A new research paper Talk Factory: Supporting 'exploratory talk' around an interactive whiteboard in primary school science plenaries has been produced by Dr Lucinda Kerawalla, Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies in the OU’s Faculty of Education and Language Studies, following the creation of a new piece of classroom software called Talk Factory.
Dr Kerawalla, together with colleagues Professor Eileen Scanlon and Dr Marilena Petrou, designed Talk Factory as a tool which teachers and students can use to support their understanding of the useful features of classroom discussions, and to provide immediate feedback on how well each child is contributing.
The technological support of classroom plenaries has remained relatively unexplored until now. By using Talk Factory, children can learn how to problem solve through dialogue with each other, using ‘prompts’ on an interactive whiteboard rather than simply responding to questions from the teacher. Talk Factory can put children in the driving seat while their teacher becomes a facilitator.
Positive, managed and measured
Dr Kerawalla explains: “A dialogic approach to teaching, focusing on the development of children’s oracy throughout all curriculum subject areas, is very much on the agenda at the moment but shifting teaching styles and the student’s responses towards this approach can be extremely challenging for any teacher or school. This is where Talk Factory comes in, software designed to help teachers encourage debate and conjecture and problem solving in their classrooms in a positive, managed and measured way.”
Then, as the class begins to discuss a topic, the teacher will record their progress by tapping on the rules displayed on the interactive whiteboard, effectively evaluating how each child’s utterance contributes to the overall discussion (in line with the above rules) and facilitating reminders to pupils of the rules that will help them discuss more positively and constructively. This in turn generates real time graphical representations of the content of students' whole class discussions in, for example, a bar chart, which teachers and pupils can use to help them evaluate how well they are doing, and make any adjustments if necessary.
Dr Kerawalla adds: “The public and dynamically-evolving nature of the graphical representations on the classroom whiteboard means that this can be used by students to elicit instant feedback on their conversations. In this way, the teachers’ use of Talk Factory plays a central role in opening up a dialogic space where ideas could be put forward, respected, scrutinised and challenged in a supportive discursive environment.
"Overall, where Talk Factory was used in the recent study, we found that teachers adopted a more facilitative role focussing on prompting students for explanatory responses and drawing students into the debate, rather than taking a lead role in steering the direction of the dialogue towards the production of outcomes set by themselves.”
'Dramatic leap in self-realisation'
The Talk Factory software was showcased at an Open University/UK Literacy Association (UKLA) workshop in 2011 and as a result new versions, designed to support discussion in any subject area, have already been adopted by Cornwall Learning and is in use in primary and secondary school throughout Cornwall.
Katie Fitzsimmons, Assistant Head Teacher at Fowey Community College in Cornwall, has supported the development of Talk Factory in classrooms, working with it across a range of subjects from maths to geography. She says this was done through the explicit teaching of rules for group talking supported by the Talk Factory software.
She said: “Talk Factory yielded some excellent results in engaging our students in more effective talking in lessons. This in turn has enabled students to see how they can expand their written responses and build on input from others in their group, linking speaking with writing. As one member of staff commented ‘The development of the class within one 100 minute lesson was nothing short of phenomenal. It was the quickest and most dramatic leap in self-realisation that I have ever seen in 11 years in the classroom.’”
Talk Factory is a tool that has a dual role: it helps teachers to model and encourage the positive features of discussion and argumentation, and it enables students to take part more effectively in argumentation by increasing their understanding of how to talk together effectively.
