The aim of this explorative research study was to identify the relationship between the positions of individual students in their peer social networks and their classroom seating arrangement through sociometry and social network analysis. We examined the social networks of 17 classrooms comprising 363 students (183 boys, 180 girls) attending lower secondary schools (ISCED 2A). We found that positions in social networks could not be connected with single specific seating positions. Nonetheless, certain tendencies can be observed. Students who are perceived as more likeable sit in the middle column of the classroom and are seated close to each other. Locations inhabited by dominant students are positioned further from teachers and further apart from each other. The increase of the values of degree centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality is noticeable in desks positioned further away from the teacher. By comparing these results with studies examining seating arrangements as a means of distributing learning opportunities through student participation, specific zones can be observed in the classroom that could benefit the children seated there in their roles as students and at the same time in their roles as classmates.
In this study, we present an action research project studying classroom discourse that took place at the Department of Educational Sciences at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, in Brno, the Czech Republic. The core of this project consisted of a development programme for teachers focused on a change in communication methods in dialogic teaching. We observed four teachers who took part in the programme in 2013/2014. Our goal was to determine how much the participation in the programme led to an actual change in teacherstudent communication in the classroom. The data analysis showed that the participating teachers did actually change their communication methods – there was an increase in the average levels of openness, cognitive demand, length of student replies, and the number of cases when students themselves initiated communication. The data analysis also showed that the process of change is unique for each teacher and there is no unified trajectory.
This paper examines the emotions that eight teachers experienced during intervention research project on the transformation of their teaching practices. During the program which we designed, the teachers were trained to transform their teaching practices so that they would include more features of dialogic education. In this paper, we analyze data from repeated interviews with teachers who participated in our project. Based on qualitative analysis of our data, we differentiated among four groups of teachers, each with a unique self-understanding. The groups included teachers who were: perfect, eager to learn, in a good mood, and uncertain. Our paper shows that each group experienced specific emotions during the program. The only group that did not experience negative emotions was teachers in a good mood. These teachers also implemented the fewest changes in their teaching practices. Our results thus show that a lack of negative emotions limited the efficacy of teacher development.