Opening classroom interaction: the importance of feedback

By Heather J. Smith, Steven I. Higgins. 2006

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Efforts to encourage ‘interactive practice’ in the National Literacy (NLS) and Numeracy (NNS) Strategies in the UK, have led to an emphasis on teacher questions. Recent research into classroom interactions, however, indicate that the pattern of interaction remains largely unchanged since the introduction of these strategies in terms of the type and amount of questions teachers are asking, and the opportunities for extended pupil participation. This article uses evidence gathered from a large‐scale research project examining classroom interactions during literacy and numeracy lessons, and the researchers' critical reflections upon this process, to examine conceptions of interactive pedagogy. It is argued that in order to ‘open’ classroom interaction, emphasis should be less on the questions teachers ask, and more on the manner with which teachers react to pupils' responses to questions. Episodes of classroom interaction from video recorded literacy and numeracy lessons taken as part of the study are used to support this argument. They present evidence of teacher behaviours in reaction to pupils' responses which succeed in facilitating a more interactive learning environment. The implication that such behaviour will contribute towards a model of effective interactive practice is also discussed.

Subfields: Education, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e918957bff20f6055af900c910add1af065e59b6

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In Education

In Language and Linguistics

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Citations in the corpus

Teachers’ formative assessment abilities and their relationship to student learning: findings from a four-year intervention study (2016, methodology): “We also examined the significance of the random slope of the pretest as described in Snijders and Bosker (2012) and found that, while there was some slope variation across teachers, the joint test of variance and covariance based on the likelihood ratio test was non-significant for both baseline and”
Changing Classroom Practice Through the English National Literacy Strategy: A Micro-Interactional Perspective (2008, background): “Thus, for example, pupils may misperceive their teacher’s open questions as closed on the basis of the regularities of previous experiences (Smith & Higgins, 2006).”