‘Explain to your partner’: teachers' instructional practices and students' dialogue in small groups

Abstract

Collaborative group work has great potential to promote student learning, and increasing evidence exists about the kinds of interaction among students that are necessary to achieve this potential. Less often studied is the role of the teacher in promoting effective group collaboration. This article investigates the extent to which teachers' instructional practices were related to small‐group dialogue in four urban elementary mathematics classrooms in the US. Using videotaped and audiotaped recordings of whole‐class and small‐group discussions, we examined the extent to which teachers pressed students to explain their thinking during their interventions with small groups and during whole‐class discussions, and we explored the relationship between teachers' practices and the nature and extent of students' explaining during collaborative group work. While teachers used a variety of instructional practices to structure and orchestrate students' dialogue in small groups, only probing students' explanations to uncover details of their thinking and problem‐solving strategies exhibited a strong relationship with student explaining. Implications for future research, professional development, and teacher education are discussed.

Keywords:

• classrooms
• grouping
• cooperative group learning

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Spencer Foundation; the National Science Foundation (MDR‐8550236, MDR‐8955346); the Academic Senate on Research, Los Angeles Division, University of California; and the Diversity in Mathematics Education Center for Learning and Teaching (DIME). Funding to DIME was provided by grant number ESI‐0119732 from the National Science Foundation.

We would like to thank Marsha Ing for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. Analyses of teacher practices and student participation in three of these classrooms were reported in Webb et al. (in press). The current study is larger and more comprehensive than the previous one: it uses a larger sample of classrooms, considers all instances of collaborative group work in all classrooms, uses more in‐depth (and finer grained) coding of teacher practices and student activity, and analyzes links between teacher practices and student activity during the same group episodes.

2. For some classes prior achievement scores (standardized test scores from the previous spring) were not available. Consequently, we could not compute partial correlations to control for prior achievement.

3. All recorded students except one (n = 50) experienced a teacher intervention.

4. All recorded students except one (n = 50) were members of groups that had not already given a correct/complete explanation by the start of the teacher intervention.

5. For contingency tables with small expected cell counts, we used a Fisher's exact test (Fisher, 1935).

6. Unless otherwise indicated, all significance levels are the results of Fisher's exact tests of contingency tables.