Dialogic skills for religious education

Abstract

In the field of religious education, pedagogies have featured regularly as teachers strive for the most effective methodology to promote pupils’ learning but their current success rate has been called into question by two critical Subject Reports in 2010 and 2013 from the English Government’s Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED). This paper reports on a piece of action research that sets Bloom’s taxonomy within a framework of classroom dialogue skills with the intention of addressing the OfSTED-identified shortcomings. Furthermore, the paper proposes that in a world where young people often hear and see a close relationship between religion and conflict, religious education cannot remain silent and the skills for enhancing dialogue in the classroom may also have a contribution to make to issues around religion, conflict and education.