Abstract
ABSTRACTThis study examines teachers’ instructional practices during seatwork in primary Norwegian Language arts classrooms. Although seatwork is a common activity in classrooms, our knowledge about what teachers actually do during this activity is limited. In this qualitative study, six teachers in third grade primary school were videotaped while pupils worked individually. The study gives examples from writing instruction. An analytical framework was developed based on existing research and used for coding of the video data. The analyses reveal that the participating teachers utilised their time during seatwork very differently. Two of the six teachers spent a majority of the time on instructional support (for instance challenging pupils’ thinking), while the other four spent the majority of the time on organizational support (for instance practical help) or monitoring (for instance listening to pupil read). Emotional support was almost non-existent in these classrooms. Teachers’ use of challenging versus telling as a way of supporting pupils is a key difference among the observed teachers.
Highlights
Seatwork, defined as pupils working alone on an assigned task (Stright & Supplee, 2002), is a common activity in classrooms around the world (Alexander, 2001; O’Keefe, Xu, & Clarke, 2006)
This study examines teachers’ instructional practices during seatwork in primary Norwegian Language arts classrooms
Seatwork is a common activity in classrooms, our knowledge about what teachers do during this activity is limited
Summary
Seatwork, defined as pupils working alone on an assigned task (Stright & Supplee, 2002), is a common activity in classrooms around the world (Alexander, 2001; O’Keefe, Xu, & Clarke, 2006). While monitoring and teacher support during seatwork is a frequent activity in primary classrooms (Alexander, 2001; Klette, 2003), it is often described as ‘the invisible teaching method’ Scaffolding as an approach to teaching was introduced by Wood, Bruner and Ross in the late 1970s (1976). They defined scaffolding as support ‘that enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts’ A key challenge of such interaction is how involved or how distant the teacher should be in these conversations and the degree of direct and explicit instruction versus the degree of facilitation
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