Substantive conversation
Does classroom talk lead to sustained conversational dialogue between students, and between teachers and students to create or negotiate understanding of subject matter?
In classes with substantive conversation there is considerable teacher-students and student-student interaction about the ideas of a substantive topic; the interaction is reciprocal, and it promotes coherent shared understanding. This element describes the extent of talking to learn and to understand in the classroom.
Features of substantive conversation include:
- INTELLECTUAL SUBSTANCE: The talk is about subject matter in the discipline and encourages critical reasoning such as making distinctions, applying ideas, forming generalizations, raising questions. It moves beyond just the recounting of experiences, facts, definitions, or procedures (e.g., technical language, analytical distinctions and categories being made, levels of differentiations between types and arguments stated, grounds for disagreement stated).
- DIALOGUE: The conversation involves sharing of ideas and is not completely scripted or controlled by one party (as in teacher-led recitation). Sharing is best illustrated when participants provide extended statements, direct their comments, questions and statements directly to others, redirect and select next speakers.
- LOGICAL EXTENSION AND SYNTHESIS: The dialogue builds coherently on participants' ideas to promote improved collective understanding of a theme or topic. In short, substantive conversation resembles the kind of sustained exploration of content characteristic of a good seminar where student contributions lead to shared understandings (e.g., teachers and students may make principled topic shifts, may use linking words, make explicit references to pervious comments, and may summarise).
- A SUSTAINED EXCHANGE extends beyond a routine IRE (initiate/response/evaluate). This can occur between teacher and students or student and student and involves several consecutive interchanges. Dialogue consists of a sustained and topically related series of linked exchanges between speakers.
In classes where there is little or no substantive conversation, teacher-student interaction typically consists of a lecture with recitation where the teacher deviates very little from delivering information and routine questions; students typically give very short answers. Discussion here may follow the typical IRE pattern: with low-level recall/fact-based questions, short utterance or single-word responses, and further simple questions and/or teacher evaluation statements (e.g., 'yes, good'). This is an extremely routine, teacher centred pattern, that amounts to a 'fill in the blank', or 'guess what's in the teacher's head' format.
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Virtually no features of substantive conversation occur during the lesson.
Lesson consists principally of either a sustained teacher monologue/lecture and/or a repeated IRE sequence with little variation, or conversation which is not substantive.
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Features B (dialogue) and/or C (logical extension and synthesis) occur and involve two or more sustained exchanges.
- All features of substantive conversation occur in an ongoing and sustained fashion, extending across almost all of the lesson, with both teachers and students scaffolding the conversation.
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A year 8 integrated Maths and Science class was divided into groups. Each group spent a period building animals to certain design specifications. The animals were given names by the students. Discussion was then held about classification systems of the animals. The teacher then distributed a classification system that he had created.
In groups of four the students then moved from table to table where the 15 animals were set up and had discussions about the animals. On a sheet they classified the animals according to the system the teacher had given them. When all the animals had been classified by all groups, the teacher held a whole-group discussion of the classification by each group of each animal. Interesting discussions ensued in respect of different classifications by some of the groups of the same animal.
This discussion covered issues of measurement, including very sophisticated discussion about exactitude, angle of viewing the animals, injured animals, error in measurement generally and its sources and so on. In most instances within these conversations students were initiating the dialogue and other students were providing the frameworks upon which the groups were constructing their collective understandings of the topic.
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