Quality in Educational Dialogue: Investigating dialogic practices in Nordic Classrooms

Teaching inherently involves an intention to foster learning, meaning that every teaching activity has an underlying purpose, whether consciously recognized by the teacher or not. This intentionality clashes with the emancipatory ambitions of dialogic teaching. The tension emerging in practice when teachers are faced with the dilemma of pursuing multiple conflicting purposes, becomes apparent in the educational context of current Scandinavian schools. It does so, because the Scandinavian educational system is permeated by non-affirmative Bildung-related values and ideals, and at the same time assessment of teaching quality based on research on effective teaching is gaining attention these years. It is therefore not surprising, that a recurrent finding is that teachers struggle with implementing dialogic practices into their classrooms and instead maintain an authoritative approach and teach through a traditional teacher-controlled conversation structure. This finding is substantiated by the analyses of this thesis.

With a foundation in the traditions of didactics and non-affirmative Bildung theory, this thesis explores how the dialogic quality of classroom conversations in Scandinavian schools can be investigated through observational methods. By identifying pat-terns in challenges and pitfalls regarding the achievement of high dialogic quality, the results from the analyses of the articles in this thesis provide suggestions on how to enhance the quality of dialogues in Scandinavian classrooms.

Throughout the four articles which are included in this thesis, three methods for analyzing central aspects of dialogic quality are developed and applied in two conversational contexts: Lower secondary school whole-class conversations and upper secondary school students’ group conversations. Acknowledging the inherent tension in practicing dialogic teaching, these investigations identify challenges and missed opportunities influencing the dialogic quality of both kinds of conversations. The methods developed can be used to map where specifically the opportunity for dialogue is missed and why. Insights regarding which aspects of dialogue are continuously absent, are valuable for future re-search, professional development programs and teacher education.

Answering a call from previous research for developing new ways of analyzing questioning in relation to dialogic teaching, Article 1 investigates what characterizes teacher and student questioning patterns in whole-class conversations in Danish and Norwegian lower secondary classrooms and how they contribute to or impede the realization of dialogic teaching ideals. It does so by use of a reflexive thematic analysis, mapping how teacher and student questions promote and impede common dialogic inquiry among the students. The questioning patterns in 48 whole-class conversations lasting approximately 15 minutes each, were analyzed through video observations. The article finds that the context in which a question is asked, is crucial for the question’s function in terms of either opening up or closing down the opportunity for common student inquiry.

Article 2 examines the dialogic quality of 19 of the videotaped whole-class con-versations from Article 1, by investigating what characterizes the dialogic quality of these teacher facilitated whole-class conversations with a high degree of grammatically open-ended questions and student engagement. The article presents the application of a novel coding scheme. The coding scheme consists of 24 questions developed by operationalizing Alexander’s six principles of dialogic teaching. According to these dialogic teaching is: Collaborative, supportive, reciprocal, deliberative, cumulative and purposeful. The analysis shows that in general the two principles of support and reciprocity were followed except for the aspect of student questioning, which was very scarce. All the conversations were mediated through the teachers, thus not being strong on student collaboration. The principles of cumulation and deliberation were only consistently present in two of the 19 conversations. The principle of purpose was difficult to observe. The article concludes that throughout the conversations there were a high frequency of missed opportunities for cumulation and deliberation.

Article 3 was written together with professor Ane Qvortrup who supervised this PhD project, and it employs the same coding scheme as Article 2 in another educational conversational context. The coding scheme was used to analyse 32 upper secondary school students’ (n = 128) online group conversations about sustainability. The article investigates what characterizes Danish mercantile upper secondary school students’ con-versations about sustainability issues and assesses the students’ ability to engage in dialogic inquiries without the presence of a teacher. The group conversations were supported by an interview guide developed inspired by dialogic teaching questioning strategies. The article finds that the students share relevant ideas but lack abilities to establish common understandings of central concepts.

Article 4 was written together with associate professor Esben Nedenskov Petersen, and it proposes a definition of thematic coherence and a novel approach for analyzing it in classroom conversations. Addressing the ethical imperative that dialogic teaching must be effective the approach allows for systematic and thorough mapping and assessment of the presence of a key characteristic of dialogic teaching, that the students and the teacher inquire the same overall question. This characteristic is common across a broad range of approaches to dialogic teaching and a necessary condition for the achievement of the dialogic principle of cumulation. As it proved difficult to intuitively assess if students actually did build on each other’s thinking, the Question Centered Approach was developed. The article thus contributes to the overall project by providing a method for assessing when and where coherence as an aspect of cumulation succeeds or collapses, thus contributing to diminishing one of the pitfalls of dialogic teaching identified in the first three articles of the thesis, which is central to strengthening the quality of educational dialogue.

The thesis as a whole examines dialogic quality grounded in a qualitative observational approach to the investigation of dialogic quality in educational practices. Analyzing relatively large data sets, the analytical approaches I used allowed for the investigation of patterns of challenges and pitfalls across the samples of special cases which all have great conditions for dialogue to emerge.