A Dialogic Approach: Working with teachers to enhance student talk
Deer Park West Primary School values the importance of dialogue in the classroom, making it a whole school priority. Teachers in the senior school have begun introducing strategies to support accountable talk in their classrooms.
schoolED is supporting their journey, working with leadership and classroom teachers through individualised coaching and modelling to strengthen students’ ability to engage in these deeper level interactions. Working with a consultant, the teacher’s goals have been to develop a teacher framed but student owned process where the focus is on the quality of interactions and their ability to encourage deep learning.
As a starting point, teachers have introduced accountable talk strategies where students are encouraged to provide opinions and justify these by agreeing and disagreeing respectfully with their peers. Students are providing reasoning for their responses and purposefully building on other’s responses.
The use of sentence stems and talk cue cards have scaffolded student discussions, resulting in students contributing independently and drawing their own conclusions in a collaborative manner.
Ground Rules for Talk have also been co- constructed with students to give them agency over their learning, acting as a set of protocols around discussion.
The result of this professional learning has seen a significant increase in productive dialogue and negotiatory interactions, impacting positively on student’s critical thinking and comprehension of complex texts. These are strategies that students and teachers can now use to strengthen all curriculum areas. After seeking feedback from staff and students, schoolED are ready for the next steps to support the continued implementation of meaningful dialogue in the classroom.
Further reading on dialogic practice in the classroom can be found here:
Discussions in the dialogic classroom (education.vic.gov.au)
Extended talk and dialogic talk (education.vic.gov.au)
Accountable talk (education.vic.gov.au)
