In secondary school philosophy classes students learn to reason critically about social and scientific issues. This study examined the effects of a whole-class, teacher-led philosophy classroom dialogue intervention on students’ value-loaded critical thinking. Value-loaded critical thinking is logically consistent, self-reflective reasoning focused on making moral value-judgments about what is right to believe or do. In a quasi-experimental study (N = 437 students) with a pre-test post-test design, we investigated whether engaging in classroom dialogues in which the teachers implemented five design principles for promoting value-loaded critical thinking and transfer thereof, positively affected students’ (n = 150) value-loaded critical thinking in transfer tasks. The results were compared to two comparison conditions: students (n = 149) who participated in regular teacher-led philosophy classroom dialogues and students (n = 145) who followed a regular 10th-grade curriculum without philosophy classes. Results showed that students in the intervention condition outperformed students in both comparison conditions on referring to moral values. Regarding critical reasoning, we only found significant effects compared to the students who followed the regular 10th-grade curriculum. Findings indicate that a specifically designed dialogic intervention can enhance students’ capacities in value-loaded critical thinking.
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Seven college lecturers and two senior support staff were interviewed during 2021 about their experiences teaching in hybrid virtual classrooms (HVC). These technology-rich learning environments allow teachers to simultaneously teach students who are in class (on campus) and students who are joining remotely (online). There were two reasons for this choice: first, ongoing experimentation from innovative teaching staff who were already using this format before the COVID-19 pandemic; secondly, as a possible solution to restrictions on classroom size imposed by the pandemic. Challenges lecturers faced include adjusting teaching practice and lesson delivery to serve students in the class and those online equally; engaging and linking the different student groups in structured and natural interactions; overcoming technical challenges regarding audio and visual equipment; suitably configuring teaching spaces and having sufficient pedagogical and technical support to manage this complex process. A set of practical suggestions is provided. Lecturers should make reasoned choices when teaching in this format since it requires continued experimentation and practice to enhance the teaching and learning opportunities. When external factors such as classroom size restrictions are the driving force, the specific type of synchronous learning activities should be carefully considered. The structure and approach to lessons needs to be rethought to optimise the affordances of the hybrid virtual and connected classroom. The complexity of using these formats, and the additional time needed to do it properly, should not be underestimated. These findings are consistent with previous literature on this subject. An ongoing dialogue with faculty, support staff and especially students should be an integral part of any further implementation in this format.
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This study shows how learner initiatives are taken during classroom discussions where the teacher seeks to make room for subjectification. Using Conversation Analysis, subjectification can be observed when students take the freedom to express themselves as subjects through learner initiatives. Drawing on data from classroom discussions in language and literature lessons in the mother tongue, the authors find that learner initiatives can be observed in three different ways: agreement, request for information, counter-response. A learner initiative in the form of an agreement appears to function mostly as a continuer and prompts the previous speaker to reclaim the turn, while the I-R-F structure remains visible. In contrast, making a request for information or giving a counter-response ensures mostly a breakthrough of the I-R-F-structure and leads to a dialogical participation framework in which multiple students participate. Findings illustrate that by making a request for information or giving a counter-response, students not only act as an independent individual, but also encourage his peers to do so.
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Conducting a classroom dialogue for reasoning can be very challenging for teachers and, in particular for students-teachers. Research on classroom discussions provides examples of models that can be used to help teachers organize, analyse and conduct classroom discussions. One of these models is the five-practices framework (Stein, Engle, Smith, & Hughes, 2008). In this study we investigate how this framework has been applied in one course of mathematics' pedagogies for in-service student-teachers at the applied university of Amsterdam to support mathematics student-teachers in conducting classroom dialogue based on students reasoning. The study was conducted in the academic year 2017-18 and involved 15 in-service student-teachers and their teachers. The data concerns students written rapports to an individual assignment in which they were requested to use the five-practices in an hypothetical classroom discussion. The preliminary results confirm that the model can be useful for students-teachers to prepare themselves beforehand and to think about creating opportunities for dialogue to occur in the classroom. But, the practice of making connections during the classroom discussion remains misunderstood or superficially performed by the students teachers. These results suggest the need of a more fine grained description of the practice of connecting as ways to involve students-teachers in it.
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The journal was a forum for the work of both theorists and practitioners of philosophical practice with children, and published such work in all forms, including philosophical argument and reflection, classroom transcripts, curricula, empirical research, and reports from the field. The journal also maintained a tradition in publishing articles in the hermeneutics of childhood, a field of intersecting disciplines including cultural studies, social history, philosophy, art, literature and psychoanalysis.
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The dialogue between a mentor teacher and a prospective teacher is a key element in the supervision of prospective teachers in the workplace. This literature study deals with the issue of how to conceptualize the supervisory behaviour of mentor teachers in mentoring dialogues by systematically examining empirical literature on aspects of mentor teachers' behaviour during dialogues with prospective teachers. From the findings a model is derived which can be used to describe and map mentor teachers' behaviour in mentoring dialogues. The model may be helpful in the further development of the quality of mentor teachers' behaviour in mentoring dialogues.
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In this chapter, we propose that the democracy we wish to see out in the world is influenced by the quality of our own “inner democracies”—that is: the quality of the democracies among and between the selves or voices in the landscape of the self. We must find ways out of the I-prisons we experience and perpetuate. With this in mind, we propose that ”writing the self,” a method whereby creative, expressive, and reflective writing is used to cultivate an internal dialogue and construct a new identity narrative (Lengelle, 2014), can assist in reshaping our stories about ”the Other and ourselves” and can contribute to personal and cultural healing and reconciliation. The inner dialogue reconciled is foundational for the external dialogue at the heart of global citizenship within education. Indeed, as Schellhammer argues, we must cultivate the self in order to become inter-culturally competent, and this includes facing shadow aspects through truthful dialogues with the self and caring for the self. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62861-5_6 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reinekke-lengelle-phd-767a4322/
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This study reports the evaluation of a lesson series, developed in collaboration with teachers and experts, to generate a research-based solution for teaching critical thinking through Socratic dialogue in secondary vocational education. The lesson series has been evaluated for feasibility and tailoring to different target groups of students by five citizenship education teachers and 85 students. Data consisted of self-report questionnaires by teachers and students, complemented with observations of lessons. Results show that lessons based on Socratic dialogue for teaching critical thinking to students in secondary vocational education are considered a promising educational intervention. Teachers considered the lessons as feasible and well-tailored to their students and were able to implement the lessons in their classrooms. Students were motivated to participate, and their motivation did not decrease significantly during the lesson series. At the same time, students tended to be more motivated when the value of learning to think critically for their future profession was clearly substantiated. Practical implications from the evaluation of the lesson series were that, in addition to participating in Socratic dialogue, students need clear learning objectives and short assignments to remain active.
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In today’s foreign language (FL) education, teachers universally recognise the importance of fostering students’ ability to communicate in the target language. However, the current assessments often do not (sufficiently) evaluate this. In her dissertation, Charline Rouffet aims to gather insight into the potential of assessments to steer FL teaching practices. Communicative learning objectives FL teachers fully support the communicative learning objectives formulated at national level and embrace the principles of communicative language teaching. Yet, assessments instead primarily focus on formal language knowledge in isolation (e.g., grammar rules), disconnected from real-world communicative contexts. This misalignment between assessment practices and communicative objectives hampers effective FL teaching. CBA toolbox The aim of this design-based PhD research project is to gather insight into the potential of assessments to steer FL teaching practices. To this end, tools for developing communicative classroom-based assessment (CBA) programmes were designed and implemented in practice, in close collaboration with FL teachers. Rouffet's dissertation consists of multiple studies, in which the current challenges of FL education are addressed and the usage of the CBA toolbox is investigated. Findings reveal that assessing FL competencies in a more communicative way can transform teaching practices, placing communicative abilities at the heart of FL education.
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Situated learning plays a key role in internships and other practice-based learning settings in teacher education. The dominant assumption for a long time has been that the development of teaching competency is advanced most through practical teaching experience and post-lesson conferences between mentor and student teachers. It is through the reflection of teaching and classroom processes that student teachers are believed to develop their professional knowledge. The assistance of such reflection draws on mentor teachers’ teaching expertise. Mentor teachers, however, rarely explicate practical and theory-based knowledge underlying their practice and student teachers are not inclined to search for their mentor teacher’s underlying knowledge. As a consequence, the knowledge underlying effective teaching often remains implicit. The symposium brings together three novel approaches to assist teacher learning, which aim to make knowledge of teaching explicit. To bridge the gap between mentor and student teachers’ instructional concepts, the method of videobased tagging as a pre-requisite to initiate and structure professional dialogue is suggested and researched by van den Bogert, Crasborn, Bruggen and Eindhoven in The Netherlands. The second study by Staub, Waldis, Schatzmann and Futter investigates effects of an intervention with mentor teachers in Switzerland, suggesting the enactment of pre-lesson conferences and/or the use of a core concepts for lesson planning and reflection. A third study involving Germany and Switzerland by Kreis, Schnebel, Wyss, Wagner and Deiringer researches student teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and experiences related to collaborative lesson planning with peers. The shared assumption is that all three approaches enhance explicit communication on teaching and encourage professional dialogues that contribute to teacher learning in significant ways. Eliciting mentor and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge using teacher-tagged classroom situations Bogert van den, Crasborn, Bruggen van & Jochems) Objectives The present study has a twofold objective. First, elicitation of mentor and pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of videotaped classroom situations to clarify similarities and differences between practical knowledge of experienced and novice teachers. Second, exploration of ‘collaborative tagging’ as a new method to access mentors and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. Theoretical framework Teachers’ practical knowledge underlies overt teaching behavior, and is personal, unique, often tacit, and intertwined with teaching actions (Meijer, Verloop, & Beijaard, 2002). The ability to notice and interpret what is happening in a classroom is a basic aspect of teachers’ practical knowledge (Goodwin, 1994). Experienced teachers are more proficient in this essential perceptional process than novice teachers (Berliner, 2001; Sabers, Cushing, & Berliner, 1991). Consequently, proficient teachers may facilitate the professional development of novices. However, mentor teachers rarely explicate practical knowledge underlying their teaching practice (Edwards & Protheroe, 2004), and most pre-service teachers are not inclined to search for their mentor teacher’s practical knowledge (Penny, Harley, & Jessop, 1996). Hence, in this study we explored ‘collaborative tagging’ (Mika, 2005): a method where many people independently attach keywords called tags to e.g. videos, for categorization and fast future retrieval. Collaborative tagging has gained popularity since 2004 (Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005), indicating the willingness and ease with which this activity is undertaken. In other studies (Cattuto, Benz, Hotho, & Stumme, 2008; Mika, 2005) network analysis of the co-occurrence of tags revealed the semantic relationships between the tags; a bottom-up taxonomy, or a so called folksonomy (Vander Wal, 2004). In this study, collaborative tagging was applied to explore the structure of teachers’ knowledge and compare conscious aspects of mentor and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. The main research questions were: • Which concepts do mentor- and pre-service teachers use to tag videotaped classroom situations? • To what extent do the generated tags and the relations between them differ between mentor- and pre-service teachers? • To what extent is collaborative tagging is helpful in gaining access to conscious aspects of mentors and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge? Method Participants were 100 mentor-teachers and 100 pre-service teachers. The participants each ‘tagged” five video-fragments of different classroom situations. Data were analyzed with UCINET software as proposed by Mika (2005). Co-occurrences of tags were computed. Familiar measures of social network analysis (e.g. clustering coefficients, and (local) betweenness centrality) were used to describe each folksonomy, and to compare pre-service and mentor teachers’ networks of tags. Results and significance The study established that tagging is a promising new method to elicit teachers’ practical knowledge. The resulting folksonomies clarified similarities and differences between mentors’ and pre-service teachers’ practical knowledge. Results indicate that experienced teachers use more detailed and specific tags than pre-service teachers. This method makes a significant contribution to the methodology of the study of teachers’ practical knowledge. Folksonomies not only elicit individual teachers’ practical knowledge but enable researchers to discern common element’s in teachers’ practical knowledge. Moreover, in teacher education, folksonomies are helpful to initiate and structure professional dialogue between pre-service and mentor teachers.
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