Susanne Engström

A Teacher Professional Development Programme on Dialogic Inquiry

In this chapter we report and discuss inquiry-based science teaching/learning and more specifically dialogic inquiry, as a basis for a professional development programme for teachers. The pilot programme aimed at (1) considering teachers’ experience, (2) letting teachers develop their current lessons and (3) prompting teachers’ reflections on generic competencies coming from the theory about communicative approaches and writing in dialog. The intention was to make a long-term difference for science in schools due to teachers’ enhanced awareness of dialogic inquiry. We focus on the teachers’ experience of the research-informed professional development programme. The programme was designed with six meetings, when teachers met and reflected on different aspects of dialogic inquiry, based on video clips of good practice episodes from science lessons. Between the meetings, the teachers developed and analysed their own teaching by using instruments, developed by the researchers, to find out how they used their lesson time on different lesson activities, different communicative approaches and writing. We argue that the balance between dialogic inquiry as a deep meaning-making process and dialogic inquiry as a way to organise the lesson depends on the teacher’s experience, subject knowledge and their students’ interests and creativity. Findings show that teachers observed that too much time was spent on giving instructions, that the writing of hypotheses could be improved and that the teachers’ choice of lesson activities had an impact on learning opportunities. The difference between dialogic inquiry and inquiry is discussed.