 Good afternoon everybody. So what I'm going to try and do is bring by Gottsky and dialogic learning into the digital age and talk about what we can do with it this year. So the aims and intentions of the session just basically make sure you understand, talk about how the theory helps us understand how making students, we can make students learn. We're going to look at some research informed practice and we'll have a quick look at some theory and then we're going to talk about how we can build it into practice. So I start everything with a great hero of mine Dylan William and this is a table you'll see in his book Embedding Formative Assessment and it's my emboldening. So you think in a classroom the teacher's job is to engineer effective classroom discussions, activities and tasks, the evidence of learning and I love that because it says effective classroom discussions and if you're going to have a discussion there's got to be something social going on. So we then go back to another great hero of mine which is Vygotsky. Anything in the slides and you'll get the slides and gives you a link to one of my blogs in Inspired Ideas in the UK which kind of outlines some of these ideas. There are only 500 words each but if you want to pick up something in depth in a bit more detail they're there. So Vygotsky, he's a Russian theorist, died in 1936 from tuberculosis in Moscow. He was in the Stalin's education department and he had a very different view of Piaget's image. So Piaget believes individuals do things on their own. They're little scientists. They find stuff out on themselves and Vygotsky says on your own you'll find out nothing. You need to be in a social group and he also sees that within the social group you need to be reacting with something, with other people or with tools and the thing I love about his idea of tools is that tools are real things like paper, pens, computers, but they're also symbolic things. Languages, math systems, signs and for me that's something to just remember. He's talking about symbols all the time. So here are some words from him. A couple of quotes from his 1933 work quoted in the 1978 translation. It is through others that we become ourselves. So clearly he believes that all learning is social. Everything is happening with other people. And secondly he says that what you can do in cooperation today you can do alone tomorrow. So let's start by looking at probably one of his more important ideas which is the idea of social development. So he thinks that when you have social learning so there needs to be some, you're in a social situation, things start to be said and you develop by that interaction that you've just experienced doing something inside you. So this is the link between the social learning and cognitive learning and I don't, I love social learning but I do believe that all the cognition stuff is really interesting and it helps explain this theory. We can learn through lots of different communication methods. We can learn through writing and speech obviously but we mustn't forget culture. We learn things through dance, through song, through the people that we meet, the things that our grandparents do. These are all ways in which we learn and they're important things we learn that way. And if we can use some natural tools we can develop those higher thinking skills instead of just the basic ones. And he comes up with a number of big ideas. So the first is social development, I've just covered that. The second is the idea of guided participation. Now guided participation, I've read all sorts of people's explanations of this and they make it sound really complicated. But all guided participation is somebody showing somebody else how to do something. So if I know more about doing something, I show somebody how to do it, I am doing guided participation. If I do it for them, I'm not doing guided participation. So if you're ever watching a class and a teacher grabs the mouse and starts driving the computer, they stop teaching at the moment and their hand touch the mouse. What they should be doing is you need to go on here, then you click on there, put your mouse there, do that, and that way they're guiding the participation of the individual on that social link between the two of them will help that person learn. In order for there to be guided by participation, you need a more knowledgeable other. Simply somebody who knows more about something than the other person. And I always say to teachers when we're talking about this, that just be aware that you aren't necessarily the most knowledgeable, the more knowledgeable other in your classroom. I know that if I want to talk about football, and I'm talking to my son, I basically need to listen to him because he knows loads more about football than I do. He can name every footballer in the Premier League, I can probably name about three. The next idea that again, there's lots of rubbish written about and lots of very complicated descriptions is about the zone of proximal development. Or as the Americans say, the ZPD, which I hate. But the zone of proximal development is simply you can't learn something you don't know enough about. So you start with, you know what you know. There's a whole load of stuff about a subject you don't know. And the zone of proximal development is those things that are close enough to what you currently know, that you can learn them with somebody who's a little more knowledgeable other through guided participation. All that involves scaffolding. And if you read a book that says that Brunner invented scaffolding, the paper he did that in his 1979, which is actually one year after the part of the work of Weigotsky was translated. And interestingly, Weigotsky came up with the idea in 1932. So scaffolding is simply exactly what he says, building giving the more knowledgeable other, giving the person who's learning things to help them extend their knowledge into their zone of proximal development. And then finally, it's all about language. Language is the most important thing we learn. Now, I don't know if you've seen the evidence, but there is evidence that I'm at the age of 16, the average sort of average 16 year old young male in Britain has about 8,500 words vocabulary. Those who've just come out of Eden have 16,000 words. And there's a direct link between the number of words you know at the age of 16 and your life chances. And I think that's a little bit of indication that maybe Weigotsky's got that one right. So why is language so important? Well, first of all, it's a really important part of our mental development. People who can't learn language really struggle to learn anything. And if you think back to Bruno's idea of schema, if you don't have a word to link things to, it's really, really difficult to understand how you would learn learn anything. It's the main means by which we pass information between us and our students. And in itself, it's a very powerful tool of us understanding stuff. We learn stuff through learning words and being able to use words. And that's maybe why those with very high vocabaries have higher life chances. So that's a quick skim through Weigotsky. In the classroom, he says we need to do lots of social learning. We need to be doing harder tasks with somebody else, because we can do though, we can do those in groups, so we need collaborative learning, we need group presentations, we need group work. There's only approximate development means the teacher has to consider how much scaffolding you give a student. And things should be tied to the context they're in that authentic learning is really important. So how do we make all this work? And this is where I bring in dialogic learning, because dialogic learning is Robin Alexander has come up with these five principles. Very simple. Everybody's working together, including the teacher. Everybody listens to each other, shares their ideas and is willing to consider everybody else's viewpoint. Everybody is so very supportive. So everybody's able to kind of say what they want to say, don't feel embarrassed, there are no wrong answers. And there's a kind of general aim to come to some common understanding and common way forward. It's cumulative, things build on each other, and it's purposeful. And that's really the only bit the teacher does is keeping it focused on whatever it is the class is about. So in a digital classroom, here are some ways you can do that. There's an idea Alexander has of talk partners, which in a classroom, you just get the person to talk next to them. But you could get students use chat. So if they were sat in MS teams, they could chat with each other. Or they could chat with an AI. So if you think of somebody who's neurodiverse and finds talking to other people difficult. First of all, the evidence is that they find text chat easier. So they would find it easier to text chat with a fellow student and talk to them. But actually, if they really can't even do that, they might well be happy to talk to an AI. So that is that to consider. We can put them into breakout rooms. So almost all the MS teams or Google or whatever now have the ability to put students to breakout rooms. So we can pull together partner groups, whole group discussion. You can do that online as well as you can do do it in the classroom. The teacher thing about pose, pause, pounce, bounce works beautifully in the digital classroom. You can actually even mute people. So that they can't answer. And you can then pounce by unmuting the one you want to answer. So there's lots and lots of ways of using that. The important thing to remember is the bounce because we want to be social. So we want to teach people to follow up from each other's answers. We want to teach people to do the kind of dialogic learning principles. I think when you're minimizing transition time, so cutting down the wasted time in a lesson, digital makes it easier. You can sit there in class with three or four things open. And when you want something, you just show that screen. And that's much quicker than handing out a handout or whatever. I mean, even better, you can actually have a screen with the YouTube clip open and literally just press go and you get no transition time at all. We need to make students feel their views are taken seriously. Well, that's a matter of you and you in your class. It's not doesn't matter whether that's digital face to face. The same is true for them being able to feel they can be wrong. I think the teacher needs to be able to allow students to dialogue. And again, that doesn't matter where we're doing it. So when we start to think about going back to my original slide about engineering discussions, that is social learning. So we can use dialogic learning, which I've talked about. We can use group work. We can go back and use peer and self assessment. That's something I'm looking at AI about how AI would help with that. I've already worked out that AI could do for criterion marking, it can do work out whether the criteria have been met within a piece of writing. So you could actually teach students to use AI to help them understand if they've met the learning outcomes. As long as they don't then plagiarise. Pre-reading, well, that's incredibly easy digitally. We can give them stuff to do. We can check they've done it. We can even make sure know how many students have looked at the video if we want. And then the whole thing about metacognition, actually teaching people to learn, teaching people to use the digital systems. All of that is very important and we can do it digitally. So my conclusion is, good teaching is good teaching. Being online really doesn't make any difference. We don't have to go back and go all because I'm online. I now have to go back to the teaching methods we used 30 years ago. You sit there and listen to me. We can enhance the ability to create that classroom in which social learning takes place. I've then given you some references and I'll make sure Chloe's got the slides at the end and comments views, etc. And I'll stop sharing so I can see you. That's it, Chloe. Apart from questions.