Abstract:
There is a consensus amongst scholars that learning from student feedback depends on how the feedback
is sought and used by the individual teachers. Using Hand and Rowe’s (2001) framework of eliciting and using
student feedback, the purpose of this self-study was to investigate how I, as a novice teacher educator, can use
dialogue with my students to learn about and how to foster student interaction in my biology classroom. I collected
data through multiple sources including students’ written feedback, my reflective journal, focus-group interviews
with the students, and video recordings of my teaching. Data were analysed through a narrative approach. Findings
indicate that the continuous dialogue with my students helped me learn about student interaction and fostering it
in my classroom through a variety of ways. This study also illustrates that the teacher needs to establish trust with
students from the onset such that the dialogue cannot only be of professional value to the teacher but also improve
the students’ learning. These insights are discussed, and recommendations are made in the article
