Sometimes you get a class that just clicks when it comes to discussions. That was my third-period AP Literature class last year. A combination of factors, such as class size, personalities, and relationships, converged to make this a group of students who loved to talk to one another. Partners, small groups, whole class: All types of discussion went well with them, and they could keep talk flowing for the entire class period. I felt like I had won the lottery with this group and that I didn’t need to do much to help them improve in this area besides giving them the opportunity to talk.
Then I came across the book Inspiring Dialogue: Talking to Learn in the English Classroom, and I haven’t been able to look at classroom talk in the same way, even with what I thought of as a stellar group of talkers. The authors emphasize that now more than ever, we need to help students express themselves and claim their voices, because the classroom is one of the last places where we can engage in dialogue about big questions with those who might not share our beliefs. Although I wasn’t wrong about providing ample opportunities for classroom talk, I was mistaken to think that there wasn’t room for improvement in this area.
I will share my three biggest takeaways from reading this book and how they have impacted my instruction.
Distinguishing Between Discussion and Dialogue
Although discussion and dialogue are often used interchangeably, Inspiring Dialogue made me understand that they represent two different communication styles. Discussion can refer to a lot of different kinds of talk, but it is primarily focused on the exchange of ideas and information. When students participate in a discussion, they might share their opinions and ideas to get others to see their point of view. Students are talking about what they already think and know.
On the other hand, a dialogue is more collaborative in nature. Rather than just stating opinions, a dialogue encourages participants to understand other perspectives and reach a shared understanding. Students are talking to learn and discover. In other words, a discussion is more about persuasion and information exchange, and a dialogue is more about connection and building on ideas.
Making this distinction helped me realize that the vast majority of talk in my classroom was discussion, and although this is not necessarily a bad thing—discussion definitely has a place in our classrooms—it did open my eyes to look for ways to provide opportunities for dialogic talk. Dialogue doesn’t often just happen on its own. Students must be taught how to engage in this type of talk; therefore, it requires careful planning and scaffolding. For me, this included defining these terms for students and sharing the purpose and expectations for dialogue.
Breaking Out of Patterns
To support dialogue within my classroom, I needed to take a closer look at the types of talk I was engaging in as a teacher. When I took the time to reflect on what I was doing during class discussions, I noticed that I often fell into a very common pattern known as IRE: A teacher initiates a question, students respond, and then the teacher evaluates the response. Again, this pattern is not inherently bad, but it doesn’t allow for students to build on ideas. Once the question is answered in this type of interaction, the teacher usually moves on to another question.
In a dialogue, the teacher can treat students’ responses to questions as building blocks and encourage students to move the discussion forward by adding to and building onto ideas. This could include revoicing a student’s response and asking other students to weigh in or bringing a student’s response back to a larger concept or theme and asking students to explain how they connect. Either way, the goal of the talk is not simply for students to show what they know by answering a question, but for the teacher and students working together to come to a shared understanding. In preparation for this kind of talk, I realized that I had to develop questions that would provoke thoughtful responses in my students instead of questions that had known answers.
Opportunities for Uptake
When I reflected on the discussions in my talkative class, I realized that one way we could improve was by noticing opportunities for uptake. Uptake is when a speaker “takes up” a previous contribution to build upon it. Although these students had much to say, most of it was not necessarily connected or forming a sustained line of inquiry. In other words, there were a lot of ideas flying around, but we weren’t going that deep into discussing them.
The first step was teaching my students about this dialogic move and being deliberate about pointing out how and when it was happening. As students participated in a Socratic Circle discussion that allowed me to sit back and observe, I took notes on successful examples of uptake as well as on missed opportunities. After the discussion, I shared the examples and explained how we could have improved the discussion. In a subsequent discussion, when I noticed a missed opportunity for uptake, I stopped students and asked questions such as “How could we dig into this idea more?” or “What are the implications of this idea?” Over several discussions where I used this prompting, I noticed that students were spending more time with a topic before moving on to something else.
According to the authors of Inspiring Dialogue, research shows that extended talk by students in classrooms is rare, even though it has been shown to be transformative to learning. And, even more important to me as a rural teacher, dialogic teaching occurs less often in rural and urban classrooms compared with their suburban counterparts. Both of these facts inspired me to be more intentional and deliberate about the type of talk that was occurring in my classroom. It required me to slow down and pay attention to how I was structuring talk and how my students were engaging with one another, and for my students and me, it was time well spent.
