On the Way to Dialogic Teaching: Action Research as a Means to Change Classroom Discourse

Abstract

In this study, we present an action research project studying classroom discourse that took place at the Department of Educational Sciences at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, in Brno, the Czech Republic. The core of this project consisted of a development programme for teachers focused on a change in communication methods in dialogic teaching. We observed four teachers who took part in the programme in 2013/2014. Our goal was to determine how much the participation in the programme led to an actual change in teacher-student communication in the classroom. The data analysis showed that the participating teachers did actually change their communication methods - there was an increase in the average levels of openness, cognitive demand, length of student replies, and the number of cases when students themselves initiated communication. The data analysis also showed that the process of change is unique for each teacher and there is no unified trajectory.