Dialogic Teaching

 

How can dialogic teaching help students to learn, unlearn and co- create knowledge?

Being an educator means having the big responsibility of building the future of the world. The first place to pave this path begins with classroom settings, as this is where future leaders are being molded. Different types of teaching methodologies are employed by both teachers and educators to enhance the learning process and make it more impactful.

Dialogic teaching occurs when classroom conversation is purposefully employed to assist students develop higher-order thinking skills. It is a pedagogical strategy where students get to collaborate in terms of meaning making process and is marked by joint ownership of the discussion that takes place in the classroom (Reznitskaya, 2012). The general goals of Dialogic teaching methodology are: 1) To cultivate knowledge and understanding using dialogue and discussion, and 2) To teach students how to have productive discussions and dialogues (Skinner, 2010). Interaction is the basis for learning this methodology. Here, participants learn through reasoning and argument and while doing so, they develop these skills along with others.

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Besides focusing on collaboration by breaking the traditional teacher-centered teaching approach, dialogic teaching also promotes perspective taking among students by creating a platform for meaningful discussion through active participation. This shift in teaching methodology where educators focus on students’ learning and understanding makes learning process more effective and efficient. Aside from these features of  dialogic teaching methodology, open or divergent questions with uncertain answers are employed by dialogic teaching (Burbules, 1993), whose sole purpose is to enrich understanding through meaningful discussion. Teachers provide constructive and formative feedback for boosting the quality of discussion (Alexander, 2008).

  Dialogic teaching has also been associated with enhancing conceptual knowledge, textual interpretation, and argumentative writing skills (Reznitskaya et al., 2009). It gives the opportunity to students to present their views and opinions on a specific topic or issue as compared to monologic classrooms which employ direct teaching methodology. Monologic classrooms are authoritative classrooms where only teachers’ voices and ideas are heard, and students are denied the access to utilize their creativity to think about the relevant topic. Monologic classrooms limits students’ thinking and innovative ability by compelling students to be uni-directional towards a fixed answer which is regarded as the only “right” answer. Instead of claiming opinions of students as “correct” or “incorrect”, dialogic teaching focuses on providing learners (students) equal chance to  engage in  “exploratory talk ”and  “think reasonably” (Nesari, 2015, p.642). Hence, teachers can scaffold students as required, being acquainted with how students think, why they think that way and what they know through dialogic teaching. Students get to learn from each other, unlearn their misconceptions and co-create knowledge with the help of dialogic teaching.

I prefer this methodology as it focuses on students’ learning process and helps in detecting areas of improvement for students’ learning. And while doing this, it also helps the teachers to understand the disparity among students learning, which cannot always be assessed by conventional examination module. Hence, students’ needs can be diagnosed, and teachers can plan specific activities spontaneously to improve students’ understanding, timely evaluate progress and provide perpetual guidance (without interference) wherever possible to broaden perspective.

Though my school had both monologic and dialogic classrooms, I preferred dialogic classrooms as it enhanced my social and emotional skills along with communication skills and above all, improved my ways of learning the contextual concept. The dialogic classrooms of my school laid the foundation for enhancing the "perspective taking" skill of mine.

In terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy, being engaged in dialogic teaching methodology, students embody the 1) “receiving phenomena”:  Here, students acknowledge each other’s opinions , 2)  “responds to phenomena” : Here, students actively discuss the relevant topic and 3)   “valuing” : Here , students justify their views and  propose an idea/ plan to improve the status of topic of concern.

Dialogic teaching enhances the quality of students’ reasoning skills, self -reflection skills as well as problem solving skills which prepare them for real-world interactions. So, this approach of teaching is required more than ever now as classrooms are getting diverse in terms of language, culture, ethnicity, etc. It can also aid in conflict resolutions as learners can apply their learning in real world settings to solve socioscientific issues. It also grants students to have a firm foundation to utilize experiential learning.

References:

Alexander, R.J. (2008). Towards dialogic teaching. Rethinking classroom talk. 4th edition.

              Dialogos.

Burbules, N. (1993). Dialogue in teaching: Theory and practice. Teachers College Press.

Nesari, A. J. (2015). Dialogism versus monologism: A Bakhtinian approach to teaching. Procedia- Social and Behavioral Sciences, 205, 642 – 647. https://doi-org.proxy.library.ohio.edu/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.09.101

Reznitskaya, A. (2012). Dialogic teaching: Rethinking language use during literature discussions. The Reading Teacher, 65(7), 446 – 456. https://doi.org/10.1002/TRTR.01066

Reznitskaya, A., Kuo, L., Clark, A., Miller, B., Jadallah, M., Anderson, R.C., et al. (2009). Collaborative reasoning: A dialogic approach to group discussions. Cambridge Journal of Education, 39(1), 29–48. doi:10.1080/03057640802701952

Skinner, D. (2010). Effective teaching and learning in practice. Continuum.