling the truth even if it is likely to hurt someone, always being nice even to someone who is either being racist or bullying a friend. What then?

Many parents will reply that they trust their children to do the right thing. But how do children know what the ‘right’ thing is unless they have learnt how to make moral decisions for themselves? In other words, how can they be moral if they haven’t learnt how to think or developed at least some wisdom?

This is where dialogue comes in because it is one of the best ways to learn how to think, how to be reasonable, how to make moral decisions and how to understand another person’s point of view. It is supremely flexible, instructional, collaborative and rigorous. At its very best, dialogue is arguably the best way for students to learn good habits of thinking.

Dialogue can help to develop students’ wisdom and ethics.

For examples of teaching students how to think, look at the strategies in Chapter 4.

1.2 Reasons for Dialogue 2: From Surface to Deep

(Jill) A lot of our teaching leads to students gaining some surface-level knowledge. Without this, many students would not ‘know’ their numbers and letters nor the myriad of subject-specific facts such as ‘rain is a form of precipitation’.

However, our teaching does not often lead to students’ deep understanding – at least not teaching in the traditional sense of ‘I speak and show; my students listen and learn’.

This is not to criticise what teachers do: knowledge is a necessary first step to understanding. So helping students to gain some initial surface-level knowledge is an important function of our pedagogy.

Students also need to develop a deep understanding of concepts, connections, context and generalisations. There are many ways to achieve this, of which high-quality dialogue is one of the best.

Of course, the emphasis is on high-quality dialogue. Not just any old dialogue will do. High-quality dialogue includes getting students to generate ideas, create meaning, classify, compare, make links, question assumptions, test cause and effect, speculate, hypothesise and so on.

Dialogue helps students to understand concepts, connections, context and general principles.

A very useful way to distinguish between surface-level knowledge and deep understanding is through the SOLO taxonomy. The Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy (Martin, 2011) is a model that describes levels of increasing complexity in students’ understanding of subjects. It was proposed by John B. Biggs and K. Collis and has since gained popularity.

We have written about the SOLO taxonomy in depth in Challenging Learning Through Feedback (Nottingham & Nottingham, 2016). We give an overview of it in Section 8.5 and suggest it as a way to review the outcomes of a mystery (one of the dialogue activities suggested in Chapter 8; see Figure 11 in Chapter 8).

The SOLO taxonomy provides a clear structure for thinking about how to deepen and extend dialogue.

The levels of the SOLO taxonomy a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• The Challenging Learning Story
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Language of Learning
• 1 Why Dialogue?
• 2 Dialogue Essentials
• 3 Dialogue to Engage Students
• 4 One Way to Learn How to Think: Develop Reasoning
• 5 Dialogue Groupings
• 6 Dialogue Detectives
• 7 Dialogue Structures
• 8 Mysteries
• 9 Odd One Out
• 10 Fortune Lines
• 11 Philosophy for Children (P4C)
• 12 Dialogue Exercises in P4C
• Appendix 1: Dialogue Detectives (Relates to Chapter 6)
• Appendix 2: LOUIS PASTEUR SCRIPT (Relates to Section 8.9.2)
• References
• Index
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