Interthinking Putting Talk To Work

Written in an accessible and jargon-free style, Interthinking: putting talk to work explores the growing body of work on how people think creatively and productively together. Challenging purely individualistic accounts of human evolution and cognition, its internationally acclaimed authors provide analyses of real-life examples of collective thinking in everyday settings including workplaces, schools, rehearsal spaces and online environments. The authors use socio-cultural psychology to explain the processes involved in interthinking, to explore its creative power, but also to understand why collective thinking isn’t always productive or successful. With this knowledge we can maximise the constructive benefits of our ability to interthink, and understand the best ways in which we can help young people to develop, nurture and value that capability.

Through using spoken language, people are able to think creatively and productively together. This ability to ‘interthink’ is an important product of our evolutionary history that is just as important for our survival today. Many kinds of work activity depend on the success of groups or teams finding joint solutions to problems. Creative achievement is rarely the product of solitary endeavour, but of people working within a collective enterprise. Written in an accessible and jargon-free style, Interthinking: putting talk to work explores the growing body of work on how people think creatively and productively together. Challenging purely individualistic accounts of human evolution and cognition, its internationally acclaimed authors provide analyses of real-life examples of collective thinking in everyday settings including workplaces, schools, rehearsal spaces and online environments. The authors use socio-cultural psychology to explain the processes involved in interthinking, to explore its creative power, but also to understand why collective thinking isn’t always productive or successful. With this knowledge we can maximise the constructive benefits of our ability to interthink, and understand the best ways in which we can help young people to develop, nurture and value that capability. This book will be of great interest to academic researchers, postgraduates and undergraduates on Education and Psychology courses and to practicing teachers. It will also appeal to anyone with an interest in language, creativity and the role of psychology in everyday life.

This book examines the place of talk in learning and the role of such talk in literacy education. It builds on a strong tradition of research into the role of talk in constructing curriculum knowledge, the relationship between talking and thinking, and the significance of extended, in-depth dialogic interaction in classroom talk. However, it differs from tradition with its emphasis on the need to make the role of language in learning more visible and more explicit. This book places particular emphasis on the relationship between dialogic pedagogy and language-based approaches to learning. Contributions range from discussions on educational linguistics and dialogic pedagogy as complementary perspectives to needs of students for whom English is an additional language or dialect. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Research Papers in Education.

Evidence-based teaching is fast becoming a new orthodoxy. There are many strong voices, including policy voices, advocating its adoption. Understanding the underlying principles allows you to better evaluate the benefits of different approaches to evidence-based teaching and how they relate to your own school context. This book summarises the theoretical principles behind talk in school and briefly maps the research tradition in this field. It examines the evidence relating to a variety of forms of classroom talk, including whole school culture and oracy; classroom environments conducive to talk; whole class teacher-pupil talk and pupil-pupil peer talk. The final chapter explores up-to-date issues and influences relating to talk, such as mastery learning, informed by international comparisons. Firmly grounded in evidence and the latest thinking, the book also offers practical advice for everyday implementation and evaluation of these principles.

Teaching for Mastery in Writing provides a practical approach to developing mastery in writing which helps all primary children to develop their skills and inspires a love of writing. This innovative book follows an approach that integrates mastery into existing teaching sequences – an approach which aims to improve the writing ability of all children, not just the more able. Writing is a tough discipline for children in today's primary schools. The number of skills they are expected to learn is a source of amazement to many adults outside education. It is no easier to teach, not least because of the many and varied demands on schools, including the National Curriculum, SPaG tests, assessment frameworks and inspections. Now, more than ever, it is crucial that teachers focus on helping children become the most effective communicators they can be through the medium of writing. Throughout the book, Mike Cain promotes the importance of a classroom culture characterised by focused talk and reasoning, and provides lots of ideas for challenging children in their writing through the development of key learning dispositions and critical thinking skills.

This book brings together a collection of work from around the world in order to consider effective STEM, robotics, mobile apps education from a range of perspectives. It presents valuable perspectives—both practical and theoretical—that enrich the current STEM, robotics, mobile apps education agenda. As such, the book makes a substantial contribution to the literature and outlines the key challenges in research, policy, and practice for STEM education, from early childhood through to the first school age education. The audience for the book includes college students, teachers of young children, college and university faculty, and professionals from fields other than education who are unified by their commitment to the care and education of young children.

Taking a Vygotskian sociocultural stance, this book demonstrates the meaningful role that L2 teacher educators and L2 teacher education play in the professional development of L2 teachers through systematic, intentional, goal-directed, theorized L2 teacher education pedagogy. The message is resoundingly clear: Teacher education matters! It empirically documents the ways in which engagement in the practices of L2 teacher education shape how teachers come to think about and enact their teaching within the sociocultural contexts of their learning-to-teach experiences. Providing an insider’s look at L2 teacher education pedagogy, it offers a close up look at teacher educators who are skilled at moving L2 teachers toward more theoretically and pedagogically sound instructional practices and greater levels of professional expertise. First, the theoretical foundation and educational rationale for exploring what happens inside the practices of L2 teacher education are established. These theoretical concepts are then used to conduct microgenetic analyses of the moment-to-moment, asynchronous, and at-a-distance dialogic interactions that take place in five distinct but sometimes overlapping practices that the authors have designed, repeatedly implemented, and subsequently collected data on in their own L2 teacher education programs. Responsive mediation is positioned as the nexus of mindful L2 teacher education and proposed as a psychological tool for teacher educators to both examine and inform the ways in which they design, enact, and assess the consequences of their own L2 teacher education pedagogy.