How do primary school teachers define and implement ‘interactive teaching’ in the National Literacy Strategy in England?

Abstract This paper reports the methods and findings of the S tudy of Pr imary In teractive Teaching (SPRINT) project carried out in English primary schools, which set out to determine teachers' understanding and use of 'interactive teaching' as a characteristic of 'successful teaching' in the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). Thirty teachers of children aged five to 11 years became either 'focus' teachers or 'comparison' teachers and were videoed twice over a six to eight month period doing 'interactive teaching' during the daily Literacy Hour as part of the NLS. The focus teachers were videoed doing interactive teaching in a different curriculum area and they participated in a process of video stimulated reflective dialogue (VSRD) with a higher education based research partner. Semi-structured interviews, held with every teacher before and after the fieldwork period, were analyzed to show teachers' changing conceptualizations of interactive teaching. In addition the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) was used to measure teachers' concerns about interactive teaching, and systematic observations were made of the video data. The results revealed few differences between the focus and comparison groups but provide significant evidence that whilst teachers have increased levels of interactivity dramatically by increasing the frequency of their questions, they still spent over half the time giving information and telling children what to do. Cognitive challenge was significantly higher in the literacy hour but lower in other 218 Research Papers in Education Volume 18 Number 3 curriculum areas for children aged eight to 11 years, whereas children aged five to seven years lower levels of cognitive challenge were experienced in literacy than in other curriculum areas. Finally, a major shift away from teachers asking children about how they might do their work compared with pre-NLS levels, suggests that literacy hour teaching is more likely to engender learned helplessness than independent learning. Keywords: Interactive TeachingLiteracyTeacher-pupil InteractionCognitive DemandVideo Stimulated Reflective Practice