ABSTRACT
Ideally a teacher’s role in an episode was to respond and tune in to a pupil’s current focus of interest and level of understanding, and to support and extend this by expert scaffolding. Modelling by teachers is a powerful and effective influence on their pupils, particularly where the classroom ethos is warm. Pupils’ extreme sensitivity and feelings of inadequacy when they were not successfully coping with their classroom activities were very apparent. The most essential element of classroom interaction, the teacher’s awareness of a pupil’s understanding and misconceptions, ‘creating a window into the child’s mind’ was found by N. Bennett to be deficient. Perhaps most important of all are the expectations and attitudes of both the teacher and their pupils, in any classroom. The episodes in which pupils made intellectual progress were those in which teachers were responsive, explicit and worked with pupils to encourage reflection.
