Education Commons^™

Toward A More Dialogic Pedagogy: Changing Teachers’ Beliefs And Practices Through Professional Development In Language Arts Classrooms, Ian A.G. Wilkinson, Alina Reznitskaya, Kristin Bourdage, Joseph Oyler, Monica Glina, Robert Drewry, Min Young Kim, Kathryn Nelson

Department of Educational Foundations Scholarship and Creative Works

In this paper, we report findings from the second year of a three-year research and professional development program designed to help elementary school teachers engage in dialogic teaching to support the development of students’ argument literacy. We define argument literacy as the ability to comprehend and formulate arguments through speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The professional development program was focused on promoting teachers’ use of a specific type of talk called ‘inquiry dialogue’ to achieve the goal of developing students’ argument literacy. We used a single-group pretest-posttest design to assess the impact of the professional development on teachers’ epistemological beliefs …