How dialogue with a teacher helps children learn.

In this extract of the text Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking by Mercer and Littleton it takes place a reflection on how language and class interaction affects students’ learning process. In this case, the intervention of the teacher is analyzed while he’s teaching his lesson and researchers could observe that while doing the lesson, inside the class some “ground rules” have been established and accepted by the different members of the class. This rules are two: the first one is that the teacher should ask and use to ask a lot of questions and the second one is that students don’t use to ask many questions. With that being said the question that comes up is “Are that amount of questions necessary?”, and there’s only one valid answer: Depends. Yes, it depends on the quality of the questions that are being asked and the relevance, if they make sense they are necessary.

But which questions are relevant and of a good quality? Well the text gives us some ideas related to that. The first case that can help us to solve this question is the one that talks about two students doing a project in pairs during the realisation of this project the teachers does an intervention in order to correct some mistakes. With the questions the teacher not only identifies the mistakes and correct them (not giving the solution but asking for it) but she also is able to create a scaffolding for her students in which she helps students to reach their goals. The intervention of the teacher in this case was crucial not only for students but also for the teacher in order to know the level of her pupils.

In the second case that takes place in Mexico, a group of researchers have analyzed different schools in which the students’ level are different but the contents that are taught are the same. So they observed that the difference between groups consisted on the teachers’ dialogue, the students with a higher level were requested by the teacher to make explicit their thoughts in order to guide the development of the students and even to discover the initial level of the pupils, they were also requested to reflect on their thoughts by creating why questions, teachers also offered students rules and tips to solve the problems but making a connexion with reality and encouraging their students to make evident which was their progress and finally, they encouraged their students to interact in order to create more complex thoughts and to take into account the opinion of the rest of the class.

Once we know how to intervene in the class, the text introduces us the context of dialogical teaching. Dialogical teaching consists on asking determined questions to provoke thoughtful answers, take into account answers in order to ask more questions and to create a block of knowledge not only not contextualized questions, interactions among the members of the class are done in real context situations and not in artificial dialogues. So with this students are given the opportunity to ask questions, reflect of their points of view and comment on ideas that come up during the lesson, teacher is able to create a situation in which he can find the previous or the actual knowledge of the students, teachers find different evidences that can help them to adapt the the new contents to students needs (scaffolding), last but not least, teacher tries to create a context in which students feel comfortable and they are able to create their own knowledge (child-centered classroom).

As we go through the text, we can see some important strategies that could be use during the realisation of the lesson and that can help our students to improve their knowledge. Therefore, it is convenient to use “why” questions that help our students to reflect on their thoughts, our pupils should use  reasoning words such as “so”, “if” or “because” and offering reasons to back up their statements,  teacher should check that everyone understood the new concepts and he has to make sure that the debates offered in class lead students to a common agreement and a common knowledge.
With that being said, the text offers a table with four kinds of teaching procedures that can help us while doing our classes. Each procedure is important at its time and none is better that the others, but we must be aware when to use each one. The procedures are:

	Interactive	Non-Interactive
Authoritative	Interactive/Authoritative	Non-Interactive/Authoritative
Dialogic	Interactive/Dialogic	Non-Interactive/Dialogic

Nonetheless the procedure that should extend the most during classes and that should be used frequently is the interactive/dialogic procedure, that could lead to debates and the creation of a common knowledge among students. In the same case, when we are teaching some rules that are unbreakable or that can lead only to one possible solution, we will use a non-interactive and authoritative procedure, which is not bad, but just required.
To sum up the text, what it is trying to explain is that while doing class, we should try to create in our students a critical thinking with which they question and reflect on what they are learning, they discuss about the new concepts with themselves and their classmates and a way of thinking that can lead them to build their own knowledge but also helps them to create links of significance with their previous knowledge. This way of thinking, practically equal to the scientific method, should be take into practice by teachers and students, with the first ones facilitating the tools and methodologies that can adapt to every students’ need and with the second ones taking profit of what the teacher offers them.