Classroom Dialogue and Learning

Dr Victoria Cook, Dr Louis Major, Dr Sara Hennessy with Farah Ahmed, Elisa Calcagni and other colleagues from the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research Group (CEDiR) | View as single page | Feedback/Impact

The Talk Audit

The first stage in developing a more dialogic approach to learning and teaching would be to consider the type of language that is already in use in your classroom. One way of doing this would be to undertake a ‘talk audit’. Produced by ‘The Inquiry Project’, the talk audit identifies four ‘goals’ for productive discussions and nine associated ‘talk moves’ in the form of a checklist. This enables teachers to examine how frequently such talk moves are used in their classroom.

https://inquiryproject.terc.edu/prof_dev/Goals_and_Moves.cfm.html

The talk goals and moves reflect the principles of dialogic teaching that are underpinned by effective questioning and feedback techniques. The Thinking Together research conducted in primary and secondary classrooms (Mercer and Dawes, 2007) has produced a similar type of audit (Dawes, 2010):

https://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/resources/Teacher_techniques_checklist.pdf

Reference

Dawes, L. (2010). Creating a Speaking and Listening Classroom. London: Routledge.

Mercer, N. and Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children's Thinking. London: Routledge