**4.2. The project design**

The project design was premised on the need for PSTs to overtly focus on developing quality interactions and pedagogical dialogues with students in classrooms. In this project, volunteer PSTs were guided to pay close attention to the details of the discursive details of the language, discourse patterns and routines actually spoken by teachers and their students in classroom exchanges. Preservice teachers, in mentoring pairs, then 'practised' interacting with small groups of four to five students in their classrooms. The focus for the PSTs was on listening and interacting rather than on teaching or being assessed as typical in practicum placements. Primarily, the project was designed as an action research project designed to provide first year PSTs with weekly opportunities to:

	- **1.** sustain the point
	- **2.** extend and deepen their thinking to build participation and engagement
	- **3.** challenge and question the thinking of others
	- **4.** demonstrate listening actively
	- **1.** allowing wait time for thinking and formulating
	- **2.** asking open guiding questions
	- **3.** vacating the floor

**4.** giving learning focused responses

Therefore, the *Talking to Learn* project aimed to support PSTs understand how classrooms work interactively and, in particular, draw their attention to the organisation of classroom discourse as a powerful way of showing them the situated construction of classroom life, learning and culture. Further, supporting PSTs to critically examine the nature and extent of their learning about and enacting pedagogical dialogues was considered critical for their development as a teacher. Explicating the role of particular teacher talk moves, as core for generating teaching practices necessary for generating learning and thinking, formed an explicit focus for postsession learning conversations between teacher mentors and PSTs [28]. These conversations took place in classrooms after PSTs practiced interacting with small groups of students. This feature of the project provided an authentic context for 'informed participation' in critique

The project design was premised on the need for PSTs to overtly focus on developing quality interactions and pedagogical dialogues with students in classrooms. In this project, volunteer PSTs were guided to pay close attention to the details of the discursive details of the language, discourse patterns and routines actually spoken by teachers and their students in classroom exchanges. Preservice teachers, in mentoring pairs, then 'practised' interacting with small groups of four to five students in their classrooms. The focus for the PSTs was on listening and interacting rather than on teaching or being assessed as typical in practicum placements. Primarily, the project was designed as an action research project designed to provide first year

• participate in overt instruction about classroom interaction and pedagogical dialogues

• focus observations of teaching in classrooms on the dimensions of interaction and dialogic talk, which included 'learning to listen' to what students said, the language used, how they

focused on enacting particular talk moves that support students to:

**3.** challenge and question the thinking of others

**1.** allowing wait time for thinking and formulating

**2.** extend and deepen their thinking to build participation and engagement

about teaching practice [34].

72 Contemporary Pedagogies in Teacher Education and Development

PSTs with weekly opportunities to:

**4.** demonstrate listening actively

**2.** asking open guiding questions

interacted with each other;

**3.** vacating the floor

• practice

**1.** sustain the point

**4.2. The project design**


These weekly in-class observations, practice sessions and mentoring conversations (after [35]) were conducted over 12 weeks in the first semester of their Bachelor of Education degree.
