The lessons had a particular emphasis on facilitating and orchestrating classroom dialogue. Children are given plentiful opportunities to share and reflect on their experiences and give opinions about the impact that their digital lives have on their physical and emotional wellbeing. To facilitate this, children were encouraged to engage in more exploratory talk where questions could lead to other questions. drew on:
- Introducing technical vocabulary such as dopamine, pre-frontal cortex, intermittent rewards
- Stem sentences such as ‘building on x’s idea…’, ‘I noticed…’, ‘I agree/disagree with … because …’
- Using stimuli to generate discussion such as an historical video clip showing a psychology experiment of rats being exposed to operating conditioning.
- Collaborative learning tasks that give children the opportunity to discuss for example how relevant certain talking point prompts are relevant to their digital lives.
- Mediated online experiences: through playing an online game and using a teacher-moderated social media platform, children had experiential opportunities to explore the issues discussed in class.
- Reflection opportunities through discussion and journaling for children to think about what they have learned and what personal action points they will take forwards in their own lives.
