The teacher’s role in facilitating conversation: a case study for professional development in preschool

The research is part of the Erasmus+ project Pedagogy of Citizenship and Teacher Training: An Alliance between School and Territory carried on in Italy, France, and Spain. The first output was a transnational "grammar" of citizenship education, based on reflection on the type of educational experience that genuinely contributes to the formation of citizens. The second phase involved case studies (Yin, 2009) in schools and we present the one concerning a pre-school class of 23 children, 3-4 years old, in Cornaredo, a town of ca. 20.000 inhabitants near Milan. The aim of this case study was to enhance the children’s dialogical skills (Bakhtin, 1982) and cooperation among peers and investigate the teacher’s role in facilitating the dialogues in the school classroom (Alexander, 2018). The choice of methodology - Teacher Professional Development-Research (Asquini, 2018) – 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. We collected data from video-observations of four typical conversations led by the classroom teacher, one conversation led by teacher educator in the same classroom and two follow up observations. These videos had been used to elicit the teacher reflections on her practice. The dialogues had been analyzed with a mixed coding system, both data-driven, and theory-driven (Krippendorff, 2012). The conversations reflected the typical whole-class discourse IRF (Mameli, Molinari, 2014) and were mainly proposed with a view of training the children in executive and mechanical tasks, as an exercise for summarizing learning contents. The classroom teacher realized that her own talk always tended to be closed or corrective compared to teacher educator talk. In the exit interview, she reported that the project had given her the opportunity to explore themes that she had never focused on previously, but the project was only partly successful because even if she recognized the weakness of her interventions there is no evidence in the follow-up observations of a real change in her practices. We discuss the reasons and we propose suggestions for further research.