Conference Program

Empirical and experimental research across curricular areas and school levels has shown that classroom discourse approaches which reduce the predominance of recitation and give a greater role to productive dialogue and discussion can support the learning of all students, including those experiencing sociocultural disadvantage (e.g., Alexander, 2018). However, classroom discussion intentionally orchestrated as collective reasoning around an object of knowledge (Pontecorvo, 2021) is still rarely observed in ordinary school settings. Even teachers who aim to promote it may struggle to position students as reasoners rather than “guessers of the right answer” (O’Connor & Michaels, 2019), while also attending to comprehensibility, coherence, conceptual accuracy, motivation, and equity of participation. As Ajello argued (2004), the teacher’s role in this kind of discussion is neither natural nor spontaneous, but a specifically professional competence to be acquired.

This paper presents a practice-based teacher education initiative developed within Talking to Learn (T2L), an interdisciplinary research project funded by the 2025 University Research Fund at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. T2L aims to bridge the gap between research and school practice by providing both in-service and pre-service teachers with a teacher-led, research-informed model of professional development, supported by a repertoire of agile resources for planning, observing, analysing, and improving the quality of classroom discussion. A central assumption of the project is that wider dissemination of dialogic teaching depends on making discussion a shared object of professional inquiry among teachers themselves (Zini, 2024). Its methodological framework builds on more than a decade of research at UNIMORE on Lesson Study (Bartolini Bussi & Ramploud, 2018), its discussion-focused development, Discussion Study (Bertolini et al., 2023), and ODIS, a coding scheme for classroom discussion observation (Zecca et al., 2025).

The contribution focuses on a lesson-study-inspired practicum module designed for student teachers in the Primary Teacher Education programme, scheduled for implementation in the first semester of the next academic year. The module is intended to support future teachers’ professional autonomy in designing and conducting effective classroom discussions for mediating curricular content. It is organised around a cycle of mentor and student preparation, co-design with school mentors, classroom enactment, audiovisual documentation of a key discussion episode, and guided reflective analysis of the activity in relation to intended learning goals. In this perspective, the practicum does not simply train participants to “use discussion”, but inducts them into a collaborative, inquiry-based model of professional learning in which teaching can be collectively planned, observed, discussed, and revised.

Rather than presenting a fully standardised package, the paper discusses the rationale and formative architecture of a practicum model designed to make discussion teachable, observable, and professionally discussable within the ordinary constraints of school life. Its relevance to democratic education lies both in preparing future teachers to treat classroom talk as a shared epistemic space and in exploring forms of teacher-led professional learning that may support the broader circulation of dialogic practices across educational contexts.