Creating an articulate classroom: examining pre-service teachers’ experiences of talk

Abstract

This paper examines the continuing ‘issue’ of developing classrooms where talk is used as means of building concepts and understanding. As curriculum guidance increasingly refers to ‘exploratory talk’ and ‘dialogic talk’, it questions why practice seems resistant to change, despite the promotion of social constructivist approaches to learning in university. Research has suggested that at the heart of the matter are the ‘inflexible’ values and beliefs that primary postgraduate trainees bring to initial teacher training programmes and a tendency to default to observed practice. Drawing on data from the first phase of a small-scale study of one cohort of 75 trainees, the paper suggests that the difficulty some students experience in engaging in exploratory dialogue, and promoting it in the classroom, is not wholly driven by these factors. It argues that we also need to consider the tension between negative memories of classrooms characterised by ‘all listening and no communication’, which is the resultant legacy of low self-confidence in answering and raising questions, and the emergent understanding that there might be a better way to give children a voice. Students suffering from such cognitive dissonance are unlikely to develop sufficient confidence to create articulate classrooms.