ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 goes in search of ‘ingredient x’, or the particular property or properties of dialogic pedagogy that exert the greatest leverage on students’ thinking, learning and understanding. From the research evidence we initially identify generic outcomes of a clearly enabling kind: cross-curriculum transfer; metacognitive capacities; teachers’ more positive views of students and students’ more positive views of themselves; and the growing confidence by all parties that comes from acquiring ownership of what is said. Thus far, ‘ingredient x’ comprises what are probably the minimal requirements for a mutually respectful, lively and productive classroom culture. But we then find, from two recent large-scale projects, evidence of a more precise kind that those talk moves which probe and test students’ utterances and encourage them to elaborate their ideas have particular potency, and that in all classroom exchanges a great deal hangs on the way the third turn is managed: it may open cognitive doors or, as in classic IRE/IRF, it may close them, and this evidence empirically supports Bakhtin’s dialogic maxim about the need for answers always to give rise to new questions. We then step back from evidence generated by the dialogic community itself and find in Hattie’s synthesis of 800 research meta-analyses across the entire field of educational research reassuring confirmation that we are on the right track; but also suggestions that the dialogic ideal of reciprocity may need to be taken further than some dialogists realise.
