Dialogic teaching to the high stakes standardized test?

Within current educational discourse, dialogic pedagogy is diametrically opposed to teaching to the test, especially the high stakes standardized test. While dialogic pedagogy is about critical thinking, authenticity and freedom, test preparation evokes all that is narrow, instrumental and cynical in education. In this paper we argue that such positioning of dialogic pedagogy as antithetical to testing is detrimental to attempts both to foster dialogue in classrooms and to constructively manage the high stakes standardized tests that are compulsory in so many schools. Drawing on an extended case study of dialogic teaching in one London primary school, we argue that while standardized testing is indeed an impediment to dialogic pedagogy, it does not follow that dialogue is impossible or undesirable within the testing context. By adopting an ironic stance towards the test, teachers can fulfill test preparation mandates while maintaining dialogic ideals and practices

Linguistic ethnographic analysis of classroom dialogue

This chapter introduces linguistic ethnography as a useful set of tools for making sense of these and related issues and explains this methodological approach, its assumptions, concepts and methods. Linguistic ethnography is an umbrella term used to describe a growing body of research, primarily in Europe, which brings together linguistic methods for studying language and discourse data with ethnographic interpretation of cultural practices. Linguistic ethnographic analyses of discourse and interaction are grounded in a number of fundamental insights about social interaction, meaning-making and the communicative order. Linguistic ethnography has been applied to numerous issues around classroom discourse and dialogue, including the implications of social processes and relationships for joint knowledge construction; and the construction of teacher and pupil identities. The chapter utilizes the analysis of the story opener’s discussion to illustrate a linguistic ethnographic approach to working with classroom interactional data. It concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of linguistic ethnographic analyses for understanding and advancing dialogic pedagogy

Beyond a unitary conception of pedagogic pace: quantitative measurement and ethnographic experience

English education policy‐makers have targeted classroom time as a key area for regulation and intervention, with ‘brisk pace’ widely accepted as a feature of good teaching practice. We problematise this conventional wisdom through an exploration of objective and subjective dimensions of lesson pace in a corpus of 30 Key Stage 2 literacy lessons from three classrooms in one London school. Systematic classroom observation produced an anomaly: the lessons we experienced as fast‐paced were rated objectively as slowest, and vice‐versa. We contrasted the fastest and slowest episodes in the corpus, demonstrating that for these episodes the accepted measure of pace primarily reflected differences in utterance length. Linguistic ethnographic micro‐analysis of the episodes highlighted predictability, stakes, meaning and dramatic performance as key factors contributing to pace as experienced. We argue, among other claims, that sometimes accelerating pupils' experience—and learning—necessitates slowing down the pace of teaching, and that government calls for urgency may, perversely, make lessons slower

Classroom discourse: The promise and complexity of dialogic practice

We estimate that, on average, an English primary teacher poses over 60,000 questions and follows up pupil responses with over 30,000 evaluations in every year of classroom lessons. This talk is shaped by deeply ingrained habits, resulting in part from an estimated 13,000 hours spent as a pupil watching others' teaching practice (Lortie 1975). However, a recent resurgence of interest in classroom discourse among educational researchers and policy makers is focusing attention on patterns of teacher talk. This attention, in turn, is placing demands upon teachers that they transform their talk, making conscious and informed choices about what had heretofore normally been second nature. How should teachers and teacher educators respond to these demands? What do they need to know and understand about classroom discourse? In addressing these questions we review a broad consensus emerging from three decades of research on the topic, according to which (i) the way teachers and pupils talk in the classroom is crucially important, but (ii) the dominant pattern of classroom discourse is problematically monologic, so (iii) it should be replaced with more dialogic models. While we find much merit in this conventional wisdom, in this chapter we also show its limitations, arguing that teaching and classroom interaction are far more complicated and problematic than is typically captured by descriptions of and prescriptions for dialogue

Developing understanding of pupil feedback using Habermas’ notion of communicative action

The focus of this article is to explore the notion of pupil feedback and the possible ways in which it can be understood and developed using Jürgen Habermas’ theory of Communicative Action. The theoretical position adopted is framed within the concept of assessment for learning, and is particularly related to the notion of assessment as learning within AfL. Furthermore, the paper is located within a social constructivist perspective. Jürgen Habermas’ theory of Communicative Action enables us to recognise that feedback, and more importantly the interpretation of feedback, cannot be a one-way process. Without recognition of pupil interpretation, its very purpose (to alter the learning gap) is compromised. This paper offers new ways of exploring feedback, which recognise complexity and the importance of interpretation and relationships in shared negotiated communicative contexts. It further contributes to the ways in which assessment and learning are understood and intersect

Assessment as learning: Blurring the boundaries of assessment and learning for theory, policy and practice

This paper explores assessment and learning in a way that blurs their boundaries. The notion of assessment as learning (AaL) is offered as an aspect of formative assessment (assessment for learning). It considers how pupils self-regulate their own learning, and in so doing make complex decisions about how they use feedback and engage with the learning priorities of the classroom. Discussion is framed from a sociocultural stance, yet challenges some of the perspectives that have widely become accepted. It offers three new views to help explore the concept of AaL: understanding feedback; understanding the learning gap; and exploring vocabularies of assessment. Pragmatically, the ideas examined suggest that teachers may need to consider less about focused and directive feedback, but more about how learners interpret and understand feedback from their self-regulatory and self-productive identities and how vocabularies for assessment can be more collaboratively shared in learning contexts. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis

Moving from "interesting data" to publishable research article: some interpretive and representational dilemmas in a linguistic ethnographic analysis of an English literacy lesson

This chapter explores the processes of case selection, data analysis, theoretical framing and representation in the move from research data to publication of a research article in a linguistic ethnographic study of classroom discourse and interaction. Over the course of our fieldwork in an East London primary school we observed and video-recorded a lesson in which the teacher invoked the televised talent show, X-factor, in organising the class to provide feedback on pupil writing. The subsequent 8-min episode intrigued us, so we spent a considerable amount of time analyzing it, and also played it back and discussed it with the teachers in the school. Ultimately, we published an article based on this episode: “Promises and Problems of Teaching with Popular Culture: A Linguistic Ethnographic Analysis of Discourse Genre Mixing” (Reading Research Quarterly, 2011). However, the move from “interesting episode” to published article was not at all straightforward. In this chapter we discuss the interpretive and representational dilemmas that we confronted in this process. In doing so, we reflect on the relationship between data and theory in linguistic ethnography, and on how academic institutions and genres impinge upon practices of interpretation and representation

Blurring the Boundaries: Opening and Sustaining Dialogic Spaces

Dialogic educators have designed strategies to facilitate dialogic teaching, such as establishing ground rules, employing talk moves, and structuring discussions. Though productive, such strategies rarely open dialogic space, in which shared meaning is created through an interaction that blurs the boundaries between participating voices. Dialogic space is facilitated by tension between perspectives; openness to others, which is facilitated by ego suspension, authority relaxation and respect for and interest in others; and acceptance of dialogue’s inherent unpredictability. We explore classroom episodes in which dialogic space did and did not emerge, highlighting the importance of playfulness and mutual attunement for maneuvering within dialogic space. These cases also point to 4 challenges that dialogic space poses: tension between curricular coverage and dialogue’s unpredictability; the demands such unpredictability makes on teacher flexibility, knowledge and judgment; equity in the distribution of teacher attention and student participation; and the threat of losing control