Three Tips for Fostering Dialogue in Self-Directed Learning

By Philip Silva

Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash

Dialogue is like jet fuel for any learning process.

It invites us to grapple with new skills, concepts, and perspectives by making sense of them in surprising and creative ways. It builds bridges between what we already know and what we’re struggling to understand on our own terms. Dialogue lures us away from certainty and invites us to slip into a kind of bewilderment, trusting that our understanding will come out the other end transformed—but whole.

Dialogue can be part of any effort to learn something new. We can design dialogue into a raucous workshop filled with colorful flip charts and sticky notes and out-loud conversations. But we can also find opportunities to foster dialogue in in a quiet solitary evening snuggled up with a book and a cup of tea. As the physicist David Bohm once wrote, “Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of dialogue is present.”

What steps can instructional designers and content creators take to support that “sense of dialogue within” for students engaging with self-led courses or simply exploring new ideas through books, videos, or podcasts? 

Here are three strategies to get started:

1. Dialogue is in the Doing

Dialogue Education could just as easily have been named “Action” Education. At the heart of this tradition of teaching and learning you’ll find a commitment to tasking students to do something meaningful, authentic, and immediately relevant with a newfound skill, concept, or perspective as soon as they’ve encountered it for the first time. You might say that “the dialogue is in the doing.”

Students inevitably enter into a kind of internal dialogue as they take action in response to a tasking prompt. “Is this how it should go?” they might ask themselves. “What if I did it this way instead? Why is it like this? When should I do the next thing? How did that happen? Why do I believe this?” The list of questions that come up whenever we take action is seemingly endless.

Tasking isn’t limited to courses, with their stepwise design and sequencing. Books and articles can task readers to work with new content at the end of every section or chapter or in marginalia that follows along with a text. Videos and podcasts can take pauses or “commercial” breaks and prompt listeners to try something for themselves.

2.  Invite Annotation

Research shows that annotation is a powerful metacognitive tool for learning.

Through annotation, a reader (or listener, etc.) enters into dialogue with the content itself: summarizing it, arguing with it, connecting it to other skills or concepts from other works. Annotation can also lead a reader into dialogue with themselves as they consider how the content applies to their own experience, making note of the connections as they go along.

Course designers and content creators should explicitly invite learners to annotate at multiple points:

• Design online courses with prompts for annotation sprinkled throughout the modules.

• Print word-based content with ample margins and remind readers to take notes at regular intervals.

• Invite podcast listeners or video watchers to keep a notebook nearby and invite them to pause periodically to reflect by putting pen to paper.

3. Take the Dialogue Online—and Offline

The dialogue that comes out of solo learning experiences needn’t all be inwardly directly. Students, readers, listeners, and viewers can all be encouraged to take their newfound knowledge out into the world for deeper exploration and experimentation. Solo courses should prompt students to schedule coffee chats with friends, colleagues, and collaborators to engage in dialogue about what they’re learning. Similarly, courses can task students with making social media posts about a challenging new skill or a thought-provoking new concept, inviting dialogue in a thread of comments. Writers, podcasters, and video creators can use the same strategies to nudge their audiences into dialogue about their content out in the world.

© 2025 Philip Silva