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
Whole class discussion
Whole class discussion of ‘Is a bat a bird?' Teacher sets unresolved problem as homework
Video/Eness vertebrates 12.mp4, https://oer.opendeved.net/wiki/Video/Eness_vertebrates_12.mp4,This video is available on your memory stick in the video/Eness Vertebrates folder. Duration: 4:19 watch on YouTube, local play / download options / download from dropbox)(Series: Eness Vertebrates, episode 12)(Transcript available here or via YouTube captions.)
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 pupils to work out whether the bat was a mammal? Did this discussion move their thinking forward?
- What did you think about teacher control and pupil learning in this video clip?
- How would you manage something similar in your classroom? How would you encourage pupil talk without losing too much control?
Issues to discuss
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 when pupils were uncertain. She asked them to investigate for themselves, for homework.
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): quiet does not mean full participation.
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 all the answers.
We realise that this is a difficult shift to make. However, it is actually possible in the African context, as the videos in our materials show. Not only is it possible, but it can be more motivating for both teachers and learners.
