Research on Dialogic Instruction

DIALOGIC INSTRUCTION is premised on a view of instruction not as what teachers provide or do to students but rather as what teachers and students collaboratively negotiate. High quality classroom discourse is characterized by substantive reciprocity between teachers and their students. In such instruction, students and not just teachers have a lot of input into the business of the classroom and hence what is learned. Our companion computer program, CLASS, provides a number of measures designed to assess the quality of interaction between teachers and their students.

In other words, dialogic instruction is talking to learn, in the words of James Britton, "A struggle to organize . . . thoughts and feelings, to come up with words that . . . shape an understanding." According to Martin Nystrand, dialogic instruction is "about figuring things out—in class, face-to-face, teacher and students together" (Martin Nystrand, Opening Dialogue, p. 2)

In dialogically organized instruction, teachers engage their students in probing and substantive interactions, and the talk is more like conversation or discussion than recitation (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991a, 1991b). In these classrooms, teachers validate particular student ideas by incorporating their responses into subsequent questions, a process Collins (1982) calls "uptake." In the give and take of such talk, student responses and not just teacher questions shape the course of talk. The discourse in these classrooms is therefore less predictable and repeatable because it is "negotiated" and jointly determined—in character, scope, and direction—by both teachers and students as teachers pick up on, elaborate, and question what students say (Nystrand, 1990a, 1991a). Such interactions are often characterized by "authentic" questions, which are questions asked to get information, not to see what students know and don't know; i.e., authentic questions are questions without "prespecified" answers (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991a). These questions convey the teacher's interest in students' opinions and thoughts. Hence, in contrast to the "test questions" of recitation, they indicate the priority the teacher places on thinking and not just remembering. These "instructional conversations," as Tharp & Gallimore (1988) call them, or "substantive conversations," as Newmann (1991) calls them, engage students because they validate the importance of students' contributions to learning and instruction. The purpose of such instruction is not so much the transmission of information as the interpretation and collaborative co-construction of understandings. In this kind of classroom talk, teachers take their students seriously (Gamoran & Nystrand, 1992).

Our project builds on 20 years of research by Martin Nystrand in collaboration with former WCER Director and sociology professor Adam Gamoran examining the role played by classroom discourse in student achievement in reading and literature. We know from this work that student learning is nurtured by open-ended discussion, open-ended teacher questions, and follow up teacher questions. Indeed our work was the first large-scale empirical study to show that open-ended discussion actually improves student learning in English.

This work is known in the literature as dialogic pedagogy with foundations in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Voloshivov. Nystrand's own foundational research will be found in The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity Between writers and Readers (Academic Press, 1986) and Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom (Teachers College Press, 1997; and now being translated into Korean). 

Our method of analysis is multiple regression where the dependent variable is growth in achievement. Because measures of achievement are affected by more than test performance, especially including background and sociological and demographic variables such as initial achievement, race, and ethnicity, we collect these data to improve the precision of our measures. Our multiple regressions proceed testing our various measures in batches. We begin by running analyses of the effects of the sociological and demographic variables, which typically find negative effects for race and ethnicity. We then rerun our regressions adding in our classroom discourse variables. Such analyses have revealed (a) positive effects for time spent in discussion and numbers of open-ended questions an follow up questions and (b) the ameliorating effects of the classroom discourse variables on the background variables. In other words, we understand not only what kinds on instruction affect achievement growth in English Language Arts but also what teachers can do to improve their teaching.

Our current research now seeks to automate CLASS, which is the program we use to collect and code classroom discourse. If successful, our work will allow for "do-it-yourself" professional development providing expert inexpensive (and private) profiles of teaching practices.

• Opening Dialogue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 (pdf)
• Questions in Time: Investigating the Structure and Dynamics of Unfolding Classroom Discourse, (subscription required) Discourse Processes, Volume 35, Issue 2, 2003. Martin Nystrand, Lawrence L. Wu, Adam Gamoran, Susie Zeiser & Daniel A. Long
  
• Dialogic Words to Teach By (pdf)
  
• What Dialogic Instruction is NOT (pdf)
  
• Teacher Comments from Partnership for Literacy (pdf)

Presentations

• Opening—and Sustaining—Dialogue: From Practice to Theory and Back (ppt), Martin Nystrand, The University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Notes from Partnership for Literacy (pdf), Eileen Kaiser
  Comments from the Exit and Closing Reflections completed by Madison teachers in response to questions about how particiaption in PFL influenced their practice

Publications

• Caughlan, S. (2003). Exploring the Gap Between Espoused and Enacted Cultural Models of Literature Discussion. 52nd Yearbook. Literacy Research Association, pp. 150-161.
  
• Caughlan, S., Juzwik, M. M., & Adler, M. (2008). From research to practice: Recontextualizing the CLASS program across boundaries. English Education, 41(1), 66-86.
• Caughlan, S., Juzwik, M., Borsheim-Black, C., Kelly, S., & Goldenring Fine, J. (2013 (February). English Teacher Candidates Developing Dialogically Organized Instructional Practices. Research in the Teaching of English, 47, 212-246. 
• Caughlan, S., & Kelly, S. (2004, August). Bridging Methodological Gaps: Instructional and Institutional Effects of Tracking in Two English Classes. Research in the Teaching of English, 39, 20-62.
• Christoph, J. & Nystrand, M. (2001, November). Taking risks, negotiating relationships: One teacher's transition toward a dialogic classroom. Research in the Teaching of English, 36, 249- 286.
• Gamoran, A., & Nystrand, M. (1994). Tracking, instruction, and achievement. International Journal of Educational Research, 21, 217-131.
• Gamoran, A., & Nystrand, M. (1991). Background and instructional effects on achievement in eighth-grade English and social studies. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 1, 277-300.
• Gamoran, A., & Nystrand, M. (1992). Taking students seriously. In F. Newmann (Ed.), Student Engagement and Achievement in American Schools (pp. 40-61). New York: Teachers College Press.
  
• Gamoran, A., Nystrand, M., Berends, M., & LePore, P. (1995, Winter). An organizational analysis of the effects of ability grouping. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 687-716.
  
• Heintz, A., Borsheim, C., Caughlan, S., Juzwik, M. M.,& Sherry, M. B. (2010). Video-based response & revision: Dialogic instruction using video and web 2.0 technologies. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 10(2). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol10/iss2/languagearts/article2.cfm.
• Juzwik, M., Nystrand, M., Kelly, S., & Sherry, M. (2008). Oral Narrative genres as dialogic resources for classroom literature study: A contextualized case study. American Educational Research Journal, 45, 1111-1154.
  
• Juzwik, M. & Sherry, M. B. (2007). Expressive language and the art of English teaching: Theorizing the relationship between literature and oral narrative. English Education, 39(3), 226-259.
• Kelly, S. (2010, May). A Crisis of Authority in Predominantly Black Schools. Teachers College Record, 112(5), 1247-1274
• Kelly, S. (2007). Classroom discourse and the distribution of student engagement. Social Psychology of Education, 10, pp. 331-352.
  
• Kelly, S. (2009). Social identity theories and educational engagement. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30(4), 449-462.
  
• Kelly, S. (2008, January). What Types of Students' Effort Are Rewarded with High Marks? Sociology of Education, 81(1), pp. 32-52.
  
• Kelly, Sean and Caughlan, Samantha (2011) 'The Hollywood teachers' perspective on authority', Pedagogies: An International Journal, 6: 1, 46 — 65
• Kelly, S., & Turner, J. (2009, July). Rethinking the Effects of Classroom Activity Structure on the Engagement of Low-Achieving Students. Teachers College Record Volume, 111(7), 1665-1692.
  
• Nystrand, M. (2017). Twenty Acres: Events That Transform Us. Madison: Wisconsin Center for Education Research.(pdf)
• Nystrand, M. (2009, September). En què consisteix la felin d'un mestre. La formació del professorat de llengues, 49, 82-110.
• Nystrand, M. (2007, March 27). Keynote Address: Opening-and Sustaining-Dialogue: From Practice to Theory and Back. The International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education (IAIMTE). Exeter, UK March 27, 2007.
• Nystrand, M. (2006, May). Research on the role of classroom discourse as it affects reading comprehension. Research in the Teaching of English, 40, 392-412.
• Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (1997). The big picture: The language of learning in hundreds of eighth- and ninth-grade English lessons. Chapter 2, Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Nystrand, M., Wu, L., Gamoran, A., Zeiser, S., & Long, D. (2003, March-April). Questions in time: Investigating the structure and dynamics of unfolding classroom discourse. Discourse Processes, 35, 135-196.
• Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (1991). Instructional discourse, student engagement, and literature achievement. Research in the Teaching of English, 25, 261-290.