What exactly are 'ground rules'?

The Thinking Together approach to teaching dialogue relies on teaching learners ‘ground rules’ for talk. But what exactly are these ‘ground rules’? The term ‘ground rule’ originated with base-ball in America. Every base-ball ground was a bit different and had to have their own ground rules in addition to the universal rules. For instance a ground rule that applies at Fenway Park, the home of Boston Red Sox, is that: A fly ball that strikes the top of the ladder on the Green Monster and then bounces out of play is two (2) bases. These are explicit rules and so quite misleading when it comes to the use of the term ‘ground rule’ in dialogic education. Here the Oxford English Dictionary definition is a better guide. This describes a ground rules as ‘a basic principle’ and gives as one example of use: ‘My first ground rule is always to tell the truth.’ 

Ground rules are not meant to be explicit rules but implicit guides to actions. We sometimes teach them explicitly but this is mainly so that they can become implicit again through practice. For example we might teach very young children to say ‘I think’ before they give an opinion. This is because they do not always talk in a way that acknowledges that what they are saying is only one possible point of view that could be questioned and that is open for change. But after a bit of practice with dialogue the ‘I think’ in front of utterances becomes implicit. In a real dialogue we know that everything put forward is put forward provisionally as an opinion which can be challenged and can be changed so it is no longer needed to spell this assumption explicitly. 

One way to think about teaching ground rules for effective dialogue is as a form of culture-change. Any culture has implicit assumptions or expectations that shape explicit behaviour. These assumptions tend to be unconscious because you only become aware of them when they are challenged. If the culture of a classroom is individualistic and competitive then inviting a child to tell the class what she thinks about an issue might be interpreted either as an opportunity to perform or as an invitation to be judged and found wanting or, indeed, both. If the culture of the classroom is ‘dialogic’ then exactly the same invitation might be interpreted simply as a chance to participate in shared thinking with the goal of shared understanding in which case provisional or ‘half-baked’ thoughts are welcome and mistakes are understood as valuable learning opportunities. 

​This diagram of the four stages of competence originally applied to learning any new skill sums up well what we are doing when we teach ground rules for dialogue. In the first stage – unconscious incompetence the children are not very aware of the implicit ground rules behind the way that they talk together or how this impacts on their thinking. We get them to be more aware of this through discussing videos of people talking, even videos of them talking together in a group around a problem, or role-plays or discussing pictures of people talking in different situations. When they realise that maybe the way that they talk together makes a difference and that they ought to think about it they move into the next stage of conscious incompetence. We then introduce possible ground rules. The best way to do this is to get them to do it. Ask them what they think the ground rules of effective talk should be and rely on their intuitions. The actual ground rules should vary a lot depending on many factors but once they have tried to work in a group children will probably be aware that some ground rule work better than others, rules like listening to everyone with respect, giving everyone a chance to speak, even asking everyone they think, not getting angry or being rude when challenged but, instead, giving reason and being open to change your mind. Ground rules like this will make sense to them and all you have to do as a teacher is bring them out and help the class express them explicitly in a set of ‘ground rules for talking’ which could go up as a poster. This is the stage of conscious competence when the ground rules are consciously referred to and applied. But the expectation is that practice will move the rules into a change in the culture of the class. Many anecdotes about how more dialogic classes are able to solve problems together without always asking the teacher or spontaneously organise collaborative learning indicate that this change in culture can occur whereby the ground rules of dialogue become implicit and assumed as part of the background of communication. 

Once implicit ground rules have been established, this does not mean that there is never any need to go back and revisit those ground rules. One reason might be to develop them further in the direction of more advanced dialogue, adding, for example, the rule of looking at things from other people’s points of view and, perhaps, everyone’s point of view as in ‘would everyone see it that way? If not then why not? What are other possible ways of seeing it?’. While at first this could be an explicit strategy on the lines of ‘what would my aunt think? What would Sherlock Holmes think? What would a Martian think?’ after a while this scanning for alternative perspectives and possible counter examples to every claim can become an automatic or implicit part of dialogic thinking. Another reason to dig up implicit ground rules and make them explicit again is when they are no longer helping. In new contexts ground rules might need to change. In dialogues with some other cultures for example, the implicit assumption that eye-contact means good listening might need to change. In some creative tasks the ground rule to ask for reasons and to give explicit reasons might need to be modified and developed or perhaps this is more about questioning and expanding implicit assumptions about what counts as asking for and giving reasons. 

So exactly what kind of thing are these ‘ground rules’ again?

The use of the term 'ground rule' for teaching dialogue is a version of the rules suggested by 'conversational implicature' in pragmatics (Grice, 1975). Conversational implicature concerns the assumptions that people make, and often have to make, in order to interpret what others say in a dialogue.  For example we normally assume that what another person says is relevant so if I ask 'where are the keys?' and my son says 'on the table' I can just assume that he means the car keys I am looking for as I am about to leave the house and that he means that they are on the nearest and most obvious table to both of us. Of course there are lots of misunderstandings but that is why we know that the rules of implicature apply because we can see the assumptions being made that generate the misunderstandings. 'They are not on the table!', 'Yes they are - I didn't mean the big table, I  meant the small table in the hall' etc.

Implicature in dialogues is interesting because it suggests that explicit meaning rests upon a larger background of shared implicit assumptions. It is only because we have a shared 'form of life' as Wittgenstein put it that people can make sense of what each other are saying. The set of implicit assumptions vary across cultures and change over time.  They depend on who we think we are and what we think we are doing. More than that, if we do not question them and take conscious responsibility for them, they determine who we think we are and what we think we are doing. Foucault has argued, for example, that it is not so much that subjects (us) speak the discourse - as we tend to assume - but rather it is the other way around, the subjects - i.e us - are spoken by the discourse. 

Ground rules need to be shared. If one person had a set of implicit assumptions that she used to interpret the meaning of utterances and no one else shared those then they would not be ground rules. While ground rules might be found reflected in neural activity in individual brains –  but then again,  what isn’t? – their primary nature is to be shared and social. They are not material objects found in physical space. Ground rules are invisible features of dialogic space. Dialogic space is that meaning space shared between people in dialogue together. When ground rules are made explicit, written down on cards and discussed together, then they are part of the contents of dialogic space. Anything that enters into dialogic space can be seen from multiple perspectives. It becomes a sign in an ongoing dialogue with a meaning that evolves as the dialogue moves on. However, before they are made into objects of shared attention, before they are written down, they are hidden in the background.  Ground rules originate as part of the invisible architecture of dialogic space. Although, as I have argued elsewhere, dialogic space always has an infinite potential for generating new meaning, in practice any given dialogue has a hidden architecture that shapes what is likely to be said and what is likely to be thought.

Take this simple example that I have invented out of my experience of recording hours of children playing video games together:

Tom: It’s that one
Shane: No, it’s not
Tom: Yes, it is
Shane: I got it right
Tom: No you didn’t
Shane: I won. I am the best
Tom: You're just a d**khead
(2 boys playing a video game)

It is easy to see here simple ground rules at play of the kind that Neil Mercer referred to as characteristic of ‘disputational talk’. Ground rules like ‘always disagree’, ‘try to win’, ‘do not admit to learning anything from the other’. The simple ground rules here are not reducible to the visible words spoken. Those words are, in a sense, generated by the ground rules. Although the ground rules are invisible behind the surface of the talk they are quite close to the surface and easy to discern behind it. 

Kant actually began the kind of analysis we are doing here. He called it a transcendental argument. He meant by that, working back from the empirical surface of things to reconstruct their necessary preconditions. Peirce called this creative generation of causal mechanisms, ‘abduction’, and claimed it was the essence of scientific method. Bhaskar took this idea from Pierce and called it ‘retroduction’. Bhaskar claims that science is essentially ‘transcendental realism’, which is to say that the causal mechanisms we find through retroduction are real, it is the empirical surface of things that is a bit of an illusion. This seems to fit the reality of science pretty well. Matter, for example, does not seem to exist in any very simple surface way but Schrodinger's wave function maps the underlying invisible ground rules that can give you the probability of a particle appearing to an observer at any given point and at any given time. In a similar way much social science uses invisible social norms, rather like our ground rules, as causal mechanisms to explain behaviour, but always in a probabilistic way.

 ​If ground rules are transcendentals then they are not transcendentals in the way that Kant used the term to mean things that can never be part of our experience, unknowable 'ideal' things belonging to a different 'noumenal' sphere. Ground rules are more like what Merleau-Ponty called, in a striking phrase, ‘the invisibles of this world’. He used the example of the nervure of a leaf. If you look at the veins in a leaf you can almost see an underlying  dendritic pattern, an organising idea that lies just behind the surface but each leaf is different manifesting that invisible idea in a unique way. In a similar way ground rules lie just beneath the audible and visible surface of dialogues structuring them from below. But the exciting thing is that we can make them visible and we can alter them and send them back underground again, as it were, to become invisible again behind behaviour. This is exactly what we do when we teach ground rules for effective dialogue. So the idea of teaching 'ground rules for talk' is a more complicated and, I think, a more profound idea than it might at first appear. By teaching ground rules for talk in classrooms we can, consciously take charge of some of the implicit shared assumptions that shape us and re-design them so that we can collectively think together better, learn together better and live together better. 

References and links to follow up

Sources for practical advice on how to teach ground rules for thinking together:
​Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering core concepts through thinking together. Routledge. 
Dawes, L., Mercer, N., & Wegerif, R. (2004). Thinking together: A programme of activities for developing speaking, listening and thinking skills for children aged 8-11. Imaginative Minds.
http://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/


Bhaskar, R. (2013). A realist theory of science. Routledge.
Cox, B., & Forshaw, J. (2013). The Quantum Universe:(and why Anything that Can Happen, Does). Da Capo Press.
​Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. 1975, 41-58.
Hedström, P., & Ylikoski, P. (2010). Causal mechanisms in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 49-67.
​Kant, I. (1781/1998). Critique of Pure Reason (translated and edited by Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood).
Mercer, N. (2000). Words and minds: How we use language to think together. Psychology Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M., (1968). The visible and the invisible: followed by working notes. Northwestern University Press.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/peirce.html


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