Bringing Talk to Life: Thinking Through Dialogue in The Classroom

Do you want to encourage purposeful talk between students in your classroom, but feel you do not have the time or the permission? Do you wish you had more opportunity to listen to your students and include discussion of pressing and controversial issues in their lives and society today in your curriculum? Amidst rising recognition of how being articulate improves life chances, this book takes a look at these questions, outlining an alternative approach to curriculum and pedagogy.

Bringing Talk to Life is firmly grounded in classroom experience and research evidence and explores how a dialogic approach to teaching can improve students- confidence and agency and restore teachers- professional judgement. It outlines the social and linguistic barriers some students find in accessing knowledge through the school curriculum and identifies ways that teachers can help them become more confident and articulate by modelling different behavioural norms and introducing conc