Widening access to educational opportunities through teaching children how to reason together

Abstract

This paper reports on a project to explore the impact of promoting exploratory talk as the medium of teaching across the curriculum for 6‐ and 7‐year‐old pupils in three primary schools in the UK. We found that this focus on teaching through exploratory talk (which we call the Thinking Together approach) enabled the children to work together more inclusively and more effectively, improving their social skills and, at the same time, their use of language for reasoning and learning.