'Teaching through dialogue' approach - five principles

Professor Robin Alexander, from the University of Cambridge, has campaigned to make oracy not just up there alongside reading and writing in primary classrooms, but the driving force behind effective, confident and precise communication.

He offers five main principles for teaching through dialogue which have formed the cornerstone of two major initiatives he set up in 2002 with primary schools in North Yorkshire LEA, and more recently with primary and secondary schools in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham.

According to the five principles, talk in the classroom should be:
1. Collective - teachers and children address learning tasks together, whether as a group or as a class.
The children learn to:

• become more confident in social situations
• express their thoughts and views in public
• take part in extended exchanges between teacher and child or child and child
• sort out their ideas and firm up concepts

2. Reciprocal - teachers and children listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints. The children learn to:

• share and consider each other's, and alternative, points of view
• take part in sustained interactions
• abide by ground rules for listening to each other without interruption
• look at, and concentrate on, the speaker

3. Cumulative - teachers and children build on their own and each other's ideas and chain them in to coherent lines of thinking and enquiry. The children learn to:

• promote and extend classroom dialogue
• demonstrate competence in thinking and oracy skills
• help each other to develop new ideas

4. Supportive - children articulate their ideas freely, without fear over 'wrong' answers, and help each other to reach common understandings. The children learn to:

• think through and consider their answers and exchanges
• exploit all answers and learn from their mistakes
• overcome feelings of embarrassment or inhibition

5. Purposeful - teachers are clear about learning objectives. Teachers: plan and steer classroom talk with specific educational goals in view.

(Junior Education, January 2004)