New Pedagogies in Teaching and Learning

Substantive dialogue has long been deemed beneficial to students’ knowledge and cognition, but the actual classroom discourses are still dominated by teacher’s monologue which deprives students of their opportunity to participate in classroom dialogue. One of the reasons for the lack of classroom dialogue is that some teachers have difficulties in opening dialogue in spite of their attempts. Although many discourse strategies have been proposed to help teachers open dialogue and many teachers do use these strategies in their class, how and when a teacher uses these discourse strategies are a factor that separates effective teachers from ineffective teachers in engaging students in classroom dialogue (Mercer, 2001). Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of dialogism and the body of literature on dialogic instruction, the researcher aims to critically reflect on his actual use of discourse strategies to open classroom dialogue and to explore how and when these discourse strategies might be used for better effect. Specifically, the study examined fifteen English language lessons in a Chinese university and the duration of each lesson is 135 minutes. All the fifteen English language lessons were taught and recorded by the researcher himself, and all the lessons were transcribed verbatim. Based on these data, the study answered two research questions: (1) What types of discourse strategy have been used by the teacher/researcher to open classroom dialogue? (2) How might these discourse strategies be used more effectively in terms of the ways and timing? Through a systematic coding of the lesson transcripts, four main discourse strategies have been found among the teacher’s efforts to open classroom dialogue, that is, elicitation, scaffolding, extension and evaluation. By meticulously analyzing some episodes in which these discourse strategies have failed to produce a good effect, the study has proposed several ways to use these discourse strategies more effectively to open classroom dialogue, such as asking open questions, giving appropriate wait time, alternating nomination and volunteering as well as building students’ reciprocity..

The English language syllabus (Ministry of Education, 2008) outlines the teaching of writing in three stages – the generation and selection of ideas, development and organisation of ideas, and review, revision and editing. These processes are recurrent in the creation of texts. This study focuses on the first stage – generation and selection of ideas – as this is a crucial stage which determines the extent to which the next two stages can be effectively executed. In that, we investigate the effectiveness of Visible Thinking routines in enabling our Secondary Three Express students generate and select relevant ideas for expository writing. 
This study is an extension of a cluster schools’ project in 2016, where a team of teachers from five secondary schools identified the pre-writing stage as a common learning gap for our students. It was observed that students largely ignore this critical step due to factors of time and convenience. As a result, students struggle to present and elaborate on ideas in their essays that are significant and meet the demands of the question. In addition, as students pay cursory attention to the planning stage, their subsequent essays may not consider the links between ideas presented, and how ideas are perceived from other points of view.
Visible Thinking (VT) has been chosen as a facilitation tool that aids the process; firstly, for the teacher to engage and train students, and secondly, for students to internalise and hone the way they think “to the extent that students can develop a greater awareness of thinking processes, they become more independent learners capable of directing and managing their own cognitive actions" (Ritchhart et al, 2011). As this study focuses on the generation and selection of ideas, Visible Thinking routines do not just help to make students’ thinking visible, they correspondingly aid the teachers in ensuring student understanding and facilitating the crafting of points. This study proposes that students can also rely on these routines to brainstorm and “select relevantly from the ideas generated” (MOE, 2008).  

In line with the Singapore Mathematics Framework to develop mathematical reasoning, communication and connections (CPDD, 2013), this study explored the use of classroom conversations and teacher talk moves (Zwiers & Crawford, 2011; Chapin, O’Connor, & Anderson, 2009) to improve students’ conceptual understanding of Factors and Multiples. With the additional aims to increase motivation and help students link mathematical concepts to real life experiences, the study infused mathematical learning with baking in what was called The Culinary Math Project at Ahmad Ibrahim Primary School. Two Primary Four (low- and mid-progress) classes and two mathematics teachers participated in this action research study which adopted a pre- and post-intervention design to assess the progress of the students.
The first stage of the project aimed to develop an awareness of the concept of multiples by requiring students to work in groups to ascertain the number of pastries to make based on the number of group members and pastry pieces they each desired. Students then had to figure out how to divide the pastry sheet evenly, considering that each pastry needed two equal parts of dough. The second stage aimed to develop an understanding of the concept of factors. Using play-dough as a faux pastry sheet, students explored the number of rows and columns to cut. Finally on baking day, students made edible pieces to take home. In the pre-baking stages, teachers employed talk moves to guide, clarify and deepen student thinking. All student group interactions were supported by cognitive scaffolds and recorded using interactive whiteboard technology via the Educreations app. All lessons were video-recorded.
An analysis of the recordings revealed that all students actively engaged in group discussions, even the more introverted ones. The peer coaching and dialogic interaction helped students acquire new levels of understanding. The post-intervention results showed significant improvements in the students’ written answers.
How can classroom talk promote mathematical learning? The findings of this study suggest that the use of talk moves and dialogic interaction among students can promote reasoning and communication which help to build students’ conceptual understanding in Mathematics.