Glassner, A., Cohen (Sayag), E., Nathan, N., & Vardi-Rath, E.

Kaye Academic College of Education, Israel

The 35th ATEE ConferenceBudapest, 26 August, 2010

• “Classroom discourse refers to any and to all verbal interchanges.”

• “Discussion – Based Teaching involves the systemic use of discussion to accomplish

curricular objectives.” (Henning, 2008)

• In Israel there are no extensive acts or programs

attending to promote student teachers skills in

discussion-based teaching.

• “Teachers rarely give systematic instruction on how to

conduct a discussion” (Henning, 2008, p. 4)

IRE - Initiation, Response and Evaluation

(Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975)

Teacher: What kind of ships do the Vikings used?

Students: Longboats

Teacher: Well done

Instead – IDRE :

Initiation – Discussion - Response - Evaluation (Wegerif, 2002)

What kind of discussion pattern is common

among teachers?

1. Discussion will promote higher levels of

reasoning (Beck and MeKeown, 2009)

2. Knowledge construction occurs by dialogue

3. Deep comprehension can be achieved by

discussion with others

(Chi et al., 2001; Lund, 2004; Wegerif, 2002)

• Can we promote experienced and

inexperienced teachers' skills to conduct class

discussion?

• What will be the nature of the changes as a result

of the participation in one academic course?

The course teaching model 1 .Modeling and analyzing

three types of discourse objectives

2. Experiencing Discussions with colleagues during the course

T2- Enquiry of knowledge fromtexts convergent discussion

T1-Presenting andexpansion of Knowledge

divergent discussion

T3- ArgumentationsAnd Justification of

acts and ideas

critical thinking

3. Learning to document and analyze classroom

discourse and its navigation

Two yearly courses 2008-2010 using action research.

Research Tools:

• Drawing a concept map and writing an explanation to the concept of a good classroom discussion.

• Documentation of two (pre & post) discussions with a small group (5-6 pupils; 15 min). The discussions were conducted by each student.

Method

25 students with pre & post documented discussions:

• 12 experienced teachers and 13 inexperienced teachers

• 17 FL Hebrew speaker and 8 SL Hebrew

speaker (Arabs Bedouin)

1. IN - Initiation of

teacher talk 2. FE - Giving feedback 3. TT - Turn Taking 4. TQ – Teachers’

questions

5. PR - Postponement of

teachers' reactions

6. CM/ RM - Focus on class rules or content

7. MM - Meta-pragmatics

comments

Analyzed by: CHILDES by the CLAN computer based and SPSS analysis program.

Questions in classroom

discussions:

1. Teachers today ask between 300-400 questions each day (Leven and Long, 1981).

2. Teachers spend most of their time asking low-level cognitive

questions (Wilen, 1991).

3. Asking high level questions does not guarantee high level

answers, but low level questions ensure to elicit low level

responses (Henning, 2008, p. 43)

What do we know about questioning during classroom instruction?

1. Questioning helps teachers to keep their students actively involved.

2. Questioning students gives them an opportunity to openly express

ideas and thoughts.

3. Questioning students enables other students to hear a different point of

view.

4. Asking questions helps teachers pace their lessons.

5. Questioning students helps teachers evaluate student learning.

(Morgan and Saxton, 1991)

Questions could be “both engines and outcomes of learning”

(Ritchhart,Tishman, and Perkins 2000).

• Encourage creative thinking

What will be your own ending to this story?

• Direct students to analyze and synthesize knowledge

What are the main ideas of the story?

• Ask for expanding knowledge

What is your associations to the title of the story?

• Encourage critical thinking

What is your own opinion about the conflict in the story?

Why do you think so?

• Ask students to reshape their point of view

Could you say it was a moral act? Why?

How do teachers navigate the discussion?

The categories of the questions we found and used for coding :

Planned

The question is part of the lesson planning scenario

How can we keep our water?

Response

The question is given as a response to pupils utterances

What do you mean? How do you know it?

(Nystrand, 2003)

Open

A question that does not have one definite answer, but actually several answers different from and even contradictory to each other (Harpaz, 2006)

Close

The answer suggested one true answer. such as yes/no

Test Question

Intent to test or identify the knowledge of the pupils. The teacher knows the answer to the question.

What is the name of such process?

Technical Question

such as: “what did you say?"

Real

The teacher really doesn’t know the answers.

What do you think about this?

Increase of :

Number of questions ;

Number of real questions;

Number of open questions

Number of response questions

What changes do we expected at the post

discussion?

Quantitative Findings•A significant difference was found in the quantity of the

open questions. (t(1, 20)=2.13;p=.045)

•The teachers asked more open questions at the post discussion- (M= 34; SD=24) than at the pre discussion- (M=24; SD=13.5).

•Same tendencies was found for real questions and for response questions (not significant effects- high SD in the post)

Significant difference was found between planned questions and response questions in pre discussions [t(1,17)=2.15; p=.046]

Planned- M= 20.6; SD=11.2Response-M=14.2; SD=6.2PLANNED>RESPONSE

No significant difference was found in the post discussions

Planned- M=25.5; SD=20.1Response- M=24.4; SD=25.9PLANNED~RESPONSE

No correlation was found between real question and response question at the pre discussion (r=0.05; p= 0.83)

Significant correlation was found at the post discussions (r= 0.71; p=0.00)

CORRELATION BETWEEN REAL QUESTIONS AND RESPONSE QUESTIONS

Pre Post

Opening questions:Opening questions:

1. Who has any idea what drought is?

1. Who knows what organic fertilizer is?2. What does it remind you of?

2. What does it remind you of?3. What words are connected to it?

4. When you say drought year what do mean?

The Discussion: aiming to understand the differences between two kinds of garbage.

The Discussion: aiming to understand the problem of water shortage and the solutions for it.

1. From what garbage can we make organic fertilizer?- (asking for recall of knowledge)

1.What if, What will happen without water? (asking for “what if” question)

2. Where can we find organic fertilizer?

(asking for recall of knowledge)

2.Why is it important?- (asking for understanding of the problem)

3. What more can you say about the different kinds of garbage? (asking for recall of knowledge and analyzing it)

3. How can we save water?- (asking for creative ideas)

4. How can we keep our water? (asking for creative ideas)

5. What is the difference between sea water and drinking water? (asking for analyzing knowledge)

6. What kind of water do we have in the sea? (asking for recall of knowledge)

Case study

What do we have?A. students teachers were encouraged to change the patterns

of their questions asking during the navigation of discussion - based teaching.

B. Following the course, some of the participants Increased the relative number of their open questions and the relative number of their response questions.

C. Still we expected the teachers to produce more real and response questions.

What should we do? (future perspective):

•To invite more intensive practice

•To increase the sample

•To design the coding criteria we used in the study in order to construct more holistic model

• To design new creative activities

•To teach the teachers how to encourage their pupils to ask good questions •http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5thpdEEE-DE