A guest post by Dr Sam Holdstock (sam.holdstock@canterbury.ac.uk)
Most teachers that I encounter routinely incorporate presentation slides into their lessons. These slides can be very useful – they allow us to share information, questions, tasks, scaffolding, images and texts with our students without exhausting our precious printing allowance. However, have you considered the ways in which your choice of teaching materials might be affecting the ways in which you and your students speak and listen?
When you create or open a slide deck, you will likely see a line of slides stacked up on the left-hand side of your screen. This linear arrangement of slides has consequences for the ways in which lessons are prepared and orchestrated. If, during a lesson, we make use of a pre-prepared slide deck and progress from slide 1 to slide 10 in a linear manner, the space for students to contribute meaningfully to the trajectory of the lesson can be constrained. If the learning destination is already fixed, the space for exploratory forms of talk can be limited.
A Non-Linear Approach
In 2025 I completed a PhD research project that explored the possibilities for Interactive Fiction (IF) in secondary school English classrooms (Holdstock, 2025). This research saw me create and use non-linear texts in some of my lessons. All these texts were created using the nonlinear storytelling tool, Twine, and can be found here. They include an interactive story about a young carer whose doodle inexplicably comes to life, a work of historical fiction that explores the First World War experiences of various contrasting individuals, and several critical-creative writing games. To read or play these texts, you do not turn any pages. Instead, you make choices and select hyperlinks.
In my lessons, I read these texts with my students. Instead of projecting presentation slides onto the board, I shared non-linear, interactive texts for us to explore and discuss. Through teaching and reflecting on these lessons, I explored the ways in which choice can influence the quality of classroom talk.
How Choice Shapes Discussion
Passages within the interactive texts that I developed integrate textual information with choices. These choices can become authentic, contestable questions in the classroom. They become authentic questions when no predetermined, correct choice or justification is expected (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991). They are highly contestable as they can be considered from multiple perspectives and because decisions usually require students to engage in a degree of reasoning and justification (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017).
Asking students to make and justify a choice offers them an opportunity to influence the trajectory of the unfolding narrative and, by extension, the lesson. It offers them a chance to share and elaborate upon ideas that emerge in response to a text. It can also help conjure dialogic space by bringing contrasting perspectives into contact with one another. Different students voice different preferences, and this can lead to some exploration of the differences and similarities in our thinking.
Choice and Questioning
Picture a lesson in which a class of students collaboratively read a choice-based, non-linear text such as Gretel, Redesigned or What Happens When You Close Your Eyes. In pairs or groups, students discuss the choices before them. They note down key information and ideas that emerge from their conversations. Then, after episodes of whole-class discussion, consensus is found and decisions made. In such a lesson the questions posed by the teacher can encourage students to evaluate, discuss, argue and justify (Holdstock, 2021). For example, a teacher might ask questions such as the following:
- Which link (or pathway) would you prefer us to select? Why?
- Do you agree or disagree with this link selection? Why? Can you give an alternative opinion?
- Explain why you want to select a different link to student A.
- Can you justify your choice?
Choice and Student Voice
Choices, coupled with questions such as those listed above, can affect how students contribute to lessons. Through my research, I found that IF can encourage students to engage in inferential prediction, evaluative discussion and argumentation. Choosing a link involved students making inferences about what a word might suggest and predictions about where it might lead. Students also considered and evaluated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed about which pathway we should select. As they did so, I noticed that students became increasingly able to provide reasoning in support of their opinions.
As an English teacher, I also found that choice-based texts could support students to become more attuned to the significance of linguistic choices (Holdstock, 2024). For example, texts like A Great Gatsby or A Party at Gatsby’s draw students’ attention towards the relationship between writers’ choices and the meanings they can support. Reading these texts with students enabled them to discuss and evaluate the meaning-making potential of the language choices before them.
How are your resources shaping talk in your lessons?
I am not suggesting that all teachers should immediately abandon the resources that they have developed and refined over the course of their careers. I do not argue that presentation slides make exploratory, dialogic forms of talk an impossibility. Similarly, I don’t see IF as a guaranteed means of facilitating classroom dialogue. In fact, using non-linear texts to structure talk-intensive lessons comes with a range of challenges.
However, I do invite you to consider the ways in which the tools and resources that you routinely use might be shaping the way that talk unfolds in your classroom. I encourage you to reflect upon the extent to which students in your lessons can influence the lesson’s trajectory via their spoken contributions, and I invite you to explore the ways in which choice might enhance the evaluative and dialogic quality of the conversations you facilitate.
References and Further Reading
Holdstock, S. (2021). The Dialogic Possibilities for Interactive Fiction in the Secondary Academy English Classroom. Changing English, 28(4), 395–410. https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2021.1915747
Holdstock, S. (2024). Using Interactive Fiction to Stimulate Metalinguistic Talk in the English Classroom. Literacy, 58(1), 48–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/LIT.12348
Holdstock, S. (2025). Textual Entanglements Interactive Fiction in the Secondary School English Classroom [Goldsmiths, University of London]. https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39177/1/EDU_thesis_HoldstockS_2025.pdf
Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (1991). Instructional Discourse, Student Engagement, and Literature Achievement. 25(3), 261–290.
Reznitskaya, Alina., & Wilkinson, I. A. G. . (2017). The most reasonable answer : helping students build better arguments together. Harvard Education Press.