Assisting student teachers to understand the ethical nature of their work and developing the moral vocabulary to deal with ethical dilemmas of practice are vital components of initial teacher education. The study explores ethical dilemmas experienced by 100 student teachers in their final year of their teaching degrees while on practicum. The data examined were written reflective statements of each of the 100 students' ethical dilemmas. The study found that, while some types of ethical dilemmas seem universal, a more situated theory of initial teacher education ethics is required to understand the particular sociocultural factors that inform the nature of teacher practice in contextspecific environments. Our study highlights the need for preservice teacher education focusing on student teachers finding their own authentic ethical voice, through the examination of ethical dilemmas via critical thinking and the wider examination of the political, historical and social contexts that led to the dilemma. The dilemmas faced by the students were likely to be, in part, identifiable with fellow student teachers in other countries, but we argue that dilemmas are strongly contextualised. Our study is useful for educators working with student teachers in the practicum environment to instil confidence in student teachers to follow their own moral compass.

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This study used the Quality Talk and dialogic teaching approach with a group of secondary school teachers (N = 7) to train their facilitation of dialogical discussions by small groups of students. The study used video and audio analysis to assess the teachers’ observable behaviours during these discussions, before and after professional development; for example, types of Quality Talk questions asked. The study also used face‐to‐face interviews, held before and after the professional development, to investigate the teachers’ beliefs about learning through discussion. Results show that although the number of high‐quality questions from the teachers did not increase, the quality of the questions students asked of each other did improve, and resulted in extended periods of dialogic spells. Positive developments were found for teachers’ beliefs about the use of dialogue to foster deeper thinking with their secondary school‐aged students.

This study was carried out in three secondary schools of varying socioeconomic levels within the usual framework of tasks completed by students while studying towards a national assessment. The study examined the change in the nature of the interactions between students in group conversations, in the context of a film unit and a geography unit using Quality Talk. Quality Talk is an interventional approach promoting text comprehension via a critical‐reflective thinking approach. The study also sought to determine whether there was a positive intervention effect from the use of Quality Talk, on the students' ability to write from a critical analytical (CA) stance. Differences in the pre‐ and post‐treatment writing achievement of seven intervention and one comparison class were assessed. Analysis revealed a large intervention effect within the intervention classes with marked improvements in students' abilities to talk and write with a CA stance (d = 0.92). The change in behaviour for the students in the intervention classes appeared to be associated with their increased use of authentic questions, uptake questions and high‐level questions, which appeared to foster higher levels of dialogic spells, supporting the development of higher levels of CA talk and writing.

This study focused on the impact of using Socratic questioning, based on the Paideia Method, on the nature of middle-schools students' patterns of interaction and on the cognitive complexity of their discussions. The hypothesis is that an experimental group will increase in both interaction focus and complexity at T3, which is the face-to-face seminar when compared to T1 (baselines) and that this increase will be above normative increases compared to a control group. A quasi-experimental method was employed because, although the Paideia Method was not controlled by the researchers, the researchers did have some control over when to measure the outcome variables. Using SPSS 18.0, a series of t-tests and ANOVAs were conducted to analyse data first for interaction focus and then for complexity to test for differences between the experimental control groups. The study was conducted in 12 experimental and 12 control classrooms across six schools, in New Zealand, totalling 720 students (ages 11-13). Results suggest that the experimental group increased in student-to-student focus and complexity of discussion above a normative increase with the greatest level being in the Paideia Seminar (T3).