The Conversational Framework

- A brief introduction
- the Diana Laurillard section is partly plagarized!!
- click on Diana's diagrams to see them more clearly
- bit of a preamble first before I get to The Conversational Framework.

I’ve been looking for some time, on and off, for a resolution of a problem I’ve had with learning theory.

Sometimes I am this teacher: just do what I think will work and also, as a bonus, is also interesting. Those things that might work vary from year to year depending on the school environment which varies a lot, school to school.

Sometimes I am this teacher: A teacher who has studied a lot of different learning theories and am still surprised about how little interested in learning theories that other teachers seem to be. Some staff and schools hardly ever discuss learning theory.

For most teachers practice is primary. Find something that works. And then for those who try out different approaches – which seems necessary because students cohorts vary widely – it becomes apparent after a while that there is no magic bullet. There is no unified learning theory.

I’ve had a long time interest in learning theories which may have originated from the traditional teaching method – instruction based around a textbook – being so uninspiring.

Early on (the 1980s) I cottoned onto Seymour Papert’s Constructionism after reading his book “Mindstorms”. This got me interested in computers through the Logo coding language which promised to make maths more engaging. The challenge of Constructionism was for the teacher to create an engaging microworld where the student would learn without being formally taught. Turtle geometry was one such microworld. I’ve spent time exploring other microworlds and found some of them to be very successful, eg. recently, the Turtle Art tile project developed by Josh Burker.

Seymour did setup an ideological polemic of Constructionism (intrinsic learning in a computer generated microworld) versus Instructionism (traditional school based) and in his second book “The Children’s Machine” more or less called for the overthrow of traditional schooling.

This was fine by me and where possible I modelled my teaching along the lines he suggested.

However, when I taught at a disadvantaged school in the northern suburbs Adelaide (Paralowie R12) I found that many of the students had missed out so much from before they went to school that they needed lots of instruction to fill in the many gaps in their knowledge.

This created an epistemological crisis for me (a Skinner moment!) which after some agonising I resolved my deciding that teachers needed both Constructionism and Instructionism and awareness of when to use them. Walk the walk along the spectrum of learning theories.

So for years this went on. I would delve into different learning theories and extract what I saw as useful things from each of them. There are some great learning theorists out there IMO and many of them have valuable things to offer. Probably best to provide details of this some other time.

Recently, my interest in learning theory was reawakened. It’s shocking to say but in schools there is very little discussion of learning theories! But what happened in my school is that there was a problem with quite a few year 7s and 8 engagement. So the school hired a learning consultant to fix things up. In my opinion, the theories he talked about were often not the best ones. But anyway it did induce me to start exploring learning theories again.

I’m one of those strange people who reads conference papers and PhDs for fun. Luckily for me Diana Laurillard had been invited to present a key note to the Constructionist conference in Ireland 2020. I really liked her approach because she saw the distinctive strengths of Constructionism but also saw it as not the whole deal. It was part of the jigsaw, albeit a big part, with her whole learning jigsaw being made up of Instructionism, Constructionism, Social-cultural learning and Collaborative learning. We could call these the Big Four. There are others too but those four cover most of the ground I want to cover.

Her framework, which integrates these theories, is called The Conversational Framework. I think the way she presents it can be used as a guide for teachers to develop engaging lessons for students which covers most of the ways in which learning occurs. This could be a formal development process. There is an online website for doing that (see References). But I’m using it here as a self check that I’m offering all of these different ways of learning to students. And as a justification that my preferred ways of teaching are supported by learning theory. It's a big step up from "Walk the walk along the spectrum from Constructionism to Instructionism"

I won’t attempt a detailed explanation or historical origins of Diana’s whole framework (best to read her originals for that, see references) but rather introduce some of her marvellous schematics and argue a claim that my preferred way of teaching does cover all of the methods she recommends.

So the 6 Learning Types are Acquisition, Inquiring, Producing, Discussing, Practising and Production. All of them will be explained somewhere in this article.

learning through acquisition: the teacher (human, book, website, etc) communicates (one-way) concepts and ideas, and the learner reads, watches or listens

learning through investigation’ or ‘inquiry’: the teacher asks learners to explore or question the teacher's concepts (two-way). In this case they generate their own ideas of what they want to know.

learning through practice: the learner uses the learning environment set up by the teacher to create exercises for the learners. Ideally it includes a goal, the means for learners to put their concepts into practice to achieve it, feedback on their action, and the opportunity to revise and improve it.

Learning through practice may be guided, with extrinsic feedback, or unguided (after the teacher has setup the learning environment), with instrinsic feedback. Here's another of Diana's diagrams to help explain this:

"This is why Papert could say that constructionist exercises enabled learning without a teacher. The teacher, in the form or a person, or a computer program running a multiple choice exercise, is not needed to comment or inform. The microworld, like the real world in the right context, can provide the ‘informational feedback’ the learner needs"

Learning through Discussion: questions and answers including through peers (social construction of ideas)

However, learning through collaboration is more demanding than simple ‘discussion’ in the top right-hand corner, as Figure 4 shows, because the learners are necessarily collaborating on constructing something together: that is the nature of collaboration. It involves Q&A, shared practice, tinkering / debugging / repeated iterations. The teacher may play no role at all.

Here, each learner is learning through practice by using the learning environment. And at the same time, they are discussing and sharing that practice. In order to do that, they are necessarily also linking the two, which helps them develop both concepts and practice with each other. The teacher need play no role at all, and yet there is a lot of active internal processing required of the learner during this process.

Learning through production: Here the learner must connect up concepts and practice, and then produce an essay, or performance, or design, or presentation to show what they have learned. Throughout this process the learner is actively processing both concepts and practice and the integration of the two. This is akin to what Papert referred to as constructing personally meaningful and shareable artefacts, where the sharing is part of the motivation to construct a successful artefact.

The main issue for a teacher is to be aware of the full range, and the extent to which their teaching embraces all these different types of conversation, between teacher and learner, learner and peers, and on the levels of both concepts and practice.

Constructionism is represented best through four of the 6 learning types. Learning through acquisition, and inquiry are not a particular focus. The role of the teacher is still critical, however, as it is a real design challenge to generate and modulate the learning environment that could achieve learning without a teacher. Very few achieve that as most rely greatly on the teacher to provide additional guidance and feedback. The teacher will also be the recipient of the artefacts produced by a constructionist pedagogy, able to use these for judging the value of it as a learning process.

Putting all these pedagogic approaches together defines the superset of essential requirements for supporting the learning process, a ‘Conversational Framework’, as shown in Figure 5 (Laurillard, 2002). The full framework embraces all the elements prioritized by each of the main pedagogic approaches, and demonstrates the complexity of what it takes to learn: a continual iteration between teachers and learners, and between the levels of theory and practice. It is not symmetrical: the teacher is privileged as defining the conception and designing the practice environment to match. The teacher also learns, from receiving learners’ questions and products, as well as reflecting on their performance. But teachers are learning about teaching, rather than learning about the concept or practicing the skill.

REFERENCE

Diana Laurillard. Profile

Diana Laurillard. Significance of Constructionism as a distinctive pedagogy (2020)
In Constructionism 2020 conference proceedings (Ireland), pp. 29-37

Diana Laurillard. The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies (2009)
In Computer supported collaborative learning

Diana Laurillard. Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology (2012). This book was too expensive at $200! link, but then I found it at anna's archive.

Applying the Conversational Framework using an online learning design tool
Diana Laurillard talks through how to use a free online learning design tool which applies the Conversational Framework to build courses using the six key learning types

Learning Designer
At this site you need to sign up and login. It then lets you design your own lessons using The Conversational Framework.