ABSTRACT
According to the current conventional wisdom, classroom dialogue that involves students jointly constructing knowledge, exchanging ideas, advancing arguments and critiquing one another’s thinking is good for their learning and cognitive development. This conventional wisdom is reflected in practical teaching strategies that form an “emerging pedagogy of the spoken word … that exploits the power of talk to engage and shape children’s thinking and learning, and to secure and enhance their understanding” (Alexander, 2008, p. 92). Resnick, Asterhan and Clarke (2015) describe the features of such academically productive classroom talk as follows:
This kind of talk begins with students thinking out loud about a domain concept: noticing something about a problem, puzzling through a surprising finding, or articulating, explaining, and reflecting upon their own reasoning. Students do not simply report facts they already know for the teacher to evaluate. Instead, with teacher guidance, they make public their half-formed ideas, questions, and nascent explanations. Other students take up their classmates’ statements: challenging or clarifying a claim, adding their own questions, reasoning about a proposed solution, or offering a counter claim or an alternate explanation … The key component is the learning power generated by two or more minds working on the same problem together.
(pp. 3–4)