Classroom practice - Speak easy: learning through discussion

Teachers can feel as if they spend half their time telling students to quieten down, but there are reasons why it’s good to talk

20th September 2013, 1:00am

Clare Jarmy

In the classroom, talking is rarely seen as a key skill. Teachers’ time can be so much taken up with managing chatty misbehaviour that talking is usually associated with a lack of work. When discussion does take place, it rarely stands alone, often being followed by “more important” written work. Assessed pieces of work are usually written, too, and even when there is an oral component, written components invariably have greater weight. As a result, discussion can be seen by students as a free-for-all - fun, but not “real work”.

Yet discussion has a lot to offer. According to Robin Alexander in his book Towards Dialogic Teaching: rethinking classroom talk, it gives students “communicative rights”: they are regarded as having something to contribute to a lesson, rather than being mere receivers of knowledge. It also creates an environment of constructive feedback in which tough questions are posed, forcing students to learn to tackle issues on their feet and to articulate them orally. Oracy and autonomy go together; dialogue presupposes that students can think through challenging questions and formulate plausible solutions.

Doubtless, there are examples of bad discussion work. Alexander, responsible for much recent research on dialogue, distinguishes between loose classroom discussion and structured dialogic teaching; if students are simply saying what they think, no dialogue is taking place. Bad discussion allows students to think that any opinion is valid, whether or not it is plausible, and fails to use the views expressed to build towards something.

Good discussion, on the other hand, is a collaborative effort to reach a conclusion. It is, therefore, productive. It involves students responding to the views of others and evaluating them, and is intellectually stimulating and rigorous. Effective discussion is not an airing of views, it is a speaking and listening exercise that can be a dialogue between two students, a teacher and a student, or a group of students.

It’s useful to point out that Socrates, such an important figure in the West, wrote nothing. He was not concerned with publishing or posterity; he was interested in dialogic teaching in the here and now. He spent most of his time in the marketplace, talking with young Athenians. Socrates would have thought it strange to espouse a thesis and write about it; stranger still to propound his ideas to others. He was not a philosopher with a view: he sought truth through talk.

Socrates would start with a question such as: what is knowledge? Suggestions would follow, many of which would be flawed and some of which would need rethinking. He and his companions would hack away at all the solutions, chipping off anything illogical or counter to the evidence until what was left was an answer that seemed to them incontrovertible.

Community of enquiry

Matthew Lipman, author of Thinking in Education, gave up a professorial chair in philosophy in order to take the teaching methods of Socrates into the classroom. He perceived that teachers have a tendency to introduce students to the “products” of enquiry, presenting a body of knowledge that students have to learn, rather than allowing them to develop their own skills of enquiry.

Lipman formulated the idea of a “community” of enquiry as a structure for discussion to be incorporated into the classroom. The structure works as follows:

Introduce stimulus: this could be a picture, a video or something to read.
Set up small groups: students work together to identify questions for discussion prompted by the stimulus.
Address questions: the class as a whole discuss the questions raised, responding to one another’s points.
Reach a conclusion: the process of discussion should lead to some kind of conclusion, however tentative.