M. Dobber

Regulating collaboration in teacher education

Collaboration in teacher education can be seen as a way to prepare student teachers for future social practices at school. When people collaborate with each other, they have to regulate their collaboration. In the Dutch teacher education programme that was investigated, student teachers were members of different types of groups, each of which had its own purpose and curriculum and required a certain amount of collaboration. We studied the ways in which teacher educators and student teachers together regulated collaboration in each of these types of groups. We concluded that regulating collaboration is not yet an explicit learning aim in this programme, while it is important for student teachers to learn how to direct and support collaboration in a group.

The development of community competence in the teacher education curriculum

Teachers are expected to frequently collaborate within teacher communities in schools. This requires teacher education to prepare student teachers by developing the necessary community competence. The present study empirically investigates the extent to which teacher education programmes pay attention to and aim to stimulate the development of community competence in the intended curriculum, the implemented curriculum and the attained curriculum. Various types of data are gathered and analysed in respect of these three curriculum representations. It appears that community competence is weakly conceptualised in the intended curriculum. In the implemented, and especially the attained curriculum, this results in no systematic and explicit practice in terms of the development of community competence.

The Role of the Teacher in Promoting Dialogue and Polylogue During Inquiry Activities in Primary Education

In inquiry, dialogue between persons present in the classroom can be enriched with polylogue with knowledgeable others outside of the classroom. This study aimed to find out what role dialogue and polylogue play in encouraging philosophical inquiry in three other forms of inquiry in primary education: inquiry as experimental research, inquiry by consulting sources, and inquiry of practices. More specifically, the authors wanted to know how teachers as more experienced others can promote dialogue and polylogue. The three forms of inquiry are illustrated with transcripts from classroom interaction. Crucial in each form of inquiry is the role of the teacher in creating opportunities for dialogue and polylogue in the interaction between children.

Engaging Children in Dialogic Classroom Talk: Does It Contribute to a Dialogical Self?

In this chapter, we aim to show how dialogic classroom talk in early childhood classrooms might contribute to the development of a dialogical self that is capable of dealing with diversity. Reasoning from Vygotsky’s cultural-historical activity theory and Dialogical Self Theory, we will argue that dialogic classroom talk gives children creative spaces of reflection in which different voiced positions can meet, be negotiated, and may become part of a multi-voiced self. Next, we will give an exposition of our research project in which we developed an intervention – the MODEL2TALK intervention – that supports teachers in making their classroom interaction more dialogic. Examples from classrooms that participated in our study show that inducting children into dialogic classroom talk contributes to the development of their communicative and dialogical capacities. Based on the results of our research, we believe dialogic classroom talk to be a fruitful setting in which children are encouraged to meet and explore others’ positions and reflect on their own positions at the same time.

Implementing Dynamic Assessment of Vocabulary Development as a Trialogical Learning Process: A Practice of Teacher Support in Primary Education Schools

ABSTRACT Dynamic Assessment (DA) has received a considerable amount of attention in the educational sciences and beyond. DA combines instruction or feedback with assessment or testing within a single activity. DA has great potential for classroom practices, but has not been implemented in many classrooms yet. In this article, we argue that teacher educators play an important role in implementing DA in classrooms. We describe a specific instrument that can be used for dynamically assessing children’s vocabulary development in primary school classrooms. We give examples and present some preliminary results of the implementation of this DA instrument based on experiences in primary education schools in the Netherlands. Furthermore, we use the notion of a trialogical learning process to highlight that the collaboration and interaction between teachers and teacher educators are mediated through tools (i.e., DA instruments and materials) that are further developed and may in the end lead to changes in teaching and assessment practices.

Developmental Education for Young Children in the Netherlands: Basic Development

This chapter describes Starting Blocks and Basic Development. This approach and curriculum provides possible answers for professionals working with young children. We focus on broad development of children by creating meaningful teaching opportunities in the context of play. We define play as a specific format of cultural activities that are characterised by rules that constitute the activity, high levels of involvement and the degrees of freedom that the cultural community allows to the player (B. van Oers, 2010). In Basic Development, we start from activities infused with sociocultural contents matching with everyday situations, books, stories, etc. The professional’s role is important. During play and other activities, the professional is alert for ‘teaching opportunities’, taking care that the quality of play is not impaired. In activities and dialogue, both professional and children cooperate in a dynamic process. We use five didactic impulses to structure the professionals assistance (Janssen-Vos 2008) for promoting children’s meaningful learning in play. These five impulses are useful to achieve the balance between the active process of meaning making of the children and the explicit educational goals and expected results. In this chapter we describe some examples and give insight into the ingredients of Starting Blocks and Basic Development. We finally describe the implementation strategy, focusing on the enhancement of the adults’ abilities to work with a play-based curriculum in their own everyday practices.