Using dialogic teaching to promote student satisfaction and engagement in emergency remote teaching in primary school: a proof-of-concept study

Research from around the world has shown that COVID-19 emergency remote teaching in schools has generally struggled to maintain student satisfaction and engagement: students lacked social relatedness, a sense of belonging and ownership of school activities. This study examines the idea of using a dialogic teaching approach in synchronous online videolearning environments. The aim was to deliver proof of concept that dialogic tools can increase student satisfaction with emergency remote teaching. The authors designed and implemented 58 online dialogues and compared student satisfaction with this learning environment to student satisfaction with ‘normal’ emergency remote teaching and with traditional physical teaching. They found that dialogic online teaching achieved high student satisfaction that was comparable to student satisfaction with physical teaching. This result is relevant not only for emergency and regular remote teaching because online dialogue can be used to supplement asynchronous written dialogue in any remote teaching and learning environment.