Making a CASE for the third space: A study into small group talk in the science classroom

Abstract

The Thinking Science programme or CASE (Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education) is a sequence of thirty lessons that seek to develop pupil reasoning in the context of secondary science. CASE is based upon the work of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky and was very popular being used by hundreds of schools, both in the UK and around the world, during the 1990’s and the 2000’s. The lessons and ideas are still in use today and serve as a lasting legacy for the authors: Philip Adey, Michael Shayer and Carolyn Yates. This thesis will present an insider’s view of CASE from a teacher who has been using the lessons for 34 years. This perspective will allow the author to articulate an experienced teachers thinking regarding the principles of CASE. Alongside this an analysis of Vygotskyan psychology, illuminated by Bhabha’s ideas, will be used to present the concept of the third space as a model to visualise the small group talk taking place in the CASE classroom. Since the advent of CASE much of the language it used to describe cognitive development, such as metacognition, has become common parlance in educational settings. This thesis brings a practitioner perspective to bear on the principles of CASE and the pupil talk it seeks to generate. Seven CASE lessons were taught to a secondary, Year 9, class over a period of six months and video recorded. The resulting lesson plans and transcripts, of small group conversations, enabled the Vygotskian foundations of the CASE programme to be explored. Bhabha’s notion of the third space was used to categorise talk in a way that is reflective of the real lives of children and the ideas they carry with them into the classroom. This analysis enabled an innovative, colour, coding system to be developed to illustrate and track the contours of children’s talk. This thesis brings a sense of clarity regarding the use of third space theory in educational settings and bridges a gap in this canon as it takes place in the mainstream secondary classroom within the context of a core subject. As a result third space talk has now been described and categorised in a way that allows it to be applied across subjects and in other settings such as special schools. The Vygotskian concept of a child’s lived experience, perezhivanie, is used to illustrate a possible route for teacher’s to guide the conversations towards the types of talk supportive of cognitive development. This research uses the idea of a trigger to show how appropriate challenge can be used to engage learners and this is uniquely illustrated through the use of a weather map representation of pupil talk. This serves to refresh CASE and will support and new generation of teachers to better manage the dynamics of small group talk at a time when the pressure for children, yet again, to be seen and not heard is growing. The key findings from this study for classroom practitioners can be summarised using the following headings: a) Inclusion, b) Professional choice, c) Construction talk and, d) Hope in the zone. Inclusion points to the fact that pupil funds of knowledge need to be utilised, in the third space, so that their life-times worth of experiences brought to the classroom are included and acknowledged. This is true for all learners and the potential of this is supported by the fact that majority of the pupils highlighted in the transcripts were categorised by the school as SEND. Professional choice references the fact that choices are made in the planning and conduct of lessons. To promote thinking teachers can integrate triggers in a way that engages pupils in intellectual inquiry. Triggers can be included in the lesson conduct or in response to the conversational turns taken in real-time. Similarly small groups can be orchestrated to develop construction talk that develops pupils thinking within the two planes described by Vygotsky – the social and the psychological. If managed utilising the third space then the external interactions with others support and enhance the inner cognitive life of the individual. Construction talk is a living vocabulary that verbalises the inner thought life and so is one that must be inclusive of all forms of talk. The five talk codes reflect the real, honest, messy and playful conversations taking place in classrooms today as adolescents engage with the cognitive challenges around which CASE is built. The sensitive use of triggers can engage and guide pupils towards forms of talk that activate their funds of knowledge and develop both ownership of their talk and a metacognitive awareness of their thinking. Hope in the zone – the third space is a theoretical construct that has been successfully used and applied in a range of educational settings. It has been used here to illuminate construction zone activity as a powerful time of developmental potential for children facing abstract concepts in science. Hope in the zone is possible with thoughtful planning and the use of specific classroom management techniques following the clear pedagogical guidelines for such techniques that are provided within this thesis. The outcomes of this research form a practical and easy to apply guide to the use of the third space as a bridge between pupil knowledge and curricular content and serves to both update and reposition CASE for a new generation of teachers in a way that is inclusive of all learners. The time has come for the third space to become more mainstream curricular vehicle. Historically it has been hard to find and was an idea heavy on metaphor yet light on practical examples of realistic teaching advice. This thesis shows what it looks and sounds like in the classroom in a way that is inclusive of all learners. C.S. Lewis said that children are not a distraction from more important work - they are the most important work. The outcomes of this thesis will help teachers to carry out such work, work that will outlive CASE and last long beyond my life in the classroom.