Teacher Learning in Scaffolding Children’s Collaborative Dialogue in a Chinese Elementary School

Abstract

Purpose:

Dialogic pedagogies that provide students with frequent opportunities to talk have been shown to help students develop essential 21st-century skills. Many Chinese teachers, however, lack confidence and experiences in shifting from teacher-centered pedagogical practices to such student-centered practices. This study examined Chinese elementary school teachers’ reflections on learning to facilitate small-group collaborative reasoning (CR) discussions in their classrooms.

Design/Approach/Methods:

Two fourth-grade teachers in a public school in Beijing, China, participated in the study, where they participated in seven semi-structured debriefing interviews and wrote 13 reflective journals. Thematic analysis of the debriefing interviews and journals was carried out to understand the teachers’ learning progress.

Findings:

The results showed that although the teachers encountered major challenges, such as a drastic shift in their roles, the intense cognitive demands of scaffolding, and the emotional stress of handling the uncertainties of CR discussions, they also made noteworthy progress while learning to facilitate CR discussions. The teachers’ achievement goal orientations seem to have played a major role in how they responded to the challenges and whether they made progress.

Originality/Value:

This study reveals insights into the challenges and progress that the teachers experienced when learning to use a discussion-based teaching approach. It sheds light on the motivational mechanism of teacher learning and provides guidance on how to support Chinese teachers through the use of small-group collaborative discussions.

This study examined how two Chinese elementary school teachers in the subject of Chinese language arts learned to facilitate collaborative discussions in classroom teaching—discussions that engage children in thinking about complex issues and help them develop essential 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration (Halpern, 1998; Kuhn, 2005, 2019). Indeed, these skills have been heavily emphasized in recent Chinese educational reform initiatives (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2011). The Chinese Common Standards for Language (2011) explicitly states that the goals of Chinese language teaching are to “cultivate innovation and collaboration,” “develop thinking skills,” and “nurture curiosity and interest in learning, encourage motivation in reading and free expression, and fully inspire students’ spirit of inquiry and exploration” (p. 6). In an era of information explosion enabled by continuous technological breakthroughs, it has become more imperative than ever to instill in the young citizenry skills and dispositions to productively engage in reasoned discourse. Such discourse often involves listening attentively to others, weighing contrasting perspectives, using evidence to back up claims, and resolving conflicts collaboratively with empathy and perspective-taking skills.

In addition to the goals outlined above, the Chinese Common Standards for Language (2011) recommended pedagogical strategies for improving student learning. For example, “students should be in charge of their Chinese learning while teachers serve as the organizer of learning activities and provide guidance; Chinese lessons should be carried out through dialogic conversations where teachers and students share equal rights and turns to talk” (p. 19). However, most elementary school teachers in China are accustomed to serving as the authority figure in the classroom and find such student-centered strategies too abstract to be translated into their regular teaching practices. For instance, dialogic teaching, which encourages students to share their own perspectives and to engage themselves in student-centered talk, has been simply equated with “teacher asking more questions.” Consequently, discourse in Chinese classrooms is predominantly teacher-led lecturing or recitation that follows the initiation-response-evaluation pattern (Mehan, 1979). Teachers take primary responsibility for initiating questions and evaluating students’ responses against predetermined answers, which often leaves few opportunities for children to engage in extended thinking and elaborated discussions (Alexander, 2018; Mehan & Cazden, 2015; Resnick & Schantz, 2015). In fact, Cheng et al. (2015) reported that in regular Chinese classrooms, although the ratio of speaking turns between students and teachers was almost one to one (48% vs. 52%), the students’ speech was much shorter, with their total words being only about half of the teachers’ utterances (38% vs. 62%). Teachers usually take a preeminent role in leading the conversation and ask closed-ended questions; when students talk, their utterances tend to be brief and lack elaboration.

In the United States, as well as several other Western countries, research focusing on productive academic talk in general, and dialogic pedagogies in particular, has flourished over the past few decades and shown promising impact on students’ learning and thinking abilities (Howe & Abedin, 2013; Resnick et al., 2015; Sedova et al., 2019). Classroom research in China that seeks to promote dialogic pedagogies (e.g., Cheng et al., 2015; Dong et al., 2009; Sun et al., 2017), however, is still in its infancy, where examination from teachers’ perspectives on how they could adapt to such pedagogies is particularly lacking. The present study sought to address this gap by investigating whether using a discussion-based approach, called collaborative reasoning (CR), can help Chinese teachers understand and employ dialogic pedagogies to meet the goals recommended in the new Chinese Common Standards for Language.

The CR approach to discussion

Dialogic pedagogies feature classroom discourse where students and teachers share equal opportunities and rights to talk, to construct meanings collaboratively, and to solve issues that often do not have preestablished answers (Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013). Different from recitation where the classroom discourse is driven primarily by teachers asking “known-information questions” (Mehan & Cazden, 2015), dialogic pedagogies provide students with extensive opportunities to practice open-ended reasoning. Such pedagogies allow students to consider, compare, and integrate different perspectives raised by themselves and their peers to arrive at shared understandings (Resnick et al., 2015).

Among the different forms of dialogic pedagogies, CR (Waggoner et al., 1995) has emerged as one of the promising approaches that have been successfully implemented in Chinese classrooms. In CR, children read a story where characters face a moral dilemma (e.g., whether the zoo is a good place for animals) or a selected text about a controversial public policy issue (e.g., whether schools should buy textbooks or computer software given a limited budget). Children then gather in small heterogeneous groups for a discussion in which they are expected to take positions on a Big Question raised by the text regarding the moral dilemma or controversial issue. They present reasons and evidence for their positions and challenge one another when they disagree. CR is not a debate in which one side wins and the other loses; rather, students collaboratively search for the most reasonable solution to the Big Question. CR’s profound impact on children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development has been extensively studied and documented (e.g., Anderson et al., 2001; Lin et al., 2018; Sun et al., 2015; Wu et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2016). Research shows that children who experience CR exhibit significant enhancements in important 21st-century skills, including cognitive skills such as sophisticated argumentation and decision-making abilities (Anderson et al., 2001; Zhang et al., 2016), as well as prosocial competencies such as emergent leadership skills (Sun et al., 2015, 2017).

Four different CR studies have been carried out in China (Cheng et al., 2015; Dong et al., 2008, 2009; Sun et al., 2017). The findings converge on showing that Chinese children were able to quickly adapt to this new format of discussion. In three of these studies, however, CR was facilitated by the research team for the sake of program efficacy as well as the lack of time and resources to train teachers directly (e.g., Dong et al., 2008, 2009; Sun et al., 2017). It is thus unclear how Chinese teachers respond to CR and the extent to which they can incorporate CR into their regular classroom practices.

Indeed, only one CR study so far provided teacher training as well as ongoing professional development to assist Chinese classroom teachers to implement CR (Cheng et al., 2015). In this study, the authors showcased a drastic change in the amount and nature of teacher talk as they shifted from traditional reading instruction to CR discussions. The authors also pointed out that teachers successfully made the transition from being enthusiastic but totally lost at the beginning, to learning how to use CR deliberately and becoming more confident toward the end. One limitation of this study, however, is that the analysis of teacher learning was too brief and general to reveal how teachers actually learned to facilitate CR. In other words, it was unclear how teachers reflected on their own experiences, particularly the challenges they encountered and how they overcame such challenges to make progress.

The present study sought to address these questions by further analyzing the rich data set of teacher reflections collected from Cheng et al.’s (2015) study. Our goal was to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of participating Chinese teachers’ learning progress, which may further elucidate how Chinese teachers can be effectively supported to use collaborative discussions to meet the goals recommended in the new Chinese Common Standards for Language. Our focus is on teacher reflections, as well as the motivational factors that influence their reflections, because teacher reflections have been shown to play an instrumental role in teacher learning and professional development (Korthagen, 2004).

Teacher reflections

Teacher reflection was first defined by Dewey (1933) as the process of active, careful, and persistent thinking where teachers consider the ground that supports their knowledge and practices of teaching and the consequences that such knowledge and practices lead to. It has regained popularity in recent decades for teacher training and professional development programs, where reflection is often conducted either individually or collectively (Colton & Sparks-Langer, 1993). Teacher reflection can be prompted in the format of written reflections, with or without specific guidelines, or solicited during group interviews or workshops, sometimes accompanied by watching video recordings of their own teaching (Rich & Hannafin, 2009).

LaBoskey (2003) developed a framework for considering teacher reflection as a problem-solving task where teachers experience a complex interplay of cognitive abilities, beliefs, values, attitudes, and emotions. Because of the complexity involved, both teachers’ personal characteristics and the context where reflection occurs could influence its nature, with an inherent hierarchical structure spanning across the technical, descriptive, dialogic, and critical level (Hatton & Smith, 1995). While the majority of teacher reflection focuses on the technical level where teachers are most concerned with following exact rules to achieve the efficacy of certain standards or goals of teaching, the descriptive level of reflection allows teachers to be more analytical about their performance in terms of best practices. The dialogical level further helps teachers to be deliberate in negotiating and weighing alternatives to solve problems that arise from teaching. Finally, the critical level of reflection considers how teaching may fit into or disrupt the broader ecological system of the society, such as equity, justice, moral, and ethical standards. Although each level of reflection provides valuable benefits, higher levels of reflection occur with less frequency and require increased time and efforts as well as additional knowledge. For teachers to change their behavior through reflection, it is often required that they advance beyond technical reflection to experience reflection at the descriptive or dialogical levels.

Although teacher reflection has been shown to be a promising tool to prompt discussions about teaching and learning (Borko et al., 2008), research has also found that teacher reflection may not be sufficient in helping teacher change their behavior or views of teaching (Šarić & Šteh, 2017). The barriers range from internal resistance when teachers’ own views of teaching differ significantly from the essence of the new teaching methods that they are attempting, to external obstacles where time and opportunities are lacking for teachers to develop metacognitive skills to effectively reflect on their experiences (McNamara, 1990). In addition, reflections can put teachers in a vulnerable position as they expose their feelings, perceptions, and beliefs to others. Therefore, depending on whether teachers attribute their failures or successes to themselves or to the external environment, they may feel uneasy during reflection and thus try to avoid it. For teacher reflection to be effective, it is important to adopt a collaborative approach that provides a positive and supportive environment, as well as to allow sufficient time and support for teachers to feel comfortable exploring their internal beliefs and developing metacognitive skills to reflect on what they have gone through (Zeichner & Liston, 1987).

In recent years, teacher reflection has been incorporated into professional development programs that focus on promoting dialogic teaching (Pehmer et al., 2015; Wilkinson et al., 2017). For example, Sedova (2017) found that when teachers are provided with opportunities to reflect on their experiences during the study while receiving timely feedback from researchers, they benefit significantly and are more likely to modify their instruction to be aligned with the principles of dialogic teaching.

Teacher motivation

Teacher motivation theories are generally concerned with answering the following questions: Why do teachers become teachers? What are their career goals for teaching? Why do they stay in the profession? (Han et al., 2016). Answers to these questions reveal how teachers’ motivation may influence their attitudes, beliefs, and adoptions of reform-oriented teaching strategies. In particular, teachers’ achievement goals for teaching, which are defined as “different orientations toward teaching competence, such as developing or demonstrating teaching competence” (Cho & Shim, 2013, p. 13), have been recently recognized as an important aspect of teacher motivation (Butler, 2007; Retelsdorf et al., 2010; Retelsdorf & Guünther, 2011). Previous research has identified three types of achievement goal orientations, including mastery goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoidance goals (Elliot, 1999). Teachers with mastery goals for teaching focus on improving their teaching skills; teachers with performance-approach goals strive for improving their superior teaching ability; teachers with performance-avoidance goals are concerned with avoiding demonstration of their lack of teaching capacity (Butler, 2007).

Although emerging research has acknowledged the important role of teachers’ achievement goals in teaching effectiveness (Shim et al., 2013) and student learning (Wolters, 2004), little is known about how teachers’ achievement goals influence their understanding and enactment of dialogic practices, such as CR, which requires a fundamental shift in a teacher’s role in the classroom. Previous research suggested that the mastery goal orientation was connected to more adaptive forms of instructional practices, whereas performance goal orientation was associated with less adaptive practices (Retelsdorf & Guünther, 2011). Thus, it stands to reason that teachers with different orientation goals would approach challenges in implementing curriculum innovation differently and may engage in different types of help-seeking behavior (Butler, 2007).

The present study

In the present study, we examined teachers’ reflections on facilitating CR discussions by analyzing the challenges and successes that teachers identified in their individual journals and semi-structured group debriefing interviews. We were also interested in understanding teachers’ reflections through the lens of motivation. In particular, we sought to address the following questions:

What were the challenges that teachers identified as they learned to conduct CR discussions?

Over time, what progress did teachers think they make as they became more familiar with scaffolding CR discussions?

In this process, how might teachers’ motivation, particularly their achievement goals, influence their perception of challenges and successes?

Method

To address these research questions, we analyzed data collected from a CR intervention study conducted in Beijing, China (see details below). The data corpus consists of transcripts of seven semi-structured debriefing interviews where teachers reflected on their experiences facilitating CR discussions each week and 13 reflective journals that teachers wrote during the study. We employed thematic analysis of teacher reflections from the interview transcripts and written journals to understand teachers’ perceptions of their own learning progress.

Participants

Two fourth-grade teachers from an urban elementary school that serves primarily working-class families in Beijing participated in this study. The school principal had been actively looking for opportunities to experiment with innovative dialogic pedagogies and was thus very enthusiastic about this project. She recommended two of her “star” teachers to take part in the study and offered any administrative support as necessary to the teachers. One teacher was Mrs. Chang (pseudonym), a young teacher who held a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and had taught for 4 years at the time of the study. There were 27 students (14 boys and 13 girls) in her class. According to the principal, Mrs. Chang was a rising star in the school and showed great promise to grow. Taking part in this study was an invaluable training opportunity for Mrs. Chang to further develop her pedagogy. The other teacher, Mrs. Kai (pseudonym), was a master teacher who had taught for 20 years. There were 29 students (15 boys and 14 girls) in her class. As a senior and master teacher, Mrs. Kai often represented the school in delivering exemplary lessons in district-level professional development events. She was well trusted by the Director of Teaching in the school and shouldered major responsibilities across a variety of key school projects. Taking part in this project was probably one of the many other tasks that she was involved in at the same time. Both teachers were the homeroom teachers of their respective classrooms and taught Chinese language arts.

Materials and procedures

At the beginning of the study, a baseline Chinese lesson was videotaped in each classroom to document individual teacher’s regular instructional practices. Mrs. Chang and Mrs. Kai then went through a 2-day training workshop, led by senior CR researchers who had rich experience training American teachers to use CR. During the training, the teachers first learned the theoretical framework of CR and the research findings of CR from both American and Chinese classrooms. Teachers then watched videos of exemplary CR discussions and were introduced to nine commonly used instructional moves that they can apply in facilitating CR discussions (Clark et al., 2003). After the workshop, the teachers divided their classrooms into four heterogeneous groups of six to eight students, each a representative cross-section of the class in terms of gender, talkativeness, and academic ability.

During the following 8 weeks, students from Mrs. Chang’s and Mrs. Kai’s classrooms participated in eight CR discussions in total, approximating one discussion every week, for an average of 20 min each. There were at least one lead researcher and two student research assistants present to videotape the discussions, take field notes, provide onsite professional development support when needed, and conduct semi-structured debriefing interviews with the teachers after each CR discussion except the third week due to scheduling conflicts (see Appendix for guiding questions used in teacher debriefing interviews). In total, teachers participated in seven audiotaped interviews (Mrs. Kai missed the sixth debriefing interview for personal reasons). Additionally, following the school’s reflective practices where teachers are required by the Director of Teaching to write journals on a regular basis, Mrs. Chang and Mrs. Kai wrote a journal after completing each set of CR discussions.

Data corpus

Data analyzed in the present study included audio recordings of teacher debriefing interviews that totaled 490 min and 13 reflective journals—6 from Mrs. Chang and 7 from Mrs. Kai.

Approach to Data Analysis

Thematic analysis of debriefing interviews

To examine the content of teachers’ debriefing interviews, we conducted a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts following the guidance from Braun and Clarke (2006). In Step 1, the lead author read and reread the transcripts several times while listening to the audio recordings to ensure the accuracy of the transcripts. Meanwhile, a running memo for each debriefing interview was created to document all the initial themes that captured the researcher’s attention from the transcripts. In Step 2, based on the memos, initial codes were generated that captured prominent features of teachers’ reflections, particularly surrounding the research questions where teachers discussed the challenges that they encountered and the progress that they made in facilitating CR discussions. In Step 3, codes were further reviewed and codes of similar meanings were combined to create new themes that explained larger sections of the data. All the initial codes that were pertinent to the research questions were incorporated into a theme.

Following an iterative process of data scrutiny, in Step 4, any themes that were too divergent from the research questions or had too little data to support them were discarded. The refinement of the themes took place at two hierarchical levels, with Level 1 to ensure all the coded data forming a coherent pattern, that is, theme, and Level 2 to examine how the themes fit together to represent the entire data set while revealing a broad picture of the story. In Step 5, once these two levels of refinement were accomplished, each theme was defined clearly with a concise name that conveys instantaneously the essence of the theme and was supported with a detailed analysis that not only revealed the story under that theme but also showed connections to the overall story from the entire data set. Finally, the interview transcripts were searched again to locate representative examples that clearly showcased elements of the themes.

Thematic analysis of reflective journals

We followed a similar approach to examine teachers’ reflective journals, which were much shorter than the video transcripts. We compared themes identified in the journals to those identified in the transcripts as a way of triangulation to enhance the validity of our analyses.

Narrative of each teacher’s learning trajectory

Finally, to understand the individual experience of each teacher in scaffolding CR discussions, we organized results from the thematic analysis to create a coherent narrative for each teacher to illustrate their changing attitude and behavior over time.

Results

The result section is organized by common themes that emerged from thematic analysis. Our presentation of results corresponds to the order of the three research questions.

Reflections on challenges

Through detailed analyses of teachers’ debriefing interviews and journals, we found that the major challenges that teachers encountered as they learned to carry out CR discussions included the drastic shift in their roles, the intense cognitive demands to scaffold CR, and the emotional stress associated with handling uncertainties of CR discussions.

Challenge I: An abrupt shift in the role of the instructor to discussion facilitator and relinquished control over both the content and turns of students’ speech. During the first few weeks, teachers’ reflections showed that the transition from their regular teaching to CR was difficult. The two teachers’ reflections, however, revealed slight differences in how they responded to the shift and uncertainties that accompanied the change.

As a young and relatively new teacher, Mrs. Chang had many questions about CR when she first joined this project. One of the first challenges that she reflected on was the new “facilitator” role she was supposed to take—the transition from being an instructor who teaches at the center of the class to becoming a discussion facilitator who coaches from the side. Because of this change, she felt lost at the beginning of the project and was relatively quiet during the first two debriefing interviews. In her reflective journal, she recalled her very first set of CR discussions:

[Reflective journal 1] To be honest, I was completely puzzled when I first started CR. I was unsure about the new coaching role of teachers. After last week’s discussions, I was very uncertain about when the teacher should intervene and scaffold students’ discussions.

To be better prepared, Mrs. Chang decided to spend extra time reading through the training materials provided during the initial teacher workshop to see if she had missed anything, as shared in her first debriefing interview below:

[Debriefing interview 1] Since we finished the first set of discussions, I have been studying the teacher training manual day and night, thinking about it, and reading it numerous times. I tried to envision what I should do in my mind.

Despite her dedicated efforts and attention to the technical skills of CR facilitation, Mrs. Chang was still overwhelmed by all the subtle elements of this new format of teaching that she simply did not know how to get started, as written in her reflective journal:

[Reflective journal 1] When the first group sat down for the CR discussion, all of sudden my mind went blank. I couldn’t think of any of the positions, evidence, or reasons that I’d have prepared, even the Big Question had skipped my mind. I was that nervous! So that’s why I just asked my students to have the discussion based on the article after we’d set up the goals. During the discussion, I was trying to listen to their talk, take some notes, and observe how they participated so I could facilitate at the right time…I felt like a mess, just like the very first day I became a teacher.

Compared to Mrs. Chang, Mrs. Kai started off as eager to excel in this new pedagogy. As a master teacher who had over 20 years of outstanding teaching experiences, she asked many questions during the very first debriefing interview and actively sought help from the research team with the concerns about her decreased control of classroom discourse and the unpredictability of children’s talk. Different from her regular teaching where Mrs. Kai usually had a well-thought-out plan and prepared questions that she knew answers to, CR features open-format discussions that were often managed spontaneously by children themselves. As children obtained more autonomy in deciding what they would like to say and when they wanted to join the discussions, Mrs. Kai felt lost and incapable of delivering her lesson plan in a way that satisfied her. She described herself as oscillating between being worried and feeling confused during the first set of CR discussions—worried when a group became very quiet and confused when another group’s discussion became so heated that she could not keep track of it:

[Reflective journal 1] CR discussions were a completely new pedagogy for me. As I sat with the group of seven to eight students, I was no longer the central figure of the lesson, but instead took on a more peripheral role. My mind went blank, and I had no idea what to say—I even completely forgot the Big Question from the story. This should not have happened to a veteran teacher like myself who had taught for more than twenty years.

Challenge II: The intense cognitive demands to provide appropriate and timely facilitation during rapid-paced small group discussions. Related to the issue of teachers’ decreased control and shifted role was the increased demands on their abilities to react on-the-spot to scaffold CR discussions effectively. Facing this challenge, Mrs. Chang expressed her lack of confidence in grasping the nature of scaffolding, even after completing several sets of CR discussions. She openly admitted that facilitating CR discussion was a daunting task for her, as her facilitation often seemed to interrupt discussions in an unproductive way. In the fourth debriefing interview, where Mrs. Chang participated in a practice CR discussion with her colleague Mrs. Kai and members of the research team using the same story that her students had just discussed, Mrs. Chang said:

[Debriefing interview 4] I don’t think students’ discussions can reach such high quality like the one we just had, because I felt that we gave almost no repetitive reasons, it was a great discussion: We listened and then tried to complement each other’s views, or think from another perspective. It would be so difficult to guide students to reach this high level…I also realized that whenever I tried to intervene, students became hesitant to speak, even though I didn’t take any particular side at all. My facilitation seemed to prevent them from openly sharing their thoughts as if they feared to make any mistakes.

Mrs. Kai also felt unsure about the nature of scaffolding during CR discussions. She kept wondering whether and how she should intervene and what it meant to provide contingent and timely support for her students. She could not help but kept comparing CR to her regular teaching, as shared in her first teacher debriefing interview:

[Debriefing interview 1] Scaffolding in CR is very different from my regular class. Typically, I can easily identify where my students struggle. For example, if a student doesn’t understand a sentence or only interprets it literally, I can quickly spot that and help him improve his comprehension. But in CR discussions, it is way more difficult to figure out where students get stuck. Taking “uptake other’s ideas” as an example, how do you decide if students’ subsequent talk already fulfills this goal? Should I intervene right away or wait to see if eventually, they would do so? You see, it is way more challenging.

Besides struggling with the timing and nature of scaffolding in general, Mrs. Kai felt the extra burden of providing individual support to meet her students’ needs, especially given that each small group consisted of students of varied talkativeness and academic abilities. She was not sure how to strike a balance between the comprehensiveness of her scaffolding while leaving sufficient space for each individual child to grow. She shared in the fourth debriefing interview:

[Debriefing interview 4] When I helped one student, like reminding the student to invite others to talk, I’d probably miss what happened to the other students. There was a lot to take care of during the discussion. It reminds me of the dilemma of teaching writing. If I provided very detailed guidance, guess what, everyone would write a similar essay; but if I gave no instruction at all, well, students might come up with lots of different ideas for the essay, but then I would have big trouble to help them revise to meet the expectation. I think it is a conundrum.

Challenge III: The emotional stress to balance between facilitating discussions and giving students control while not knowing exactly how to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching. In addition to the cognitive challenges, both teachers discussed noncognitive challenges, including their affective reactions. Although they felt a similar range of negative emotions, the two teachers experienced them differently over time.

Mrs. Chang expressed emotional stress mostly during early discussions. As shown in the example below, she confessed about feeling anxious and her mind went blank when students did not respond well to her prompts during the discussions. She felt disappointed in herself and her students and questioned if she failed to prepare sufficiently to lead CR:

[Debriefing interview 1] I was very worried during the first group’s discussion today. Actually, my mind went blank all of a sudden (when they were quiet). Last time I was too nervous about everything, I thought it was normal when students did not talk—they could be anxious, too, so I was very patient with them. Today it was different, because I had expected them to be able to hold a good discussion, so I was quite disappointed when the discussion did not meet my expectations. Perhaps I was not fully prepared.

As time passed, however, Mrs. Chang mentioned such negative feelings much less frequently. During the fourth debriefing interview, although she acknowledged the anxiety she had after every discussion as she recognized the lack of clear assessment criteria in CR, Mrs. Chang gave greater emphasis to her gratitude for the support and encouragement she received from the research team as she navigated the uncertainties. Her reflection on the nature of CR discussions seemed to suggest a progression from focusing on the technical aspects of facilitating CR to a more descriptive/dialogical level, where she recognized the open-ended and flexible nature of student-centered discussions:

[Debriefing interview 4] I felt anxious after finishing every CR discussion because I really don’t think there is a certain standard to evaluate whether a discussion is good or bad. Regardless of how the discussions go, however, every time the research team has been very supportive of my progress, and I am very moved by the encouragement.

Mrs. Kai also experienced a range of emotional stress that included anxiety, confusion, and exhaustion as she faced the uncertainties of CR discussions, particularly the unpredictability of students’ dialogues. Her choice of words was stronger than that of Mrs. Chang. For example, in the fifth debriefing interview, she said:

[Debriefing interview 5] I really think this is too difficult for me. I feel beaten up completely. I think I’m losing my confidence again.

Different from Mrs. Chang whose emotional stress started to fade away from the fourth set of CR discussions, Mrs. Kai’s stress lingered throughout the entire project, and she continued to experience frustrations and unsettled feelings until the final discussion. As shared in the very last debriefing interview, Mrs. Kai described how her disappointment intensified as she failed to obtain a sense of control over CR despite trying very hard. Her reflections still primarily focused on the technical aspects of CR, and she seemed to have been stuck in reconciling the differences between her regular teaching and CR discussions.

[Debriefing interview 8] Yes, this is too hard. I felt as if I couldn’t control the discussion at all. It was extremely challenging, as there was no hint about whether I should talk or not. I also had no control over what my students would say. Regardless of all the different perspectives that I could think of and prepare in advance, there was still a good chance that some students would never think of them at all…Well, actually, I think things do happen suddenly during my regular classes as well, but I certainly could handle that kind of disruption. It is common that I’d expect some innovative ideas to emerge when teaching new things; I can always successfully respond to those unexpected moments in regular teaching, but it’s not the same in CR. There were plenty of moments during CR discussions that I had no idea how to respond to my students.

Reflections on successes

Despite all of the challenges that teachers encountered in learning CR, they also perceived noticeable successes as they became more familiar with the new format of teaching. Their successful experiences were revealed in three major facets that included understanding CR better, supporting students’ progress with success, and feeling more relaxed and comfortable with the new pedagogy.

Success I: Understanding CR better. Because CR was so different from traditional pedagogies in Chinese classrooms, it took both teachers several weeks to get used to the norms of a typically structured CR discussion before they started to develop an in-depth understanding of this dialogic pedagogy.

Mrs. Chang’s breakthrough with CR occurred during the fifth set of discussions where she had a striking realization about the facilitator’s role in CR. She came to notice that “sufficient preparation” has a very different meaning in dialogic teaching context than in traditional instruction. As she elaborated below:

[Debriefing interview 5] And then I suddenly realized that it’s not necessarily because I didn’t prepare enough, perhaps those fleeting moments of inspiration could only occur naturally during discussions. So I was thinking: “How could I guide students to think from other perspectives, like putting themselves in others’ shoes?” I recalled Ms. Qi (the lead researcher in teacher training) said that we need to let children be immersed in the story instead of viewing the story as a bystander. Thus, by asking children to imagine themselves as the protagonist of the story, they may be more likely to think of alternative perspectives. After these eight discussions, I now feel more flexible about when and how to scaffold. I think it’s imperative to listen and observe whether students were able to have an in-depth discussion (on their own), even if it focused on just one particular aspect of the Big Question. If they are already thinking quite deeply about the issue, then I don’t have to intervene; but if they are merely scratching the surface, then I can intervene to guide them to think more deeply. I think this kind of training for attentive listening has even helped me to become more logical.

Mrs. Chang continued to explore this concept, and toward the end of this study, she became much more acutely aware of the importance of listening to provide appropriate support timely. Compared to her earlier perception that successful scaffolding depends exclusively on teachers’ preparation before discussions, her later reflections showed a more sophisticated view of CR where she trusted students as capable thinkers and understood the importance of attentive listening on the teacher’s part.

Mrs. Kai also developed some further understanding of CR as she started to discover similarities between CR and her regular teaching. As described in her reflective journal below, Mrs. Kai realized that the CR story her students read served as an anchor, instead of the sole base, for them to engage in a rich discussion. Students had the freedom and opportunities to bring in their background knowledge during the discussions to support their positions.

Different from Mrs. Chang, however, Mrs. Kai only expanded her view of CR based on her existing knowledge of regular Chinese teaching and did not advance beyond it:

[Reflective journal 5] I was slightly worried about how deep students’ discussions would be as I wasn’t able to find too much evidence from either position myself. In fact, I certainly had underestimated my students! They were not only able to find evidence from the text but also used their background knowledge to support their viewpoints. When I heard Ms. Qi’s (the lead researcher) praise, I suddenly realized that there is some common ground between CR and my regular Chinese lessons. For example, when I helped guide students’ reading comprehension, they could either focus on the keywords of the sentences or connect to their background knowledge.

Success II: Supporting students’ progress with success. Following a better understanding of CR, teachers also reported success in facilitating students’ CR discussions. They were particularly encouraged by this progress since it served as a feedback loop to confirm that they were on track adapting to the new format of teaching.

Mrs. Chang noticed lots of positive changes in her students starting from the fifth debriefing interview. Initially, she did not naturally attribute such positive changes to her approach of facilitating CR, and the research team had to prompt her to think specifically about what she had done well. In later reflections, she was able to see such connections readily as she became more confident in herself. In the excerpt below, she described the positive changes of her weakest group and proudly explained how her strategies had effectively challenged the group to think about divergent positions and carry out a more interesting and sophisticated discussion:

[Debriefing interview 8] You know the third group has always been my biggest headache, but today, they were the first group to do CR, and I was pleasantly surprised by their huge improvement. I couldn’t help but wonder, wow, how could such a weak group end up carrying out such a great discussion? At the very beginning, all of them thought that Gavin should not fleet, but then I tried to prompt them to consider the other side. I asked them to think from Gavin’s position, and used their stated positions to challenge them. Guess what, it worked! They changed to 3:4 in terms of yes or no position, and because of the divergent positions, their discussion today was way more interesting than it had ever been.

Although Mrs. Kai also recognized her students’ positive progress during CR, she seldom associated such progress with her facilitation. We were only able to find one example below in her fifth reflective journal where she commented on how her scaffolding helped the group to maintain a more balanced distribution of opposing positions.

[Reflective journal 5] In this discussion, I decided to try something new spontaneously. I asked my students to debrief on how the discussion went based on the goals they set on their own, so they could adjust their goals for the next discussions. Both group 3 and group 4 started with 1 vs. 7 in the positions that they took. I decided to help students, particularly the majority side, to think about the opposite views. I found my facilitation helpful to some degree. Overall, my kids were able to have an in-depth discussion as they thought about key points from different perspectives. I do think their discussions have become better and better every time.

Success III: Feeling more relaxed and comfortable with the new pedagogy. In addition to obtaining a better understanding of CR and experiencing more success, teachers started to feel more relaxed and find CR more enjoyable as time passed, particularly for Mrs. Chang. She noticed the change in her own emotions and the reactions from her children toward her emotions, which resulted in an interesting theory that she hypothesized about the role that positive affect may play during CR discussions. In her opinion, only when students feel relaxed will they be able to engage more deeply in the co-construction of meanings during the discussions; teachers’ positive affect is instrumental in setting up the tone and context for an engaging discussion. Based on this hypothesis, Mrs. Chang tried different techniques to create a relaxing yet supportive environment during CR. For example, she purposefully chose to sit off the table so her students were more likely to self-regulate the discussions, but she made sure to provide quick feedback, such as nodding her head, smiling, and giving verbal encouragement, when her students turned around to look at her for acknowledgment.

[Debriefing interview 5] I think it was their authentic views, so I was very glad to hear them. Some of their talk was so funny that I couldn’t help but laughing with them. I think that helped my students feel more at ease. I wish we could have more time to keep the discussion going. I think that’s the successful part of the discussion.

Motivational factors

It is evident from the findings above that teachers experienced significant challenges as they transitioned from regular teaching to facilitating CR discussions. Our analysis revealed that it took at least 4 weeks before the teachers gradually developed a better understanding of CR and started to feel more at ease with the new pedagogy. Interestingly, however, the two teachers exhibited quite different patterns of reflections and learning curves despite having gone through the same training provided by the research team. To understand what may have contributed to the different experiences and perceptions between Mrs. Chang and Mrs. Chang, we further examined each teacher’s motivational profile revealed by their reflections and created a separate narrative for each teacher.

Mrs. Chang: A journey of hesitant start and exciting growth

Although Mrs. Chang had a very hesitant start with CR, she demonstrated an open mindset and a strong desire to learn more about CR and improve her skills with this new discussion-based pedagogy. From her initial reflection where she admitted spending extra time at home to study the teacher training materials to her later reflections where she increasingly sought more feedback from the research team, she was able to went beyond her comfort zone with traditional Chinese teaching and developed a more in-depth understanding of CR. Although she had no less share of difficulties and tough moments along this steep learning curve, she interpreted challenges in running CR as “growth pain” and embraced them graciously. In her own words, she explained her excitement of dealing with challenges and innovations and a desire to master this new form of pedagogy:

[Debriefing interview 8] I personally enjoyed challenging tasks and preferred them over repetitive work, so I didn’t feel it was too bad. I like trying new adventures. I think learning how to run CR discussions was very refreshing (compared to regular teaching) and motivating, so I have been enjoying the process quite a bit. Although it is nothing short of growth pain or hardship, overall, I find it very interesting.

Mrs. Chang was also highly motivated by the positive progress that she witnessed in her students. It is evident that once her students had no trouble initiating and maintaining a lively discussion, she felt more at ease, and very little did she dwell on the challenges she elaborated on during her early debriefing interviews. Her reflections after the fourth discussion had shifted from expressing frustrations and uncertainties to be exclusively about the positive changes in her students’ talk and behavior during CR. Not only was Mrs. Chang encouraged by the multidimensional changes among her students, such as their growing confidence with CR and improved skills in argumentation and reasoning, she also paid close attention to the unique progress within individuals and cheered them on.

[Reflective journal 8] CR discussions have brought my students with a completely new level of learning experience. They absolutely love it! As I talked to my students, I find that they have all progressed in different ways through CR, some are more confident, some now enjoy reading storybooks more, some are capable of thinking more deeply, and some have learned to think from others’ perspectives.

In addition to witnessing students’ progress, Mrs. Chang’s growth in learning about how to conduct CR was supported by the research team and her school administrators. There were multiple times throughout the study where Mrs. Chang openly expressed her gratitude for the ongoing professional development from the research team and the school leaders. As a relatively new teacher, Mrs. Chang was particularly appreciative of the opportunity to participate in the study while receiving continuous trust and support from the school administrators. As she experienced the ups and downs of CR, Mrs. Chang had many fleeting moments where she did not feel like she could persist with this new format of pedagogy. Time and time again, however, the research team ensured that they were available to provide technical and emotional support whenever Mrs. Chang needed it. The school leaders even delegated some of her daily teaching responsibilities to peer colleagues so she can be fully engaged in this project.

[Debriefing interview 7] Because there is a research team of experts to provide funding and coaching, also there is a lot of support from the administrators in our school, so I don’t have to worry about other things and just focusing on learning how to do CR. This is tremendously helpful. I also think the research team provides a lot of help, particularly in preparing for the argumentation outline, which I did find demanding at the beginning. It would have been too much work if I was left alone to think about exhaustive reasons and evidence for both sides of the discussions. That’s why I said I didn’t feel too burdened because I feel I am a part of this large team that helps each other throughout this project.

At the end of the study, Mrs. Chang reiterated the benefits she had obtained from taking part in the study. Learning how to conduct CR had not only enriched her pedagogy repertoire but also helped her advance philosophies of teaching and learning. As she started to incorporate CR into her regular teaching, it seemed natural that she would continue to employ CR discussions in her future teaching. Mrs. Chang’s learning journey with CR is an authentic case example that we can use in future CR professional development.

[Reflective journal 8] Through CR, I have developed a new concept of teaching and learning. I’ve also tried to use CR in my regular teaching so that students can have more autonomy to share their ideas with each other and the class. I think this experience would be of great help to my future teaching!

Mrs. Kai: A journey of self-doubt and slow growth

Mrs. Kai’s emotional stress and her lack of confidence in guiding CR discussions seemed to be induced by her performance-oriented motivation. She was worried about how she looked in front of the research team from the very beginning. As shared in her first teacher debriefing interview, she was concerned that her students’ performance during CR would reflect her competence or incompetence as a teacher, despite the research team intended to support her learning with no judgment. She attributed students’ lack of participation to her own incompetence and considered it as a threat to her status as a master teacher.

[Debriefing interview 1] The first discussion group today really irritated me. When we returned to class, I had to check with them about why they didn’t talk at all. It made me look so bad. I was trying to nudge them during CR, but it was useless. I was so anxious because this kind of silence would have never occurred in my regular teaching. You know, if a teacher was observed while teaching and nobody talked when they should, that would be a disastrous lesson. Do you know how people would think of the teacher? They’d believe that it was the teacher’s fault that she didn’t help the kids develop the skills or gain the appropriate knowledge to have an animated discussion. If, for example, things like that happened when we had an open classroom lesson for other teachers to observe, no doubt that there must have been problems with the teacher’s pedagogy. That’s why I am reflecting on what I must have done wrong today.

Although Mrs. Kai gradually realized that the research team intended to support her learning and had no intention to evaluate her teaching in this research project, she was constantly pressured by the presence of school administrators and peer teachers in this project. For example, after having completed the seventh set of CR discussions, Mrs. Kai wondered if students could ever reach a level where they eloquently articulated their ideas to impress school leaders who happened to observe her class doing CR. Clearly, Mrs. Kai still had a strong tendency to control her students’ CR discussions and viewed her students’ performance in CR as a demonstration of her teaching competence. Because of this performance-oriented goal, she had a difficult time releasing her control during CR and worried more about appearing lacking mastery of the new pedagogy. As a result, she was more reluctant to embrace all the new uncertainties and challenges and made less progress in developing her confidence in facilitating CR compared to Mrs. Chang.

[Debriefing interview 7] Do you think one day students can be as eloquent during a CR discussion as those we saw during an open lesson (a common practice in China)? I think that’s what I’d hope to achieve one day so that school leaders will immediately recognize how well I have trained my students.

Additionally, although Mrs. Kai continued to notice her students’ progress through CR, particularly how “quiet children are now eager to talk in class” and how “most students’ reasoning has improved significantly,” she also tended to compare students among themselves and attribute their varying levels of performance in CR to their inert abilities. She held a static and deficit view of students’ abilities and commented on how those with lower academic status also performed less well in CR compared to students with higher academic status.

[Debriefing interview 8] I think CR can certainly help children develop their reasoning skills, however, after observing all the eight sets of discussions, I believe more firmly that those students who are performing poorly in academics will also have issues with oral communication and thinking abilities.

Finally, Mrs. Kai questioned the lack of clear assessment criteria in teaching and learning during CR, which may be reinforced by her performance-oriented goals and desire to demonstrate herself as a competent teacher. As a veteran teacher who knew Chinese teaching and learning standards by heart, Mrs. Kai had closely followed the assessment criteria in designing her classes and had a strong focus on improving students’ fundamental literacy skills such as reading comprehension. Although CR had great potentials to fulfill the new Chinese Common Standards for Language, the standards are still very new and have not been translated into detailed practice guidelines. Thus, Mrs. Kai had a hard time appreciating the benefits of CR, especially when there was no clear assessment plan that she could draw on to measure students’ progress after the discussions. She concluded that it would probably not be a good idea to promote CR before an assessment plan that aligns with Chinese Common Standards for Language is well established.

[Debriefing interview 8] Well, can we have a clearer assessment plan when we structure CR? For example, in terms of the reading comprehension skills and oral communicative competence, can we have rubrics for different levels, so that when students try CR, we would know exactly how to help them meet the standards? I can give you a specific example in teaching elementary Chinese as I’m most familiar with this subject. We have very clear assessment criteria for teaching and learning of Chinese, like Level 1 is for first and second grades, and there are separate levels for third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, etc. Then within each level, I have more specific benchmarks for a unit. So even though it is not strictly prescribed, I have a pretty clear guideline to follow with enough flexibility to meet those standards. But if we don’t have an assessment plan for CR besides letting students talk, won’t we feel quite lost?

As a result, Mrs. Kai did not believe that CR discussions can be fully integrated into regular Chinese teaching to enhance students’ whole language competence. She perceived CR as a mismatch to nurture student’s basic reading skills and thought of CR as misalignment with students’ reading aloud skills. Her reflections below clearly illustrated her narrow view of literacy competency as basic reading skills. Therefore, it is unlikely that Mrs. Kai would continue to employ CR in her teaching after the study was completed.

[Debriefing interview 8] I think we may be able to use CR with the Chinese curriculum in a very limited capacity, for example, I don’t think it’s appropriate to help children develop their Chinese language skills. CR would not have much impact on the learning of Chinese characters, vocabulary, or sentence structures. I think it would be very difficult to use CR, for example, how do you help train students’ reading skills through CR? Don’t you have to cultivate their abilities through classes? How could CR be helpful?

Discussions

In this study, we examined two Chinese teachers’ individual written reflections and group debriefing interviews in implementing a dialogic pedagogy called CR. We found that when learning to employ this new pedagogical method, teachers experienced significant challenges in facing the shift in their roles and responsibilities, in managing the high demand to provide timely and appropriate scaffolding, and in dealing with a range of emotional stress. Despite these difficulties, teachers were able to make progress that included developing a better understanding of CR, supporting students with success, and feeling more at ease with their teaching over time. Moreover, we identified teachers’ achievement goal orientation as playing an important role in their individual learning trajectory.

Compared to regular Chinese language teaching at the elementary level where teachers assume a central and authoritative role, CR presented many uncertainties to teachers, especially as they had to release a large amount of control in classroom discourse and thus could no longer accurately predict what students would say and how they would perform. This is not surprising given the contrast between CR and traditional classroom pedagogies in China. Another uncertainty largely resides in the nature of scaffolding CR, and the lack of clear assessment criteria to evaluate students’ learning or the effectiveness of their own teaching. As a result, teachers felt worried, confused, and lost at the beginning when they attempted to adapt to this new pedagogy.

Although CR presented many uncertainties, the current results showed that teachers’ willingness to embrace uncertainties largely determines whether they can overcome the challenges to make rapid progress afterward. Such willingness is influenced by several factors, including teachers’ motivation (goal orientation), their views of student performance, their understanding of the goals of Chinese language instruction, and administrative and emotional support they received.

In particular, we found that teachers’ motivation, either performance-oriented or mastery-oriented, plays a key role in how they perceive the benefits and challenges of CR, how they interpret the uncertainties of CR, and whether they are willing to adapt their instructional practices to embrace such uncertainties. As illustrated in the “Results” section, the performance goal orientation of Mrs. Kai renders her more prone to frustration because she often interprets the occasional silence during CR and the lack of student participation as an indicator of her incompetence in teaching, as opposed to viewing them as a normal learning curve for students to learn to participate in a new format of classroom discourse. She feels a sense of failure as she loses control over student performance. In contrast, the mastery goal orientation of Mrs. Chang helps her to think positively about the challenges and uncertainties she encountered. She is concerned with mastering the new pedagogy through trials and errors, rather than presenting herself as someone smart or competent in the eyes of researchers and administrators.

In addition, we found that teachers’ view of Chinese language instruction and their evaluations of student performance influenced their adaptation to CR. In CR, teachers are expected to transcend the traditional view of teaching literacy to embrace this new pedagogy as a means to promote high-level comprehension and reasoning skills. At the same time, children’s active participation and higher order thinking skills further reinforce teachers’ adaptive instructional practices. The progress Mrs. Kai made was slow because her view about the goals of reading instruction in Chinese was too narrow. She emphasized too much on fundamental literacy skills, such as learning new Chinese characters, understanding sentence structures, or appreciating the beauty and rhythm of the language. She failed to recognize the importance of CR in promoting high-level comprehension, reasoning, and oral communication skills among her students.

On the contrary, Mrs. Chang appreciated to a greater extent how students benefited from CR and the exciting progress they made in their participation in CR discussions. It should be emphasized that CR is not intended to replace the Chinese language arts curriculum; rather, it is supposed to enrich the traditional curriculum. As Mrs. Kai reflected, the lack of clear assessment methods in CR lessons posed particular challenge to teachers, as they could not pinpoint the benefits of CR on lower level reading skills. Thus, we argue that in future CR professional development programs, it is important to help teachers make the connection between lower level reading skills and higher order reasoning skills. Given that CR has the potential to fulfill certain goals set by the new Chinese Common Standards for Language, particularly in helping students develop collaboration and critical thinking skills, it will also be helpful to explain more explicitly to teachers how CR can help them fulfill these requirements in the new standards.

We also identified that the level of administrative and emotional support teachers received also impacted their adaptation to such pedagogies. Both teachers reflected on their deep frustration, moments of self-doubt, and inner resistance when they attempted to learn to facilitate CR discussions. The two teachers differed, however, in the sources of their frustration. Mrs. Chang was ready to learn new pedagogies but felt challenged to scaffold student discussions appropriately. On the other hand, as a master teacher, Mrs. Kai experienced a huge conflict in the role she played in conducting regular lessons and in facilitating CR discussions. She felt a sense of failure when her “successful” teaching strategies worked less well in CR discussions. Although Mrs. Chang expressed her appreciation for the support she received from the research team and school administrators, much work needs to be done to build teacher communities in the future to promote dialogic pedagogies among Chinese teachers. For example, future teacher learning should incorporate more opportunities for collective reflections where teachers feel safe and comfortable to share their emotions and experiences. It is important for teachers to process their frustrations and emotions and know they are not alone. Besides, the iterative process of co-constructing a notion of dialogic pedagogy during ongoing debriefing interviews is in itself dialogic and highly valuable, as it involves teachers and university researchers in cumulatively building on each other’s ideas and experiences to promote the dialogical level of teacher reflections.

It should be noted that the current study constitutes the very first attempt to train Chinese teachers to implement CR in language arts classrooms and to document their reflections throughout the enactment process. By investigating teachers’ learning progression in facilitating collaborative discussions through analyzing an extensive collection of their reflections, this study enriches our understanding of teachers as agents of change in establishing collaborative, reasoned classroom discourse that has been shown to be instrumental in helping children talk, learn, and think better. This case study of two teachers also shows the value of debriefing interviews in understanding how teachers of different professional backgrounds can be supported to incorporate peer-led collaborative discussions into their pedagogical practices. Once we know how to support teachers in changing their teaching practices, we are on the right track of moving closer to achieving one of the essential goals of education, that is, to cultivate citizenry equipped with essential 21st-century skills like critical thinking, collaboration, and deliberate reasoning.