Welcome Back!
While we’ve been away, we have refined our research question. We will now be focusing on the question:
How can we use classroom talk to foster an inviting classroom culture?
For our first article annotation we choose “MODEL2TALK: An Intervention to Promote Productive Classroom Talk”.
Chiel van der Veen, Femke van der Wilt (doctoral candidates of education at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam), and their colleagues from the Netherlands and the United States conducted research about talk in the classroom that is supportive of students’ learning and thinking. The intervention used is referred to as the MODEL2TALK intervention. This is described as a form of dialogic instruction, which is intended to support productive classroom talk. After asking the teachers to lead the same discussions (about animals) all groups were filmed in discussion for the first and last times these discussions were held. The average age group that represented the student portion of the study was around five years old. There were 469 students and 21 teachers involved in the study. The researchers analyzed the 21 teachers and their classrooms during class discussion using a “pretest-intervention-posttest” model of data collection. Students were then tested for conversational skills and communicative function.
They found that the MODEL2TALK intervention drastically improves students’ communication and promotes a culture that helps students to think and communicate together. These skills are essential in supporting students’ oral communication skills in different sociocultural contexts as well as developing an inviting classroom culture. The MODEL2TALK intervention is based on having Productive Classroom Talk, a form of dialogic talk, which helps students to find a voice for their thoughts, to build off their peers’ thoughts, to deepen their reasoning skills, and to reflect on how they communicate. This kind of talk supports students’ academic learning and thinking. They encourage teachers to start by picking a topic that the students’ like and will engage with. And during the conversation, the teacher uses talk moves to help draw out students’ thoughts and ideas. They also found that the intervention didn’t have any effect on subject matter knowledge, but was significantly related to their level of social acceptance.
There are some limitations found during this intervention. The data collected is from 21 different teachers and their students. Since this implies that only 21 classrooms were involved in the study, not every classroom situation possible can be simulated through this pool of data. Students were encouraged to share their ideas, reasoning, and thoughts together. As a consequence, they often came up with unexpected ideas and interesting questions that were beyond the scope of the teacher’s manual and our subject matter knowledge test. Some useful features from this intervention are that teachers found the productive talk moves to be helpful tools in supporting students’ shared thinking and communicating. In a relatively short intervention period, teachers are able to use these talk moves in their classroom discussions. This emphasizes how a classroom can and should have social acceptance because of how valuable it is to listen to different ideas and perspectives. Their ability to listen, and communicate ideas, impacts their social acceptance from others and their social acceptance of others.
van der Veen, C., van der Wilt, F., van Kruistum, C., van Oers, B., & Michaels, S. (2017).
MODEL2TALK: An intervention to promote productive classroom talk. Reading
Teacher, 70(6), 689–700. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1573
Let's Talk About Talk 