Teacher-led whole class discussions are essential when it comes to guiding students' construction of knowledge, and recent studies on teaching and learning emphasize the need for more studentcentered teaching methods. In previous studies, the extent to which different types of communication take place in the classroom have been extensively reported by means of lists, tables, and charts, yet these studies have not included overviews of how talk develops and progresses over time. This study addresses this aspect by presenting how different communicative approaches constitute a specific, cumulative communication structure. Within this structure, the role and temporal considerations of a dialogic approach to teaching are examined within a teaching sequence on the topic of electrical power and energy. The case data were analyzed on multiple levels. First, teaching sequences were presented graphically to provide a broader picture of the communicational orientation of the overall lesson. Second, a detailed analysis of dialogic interactions was executed to understand the quality and role of these interactions on a broader communicational level. This multilevel analysis provides insights into the different purposes and quality of dialogic implementation in terms of the cumulative and meaningful learning of science. Implications for teaching and teacher education and educational research are also discussed. # 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 50: 912-939, 2013

It is commonly believed that science teachers rely on language that allows only minor flexibility when it comes to taking into account contrasting views and pupil thoughts. Too frequently science teachers either pose questions that target predefined answers or simply lecture through lessons, a major concern from a sociocultural perspective. This study reports the experiences of science student teachers when introduced to the Communicative Approach to science education drawing on dialogic teacher-talk in addition to authoritative teacher-talk. This approach was introduced to the students in an interventional teaching program running parallel to the student teachers' field practice. The practical implications of this approach during initial teacher education are the central focus of this study. The data consisting of videos of lessons and interviews indicate that the student teacher awareness of teacher-talk and alternative communicative options did increase. Student teachers reported greater awareness of the different functions of teacher-talk as well as the challenges when trying to implement dialogic teaching.

There is an ongoing reform towards more inquiry-based teaching in school curriculum policy in South Africa. Reform towards more inquiry-based approaches is already integrated in pre-service teacher education programmes. As inquiry-based approaches have been gaining momentum worldwide, there is an increasing concern that dialogic interaction in classroom communication is being neglected. This is especially within teacher-orchestrated classroom interactions that should foster greater learner centredness and thus authentic scientific inquiry. In learner-centred teaching approaches, student contributions should be explicitly taken into account as part of classroom interactions in science. Learner-centred approaches provide the rationale for improved interaction, especially when student contributions should be considered within teacher-orchestrated communications. The aim of this study is to bring forth indicators that are connected to different forms of interactions and complement the dialogicauthoritative categorization through in-depth analysis of two lesson transcript examples. Even though over-authoritative and even transmission modes of communication seemed to prevail in South African classrooms, it is through finding building blocks for dialogicity this status can be challenged towards more learner-centred interaction. The explicitness of dialogicity and fundamentally contrasting differences between examples of dialogic and authoritative approaches are presented through the in-depth analysis of classroom interactions of two case episodes. Implications for teaching and teacher education are discussed.

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The aim of this study was to explore dialogic teaching in school classroom and teacher education contexts. Despite moves towards more socially-oriented and student-centred curricula, science classroom communication remains prevailingly authoritative and monologic. In order to address the dialogic gap existing in the field, within this study an intervention was developed and executed to increase student teachers' awareness of the dialogic aspect and its role in science classroom communication. Drawing on previous scholarly work in the field of dialogic teaching and teacher education, an interventional teaching programme focussing on teacher talk was designed covering the planning, execution, reflection and analysis of student science lessons and orchestrated by student teachers themselves. Thus, in addition to introducing the background theory of dialogic teaching, the empirical aspect was also given cogent weight. Participants of the study within the teacher education context included both science student teachers and primary school student teachers who had been introduced to dialogic teaching. The second part of the study assessed how dialogic teaching manifests in the science classroom without pre-intervention. Participants in this part of the study included volunteer science teachers and their classes.

Inquiry-based teaching has been at the heart of science education since it was first outlined in national standards over a decade ago. The general idea behind the inquiry guidelines is that pupils would adopt ways of conducting science, in addition to conceptually learning, thus attaining also the epistemological dimension of science. Although curricula are based on these ideas of inquiry, all too often authentic inquiry is hindered by overly authoritative approaches and teacher directions. To avoid this, the communicational ways in which teachers can encourage pupil reasoning during different phases of inquiry should be explicitly addressed. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a dialogic inquiry-based approach to science education. This approach combines the principles of inquiry and dialogic teaching. Based on this framework we investigated a number of primary student teachers’ (n=28) conceptualisations of science teaching and evaluated to what extent dialogic inquiry-based teaching informed these conceptualisations. Analysis revealed that dialogicality was not present in student teacher pre-conceptions, their pre-conceptions rather focused on traditional practices related to science teaching. The learning trajectories created for six cases, however, indicate an increased awareness of inquiry-based teaching including the dialogic aspect over the duration of the course.

Abstrakt

In the present study, we aimed to specify the key competence domains perceived to be critical for the teaching profession and depict them as a comprehensive teacher competence model. An expert panel that included representatives from seven units providing university-based initial teacher education in Finland carried out this process. To produce an active construction of a shared understanding and an interpretation of the discourse in the field, the experts reviewed literature on teaching. The resulting teacher competence model, the multidimensional adapted process model of teaching (MAP), represents a collective conception of the relevant empirical literature and prevailing discourses on teaching. The MAP is based on Blömeke et al.’s, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 223, 3–13, (2015) model which distinguishes among teacher competences (referring to effective performance of teachers’ work), competencies (knowledge, skills, and other individual competencies underlying and enabling effective teaching), and situation-specific skills of perceiving, interpreting, and making decisions in situations involving teaching and learning. The implications of the MAP for teacher education and student selection for initial teacher education are discussed.