Dialogic Education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together

Dialogue has long been used in primary classrooms to stimulate thinking, but it is not always easy to unite the creative thinking of good dialogue with the need for children to understand the core concepts behind knowledge-rich subjects. A sound understanding of key concepts is essential to progress through the national curriculum, and assessment of this understanding along with effective feedback is central to good practice.

Dialogic Education builds upon decades of practical classroom research to offer a method of teaching that applies the power of dialogue to achieving conceptual mastery. Easy-to-follow template lesson plans and activity ideas are provided, each of which has been tried and tested in classrooms and is known to succeed.

Providing a structure for engaging children and creating an environment in which dialogue can flourish, this book is separated into three parts:

• Establishing a classroom culture of learning;
• Core concepts across the curriculum;
• Wider dialogues: Educational adventures in the conversation of mankind.

Written to support all those in the field of primary education, this book will be an essential resource for student, trainee and qualified primary teachers interested in the educational importance of dialogue.

Neil Phillipson has seventeen years of experience as a teacher, subject leader and consultant/trainer. He is a Sapere-registered trainer and has provided training in Philosophy for Children to schools around the UK. He is also a regular speaker about the importance of dialogue at conferences and in schools.

Rupert Wegerif is a professor of education at the University of Exeter, UK. He has spent more than twenty years working closely with teachers on research projects developing and evaluating effective approaches to teaching dialogue and has written many books and articles on dialogic education including Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age.

Written with extra materials provided by:

Giles Freathy, Specialist Leader of Education at Sir Robert Geffery’s Primary School, Cornwall, UK, recipient of the TES Humanities Award (2014) and co-creator of the RE-searchers approach to Religious Education.

Dr Taro Fujita, Lecturer in Maths Education and Anita Wood, tutor in Primary English, both part of the ‘outstanding’ (Ofsted) initial teacher education team at the Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter, UK.