OER4Schools/Taster materials UNISA/Creating a supportive environment for dialogue
This clip shows Eness, a teacher in a community school near Lusaka interacting with a Grade 3 class. Watch the clip of her class discussion about Is a bat a bird?
VIDEO
Is a bat a bird?
Is a bat a bird?
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Whole group discussion (11 min).
- Was there a supportive environment for pupil participation and dialogue in this lesson? If so, how did the teacher achieve this?
- How did she help students to work out whether the boy and the whale were mammals? Did this discussion move their thinking forward?
- What did you think about teacher control and pupil learning in these video clips?
- How would you manage something similar in your classroom? How would you encourage pupil talk without losing too much control?
Issues to discuss
noisy but productive - A classroom can be noisy and productive at the same time
interactive = inter-action (with view to sense making; i.e. purpose of inter-action is to make sense)
children making sense of ideas for themselves, developing their own classifications, relating to what they already know...
teacher not telling answer, asking students to investigate for themselves
Did participants notice the “wait time” after asking a question before teacher made a further contribution or question? Increasing wait time a little increases thinking time.
Facilitator needs to know how to deal with criticisms (such as too noisy, too much chaos, not productive)
Traditional teaching places the teacher at the centre of the classroom, and gives them all the responsibility – they are expected to be the “source of all knowledge”.
Our approach aims to changes this view of teaching and learning, and places more emphasis on pupil peers as resources for learning together and from each other. This also means that the teacher does not do all the talking, and they are not expected to know the answers.
We realise that this is a difficult shift to make. However, it is actually possible in the Zambian context, as the videos in our materials show. Not only is it possible, but it can be more motivating for both teachers and learners.
