There can be a lot of pressure to pick a side. We see this all the time in education, in the debates that seek to put people on one of two poles depending on their classroom practice. 

Do you have your tables in groups and allow your learners to discuss issues from their own perspectives whilst you guide on the side?

Or are you a neo-fascist who orders pupils to sit in rows whilst you fill their heads with facts? 

Are you a knowledgeable sage who carefully instructs pupils from the front of the room to ensure that everyone has access to the same rich knowledge?

Or are you some kind of hippy who leaves their learners to sit in groups, ripping up sugar paper and sharing nothing but misconceptions? Pick a team. Demonise the other side. 

The dialogic debate

We can see this debate playing out at the moment in discussions on social media around the use of dialogic teaching, which is being held by some to sit in contrast to pupils sitting in rows and learning from an expert. As ever, the reality of the classroom is a little more complicated. 

It is interesting to note that Robin Alexander, perhaps the voice most often associated with dialogic teaching, has said that teacher talk is richest in countries where “knowledge transmission and cultural initiation were explicit education goals”.

He contrasts this with countries where there has been an antipathy to transmission teaching which pushed them into not dialogue but questioning. 

In English schools, the teacher is expected to divide their time equally among members of the class and so ask a large number of questions to ensure that all pupils are participating.

In countries where dialogue is more common, fewer pupils may be participating at any one time, but this participation is deeper with more back and forth and questions being asked by pupils of their teacher and of each other. 

The real world

This is where things start to get messy in the real world. It leaves teachers departing from academics and their claims that “All evidence supports dialogic teaching”, as we ask, supports dialogic teaching when?

Pupils can only engage in rich and meaningful dialogue from a position of knowledge, or at least, they can in my subject of geography. If we are going to have dialogue about China’s South-North Water Transfer Project and its sustainability, we all need to know lots about both the details of the project and the nature of sustainability.

If we don’t, we don’t have dialogue, we have a classroom that resembles a radio talk show where people call in to give their ill-formed views on what they reckon. 

In order to make sure that everyone does know a lot about this topic, I will need to ensure that everyone in the class is participating and answering questions to show their understanding. Then we can have an actual dialogue about it.

It could be tempting to think that we only need a handful of knowledgeable pupils in the classroom and that the rest of the class will learn by listening to the discussion, but retaining information from a discussion about which you currently know very little is difficult. We need prior knowledge to hang what we are hearing on to. 

I think most teachers realise that there is no dichotomy between traditional teacher-led lessons with children seated facing the expert at the front of the class and dialogic teaching.

We create the conditions to have knowledgeable pupils who are then able to engage in dialogue and deepen their understanding; but the culture of knowledge transmission comes first. 

Rather than casting each other as heroes and villains in the weird battlefields of education, perhaps we could have a dialogue. From a position not of ignorance, but of knowledge. 

Resources

Alexander, R. (2008) ‘Pedagogy, curriculum and culture’, in Murphy, P., Hall 

K. and Soler, J. (eds) Pedagogy and Practice: Culture and Identities, Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 3-27