Seeking educational quality in the unfolding of classroom discourse: a focus on microtransitions

In this paper, we argue the importance of conceptualizing educational quality as located in everyday talk, and to search for it in the unfolding of classroom discourse and interactions. More specifically, we argue that for the discursive classroom process to be qualitatively effective it should be open and accessible by a series of microtransitions, corresponding to local transformations producing a re-directing of the unfolding of interactions. In this perspective, a classroom system may undertake instructional and relational tasks by grasping, through discursive moves, the emergent occasions that allow teacher and pupils to reciprocally adapt in terms of purposes, needs and requests. The corpus of data comprises a series of lessons that were video-recorded in Italian primary schools. The unit of analysis is the thematic interactive sequence, coded in terms of goals and orientation. A detailed analysis of three lessons, chosen as representatives of recitative, open and flexible lessons, respectively, is presented. The article concludes that a good indicator of educational quality corresponds to the participants' capacity to engage in microtransitions fostering teaching-and-learning as intertwined processes.