This paper reports on a teacher professional development (PD) programme addressing dialogic argumentation in mathematics and science classrooms. While argumentation skills are becoming more and more important in an increasingly polarised society, the social aspect of argumentation is often neglected in secondary education. Moreover, it is agreed that genuine argumentation requires time and space in classroom dialogue. There have been calls for research delving into how teachers could be familiarised with dialogic argumentation so that they could foster such dialogue in students. The described PD programme features versatile and continuous cooperation between scholars and participating teachers. The scholars are offering educational science’s latest knowledge to schools while the teachers are ensuring that it is implemented in a successful and sensible manner. Monthly recorded lessons related to the programme take place in three phases: pre-active (planning), interactive (teaching), and post-active (evaluating and reflecting). Six teachers, teaching both mathematics and physics at lower-secondary schools, are involved in the two-year programme. In addition to discussing our PD programme, we present preliminary results on the initial status of all six teachers and the development of two case teachers. Analysis of lesson videos and teacher reflections has revealed varying starting points for teachers' PD and dialogic argumentation, especially when it comes to teacher awareness. The implications for pre- and in-service teacher education are also discussed.
Three dimensions of dialogicity are emphasised in the literature: dialogic teacher talk, students' dialogic moves and organising for dialogic teaching. In this article, we examine these dimensions and the interplay between them in supporting dialogic argumentation in the context of whole-class discussions in mathematics and physics. Three seemingly different seventh-grade lessons were selected for further analysis from the database of a research project on dialogic argumentation. In this paper, we focus on whole-class discussions after a group assignment. The lessons were video recorded with multiple cameras and transcribed. We characterised dialogic features of teacher talk, more general teacher decisions and organising for dialogic teaching, as well as students' dialogic and justifying moves. In addition, we examined how these were connected. According to the results, the three dimensions of dialogicity played out differently in the lessons. Furthermore, the results give insights into the interplay of the three dialogicity dimensions and students' justifying moves in dialogic argumentation.