Reason: Dialogic as a Direction

In this chapter I apply the dialogic account of education developed Chaps. 2 and 3 to the issue of teaching thinking. I use evidence from empirical studies of talk in classrooms to argue that thinking can be taught by improving the quality of dialogues. What groups and individuals appear to be learning as they learn to think better on tasks such as reasoning test problems, is not simply specific skills and strategies but also a more general capacity to engage in dialogue. I describe this as a shift in identity towards identifying with the space of dialogue and I argue that this direction is the primary thinking skill from which other skills such as creativity and reasoning develop.