Developing dialogic practices in vocational schools
The project aims at designing, implementing and evaluating training proposals suitable for developing the expertise of vocational school teachers in educational dialogue. Core of the project is a toolkit for teachers (T-SEDA), which builds on decades of research originated in the UK and disseminated in several countries across the world.
The quality of teacher-pupil relationships and the effectiveness of instruction are closely related to the quality of discursive interactions taking place in the classroom, both between pupils and teachers, and among peers. The need for creating dialogic spaces, promoting argumentation and making reasoning visible through talk seems to be easily recognized by all those involved in vocational training. However, day-by-day classroom experience highlights how difficult it is to achieve this in practice, in a meaningful, task-oriented and sustained manner.
To that end, teachers need to engage in a systematic work, foreseeing both an analysis of their usual practices and a guidance to develop them.
Referring to the Toolkit for Systematic Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA), the project intends to develop training proposals for vocational school teachers aimed at developing their competence in the area of classroom dialogue.
T-SEDA has been developed by the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research group (CEDiR) on the basis of decades of scientific research on dialogic education, aimed at developing models and tools to support teachers in their practices.
Drawing on this tradition and in dialogue with T-SEDA scholars Prof. Sara Hennessy and Ruth Kershner, project manager Chiara Piccini will conduct a Design Based Research to identify, test and evaluate viable and functional interventions for Swiss vocational school contexts.
Following a Design Based Research (DBR) approach, teaching trials are conducted and at the same time evaluated, in order to progressively develop the training offer.
Trials evaluation devices include logbooks, interviews and dialogue coding tools. They collect and allow to analyze four types of qualitative data:
- Factual observation of changes in teacher’s practice
- Teachers’ subjective perception of learnings gained about dialogic teaching
- Teachers’ opinions about course structure, selected materials and proposed activities
- Project manager’s observation and interpretation of difficulties, occurring during trials.