Learning to facilitate dialogue: On challenges and teachers’ assessments of their own performance

Research has indicated that dialogic approaches have desirable effects in education, but it is also well-known that it can be a challenge for teachers to make the transition from the traditional teacher role to that of the facilitator. Based on a case study, this article investigates the successes and shortcomings of 29 teachers learning to facilitate classroom dialogue in teacher development programmes. The article analyses the trainees’ written self-evaluations and the supervisors’ feedback to examine the extent and nature of the challenges encountered as well as the teachers’ self-perceptions compared to the perceptions of the trained supervisors. The main findings were that the teachers encountered many challenges, especially when it came to adopting the role of a facilitator and supporting the students’ reasoning and interaction. In addition, I found that their own assessments of their performances were generally unreliable. Nonetheless, with supervised training, the teachers were successful in learning to facilitate philosophical dialogues.