How to teach to think critically: the teacher’s role in promoting dialogical skills during classroom debates on social vivid matters

The aim of this contribution, part of a broader Erasmus+ project (STEP-Pedagogy of Citizenship and Teacher Training: an Alliance between School and Territory), is to identify different dialogue styles and the link between teacher interventions and different levels of children’s dialogical critical thinking skills. A school as a democratic venue, where the knowledge is built also through debates, provides an opportunity for pupils to take an active and responsible role in the context of experience. The teachers could play a fundamental role in supporting the development of dialogical skills promoting classroom debates on social vivid matters. The dialogic practice is a vehicle for increasing pupil engagement at a deep level and raising the quality of classroom interaction and pupils reasoning. Monologic practices, however, are nowadays still much more used by teachers than dialogic ones. Method The STEP methodology - Teacher Professional Development-Research – sprang from the awareness that inquiring into their own teaching-learning practices leads teachers to acquire a more conscious understanding of own experience, facilitating the construction of new knowledge which can underpin the development of new skills. The data we analyze in this study were collected in two case studies that involved two Primary School classrooms (3rd and 5th grade), in Milan and Cornaredo, a town at the gates of Milan. We elicit to analyze six typical debates led by the classroom teachers, recorded in different steps of the research path with a mixed coding system, both data-driven and theory-driven. Outcomes (expected) The results illustrate on one hand the effectiveness of the training-research methodology in supporting the teachers in constructing cross-disciplinary pathways and developing an awareness of the topics they dealt with, also considering matters raised by children, on the other hand reveal a teacher’s resistance to change the way they manage classroom debates that inhibit children self-confidence and has a strong impact on the quality of children’s interventions. We also identify a big difference between the microstructure of the dialogues led by teachers, student-teacher, and researchers that correspond to completely different children reactions. References Alexander, R. (2018). Developing dialogic teaching: genesis, process, trial. Research Papers in Education, 33(5), 561-598. Asquini, G. (Ed.). (2018). La Ricerca-Formazione: Temi, esperienze e prospettive. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Daniel, M.F., & Gagnon, M. (2011). Developmental process of dialogical critical thinking in groups of pupils aged 4 to 12 years. Creative Education, 2(05), 418-428. Daniel, M. F., Lafortune, L., Pallascio, R., Splitter, L., Slade, C., & de la Garza, T. (2005). Modeling the development process of dialogical critical thinking in pupils aged 10 to 12 years. Communication Education, 54(4), 334-354. Legardez, A., & Simonneaux, L. (2011). Développement durable et autres questions d'actualité. Educagri Editions. Lyle, S. (2008). Dialogic teaching: Discussing theoretical contexts and reviewing evidence from classroom practice. Language and education, 22(3), 222-240. Reznitskaya, A., & Gregory, M. (2013). The student thought and classroom language: Examining the mechanisms of change in dialogic teaching. Educational Psychologist, 48(2), 114-133.