Week 8, hall lesson, 03.15-03.55
1. T: (uses slide viewer at side of IWB screen to change IWB to show timeline slide: all
2. annotations from previous use had already been removed other than marks to show how 3. to sound out under ‘Time Line’. Looks back to Ps, standing side on to IWB) And when did 4. this happen?
5. (few Ps raise hands)
6. T: It happened in (moves hands over Ps) which year (points to P) er Mia? 7. Mia: Sixty sixty six
8. T: Sixty sixty six? 9. (few Ps raise hands)
10. T: (points to Mia and leans towards her) Try again 11. Mia: 1666
12. T: 1666. So (picks up IWB pen, looks at slide) 13. Lior: Anwar?
14. T: Was that yesterday? 15. Ps: No
16. T: (looks at Ps) Was that last week? 17. Ps: No
18. T: How many years ago was it? 19. (few Ps raise hands)
20. T: About how many (lifts hands up and down slightly) years, ago was it (points to P 21. and leans forward) Nina?
22. Nina: 400
23. T: 400 years ago, so (places pen at 2009 marker on slide, marks jump back to 1900) 100 24. (marks jump back to 1800) 200 (marks jump back to 1700) 300 (marks jump back to mid 25. 1600s) about 400 (makes mark a few times in mid 1600s) it was about here. So it
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26. happened in (writes ‘1666’ above mark) 1666. (puts pen down)
5.3.9 Commentary to lesson extract 5.3
The most obvious point to note from the two timeline extracts is how much longer the first is than the last. Looking more closely at the content of the talk and use of the timeline resource however, there are clear differences in the nature of interaction between the teacher and pupils, and in the place of the timeline slide within these interactions.
Just as unexpected queries or potential misunderstandings were voiced in the first lesson, a confusion or perhaps mispronunciation also served a pedagogic purpose in the final lesson. When asked the date when the Great Fire happened in the final lesson – in ‘setting’ the historical event in time – Mia initially replied ‘sixty sixty six’ (line 7). As this was a public and invited contribution, the teacher immediately followed this up, repeating Mia’s suggestion in a questioning tone whereby a number of other pupils raised their hands – presumably guessing that the answer given was incorrect, and that the teacher would invite a further contribution. This demonstrates an ‘Initiation-Response-Feedback’ (IRF) pattern, common in educational talk (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), with the teacher posing a question, a pupil responding, and the teacher providing feedback on this reply. The educational value of this strategy has been questioned by many researchers (including Lemke, 1990; Wood, 1992), but others argue that how pupils’ responses are used by the teacher can act as useful connection-building points, rather than as terminal points for evaluation (e.g. Mercer & Dawes, 2008; Wells, 1999). At this point in the lesson therefore, the teacher had four main choices commonly seen in teaching practice: ignore the error; provide the ‘correct’ answer himself; ask another pupil to answer; or ask the same pupil to have another go. His choice to ask the same pupil to have another go potentially indicates a couple of things:
he felt the pupils knew the correct answer, so did not need to provide it himself. This is particularly plausible given that it was the eighth and final topic lesson;
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he felt the pupil he had asked had got her words mixed up, rather than not knowing the answer, and so wanted to give her the opportunity to show what she knew instead of casting her as ‘wrong’ by asking another pupil to correct her.
Given these considerations, Mia was offered the opportunity and was able to provide the correct date on her second invitation (line 11). The teacher acknowledged this instantly in his verbal repetition, and physically a few moments later by writing it onto the timeline, validating the answer through its new permanence in writing on the visual slide (line 26). Thus the incorrect verbal reply had been lost from view, as had the fact that the pupil asked had made an incorrect response, whereas the correct reply had been concretised and ‘stabilised’ (Ludvigsen, et al., 2011; Roth & Duit, 2003) in the locally progressing discourse through its physical addition onto the technology-mediated improvable object. This demonstrated an I-R-I-R-F pattern of interaction, whereby the first ‘R’ move (‘sixty sixty six’) was responded to by the teacher in drawing out rather than closing down the exchange.
Across lesson extracts 5.1 and 5.3 it is interesting to note how the prominence of verbal and written modes shifted in emphasising the key date, between the first and last use of the timeline slide. In the first lesson, the teacher went to great efforts to locate and write ‘1666’ at the correct point on the timeline, before he himself said ‘1666’ – addressing the sequencing and setting of time as key features of history discourse. In the final lesson the teacher asked pupils to verbally offer the date, as well as how long ago this was, thus in a more interactive communicative frame, before annotating either onto the slide: utilising the ‘technical interactivity’ of the IWB (Smith, et al., 2005) after the dialogic interactivity of the verbal exchange (Mercer, et al., 2010). We can see in this way how the scaffold of the IWB slide had been more heavily drawn on initially, but how the intellectual effort could be carried sufficiently in talk in the final lesson, with the physical resource all but faded other than as a final consolidation point of the achieved learning objective. Thus my temporal analysis has enabled me to reveal the patterning of this interaction in a
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compelling way. Having considered the extracts in detail, I now give some further observations on how use of the resource shifted and stabilised over the eight lessons.
5.3.9.1 Progressive use of the resource
Use of the timeline slide across lessons in the hall and classroom was one means by which the teacher aimed to encourage pupils to link what they were learning in the two contexts, in addressing the pedagogic challenge of ‘connection building’ between learning experiences and environments. Hennessy’s (2011) comment that use of a resource conjures up for users any experiences of its previous use, and frames any future use (also drawing on Floriani, 1993), supports the thinking behind the teacher’s intention. Thus the timeline slide was used to ‘bridge’ (Rogoff, 1990), or provide a linking resource between, the two learning environments, by quickly re-orienting to the topic of the Great Fire of London and its place in sequential time. The evolving use of the same resource was an intuitive response by the teacher to the educational challenge that pupils often do not make links for themselves between learning experiences (as identified by Alexander 2008a; Crook, 1999).
Evolving use of the resource, such as in more rapid recap of previously-annotated points and progressive annotation of fewer points, evidences how the technological tool was used to pedagogic effect to support creation of a technology-mediated improvable object, that in its revisions illustrated the common knowledge available to the group. This evolving annotating and highlighting important features against the consistent timeline resource served to ‘stabilise’ the discourse about the Great Fire, as the key ideas were reinforced over the eight lessons. In this process the scaffold of the timeline slide became backgrounded in being relied upon less, as pupils’ verbal contributions were foregrounded as they were able to structure the ongoing discourse verbally for themselves. The affordances of the IWB allowed these verbal explorations to be added, edited and removed from the timeline slide as required, supporting a physical and verbal work in progress as they were mutually developed.
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Particularly in the sense of using the slide as a scaffold, it was evident as the lessons and discussion around material progressed, the teacher felt less need to identify or add certain aspects of the original or improving representation (such as other contextual information, or that 2009 is the present). This in turn made the key points that were highlighted each time more salient (that the Great Fire occurred in 1666 and that this was about 400 years ago). As aspects of the conceptual scaffold were no longer required (such as the temporal proximity of Guy Fawkes’ attempt to blow up parliament to the Great Fire), they were faded from the discursive, visual and technological scaffold. Therefore the slide and representation were not just added to, or
extended, they were used to enable discourse to ‘progress’, through how they were ‘reviewed, rethought and revised’. Thus verbally and visually the class were building a context in which they could learn more about the topic: through the creation and revision of a technology-mediated improvable object.
In this sense, Hennessy (2011) proposed that ‘A single rich resource can be progressively manipulated and interacted with in different ways for different purposes, often within the relatively short time period of a lesson’ (p. 472). Such use of repetition of resource was identified by Gillen, et al. (2007), as the teacher in their observations combined time on and off the IWB in presenting and re-presenting the everyday image of a kettle boiling to explore the scientific concept of evaporation. Maybin (2006) also articulated the relationship between pupils’ verbal repetition and appropriation of subject terms, and use of written texts to scaffold this process. In the lessons I observed the resource was revisited but also re-annotated on successive occasions, allowing the pupils progressively more opportunities to re-construct the events around when the Great Fire occurred, by providing rather than being told information for the teacher to locate the focal event on the timeline resource. This shifting focus when using a resource, from the teacher largely giving to gathering information, identifies how the notion of the technology-mediated improvable object is a useful analytic and theoretical tool in also observing meaning-making trajectories, and how they can be multimodally orchestrated. Such an analytic approach allows for
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observation of shifting patterns concerning who offers contributions, how contributions are invited and responded to, and the mode/s in which contributions are offered, grounded within a theoretical view of the mediated nature of learning.