Dialogue, engagement and generative interaction in the history classroom

Michael Bird has a long-standing interest in the power of classroom dialogue, not only as a means of elicting students’ prior knowledge or checking their understanding of new ideas and information, but also as a powerful tool for generating new knowledge through a collective process of meaning-making. In this article, he first uses two extracts of classroom dialogue to illustrate the kinds of generative interactions that can be stimulated by carefully planned question sequences and then shares an approach to planning such sequences that has been adopted and successfully shared with student-teachers within the PGCE programme that he leads...