Neil Mercer

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Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge. He grew up in Cockermouth, Cumbria, attended Cockermouth Grammar School, studied psychology at the University of Manchester, and earned a PhD in psycholinguistics from the University of Leicester.

Mercer researches how dialogue in education helps children think and reason. At Cambridge, he serves as Director of the Study Centre Oracy Cambridge and is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall. Before Cambridge, he led the Open University’s Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technologies (CREET) and was part of the Centre for Language and Communications.

He has co-edited journals such as Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, and has edited Learning and Instruction and the International Journal of Educational Research.

Mercer emphasizes using language to “inter-think” and build “common knowledge”—shared understandings that help people work together. His work is influenced by Vygotsky and the broader sociocultural and dialogic approach to learning. He proposes the Intermental Development Zone—the space language creates for peers to interact and reason together without a guiding teacher.

A key focus is the quality of classroom talk and its impact on learning, including the role of home talk. He argues that social interaction and collaborative activity in class offer valuable opportunities for learning, and that classroom talk should aim for cooperation and exploratory talk. Exploratory talk encourages explaining ideas, listening to others, and building mutual understanding, while disputational talk often involves disagreement without constructive argument. A third form, cumulative talk, involves sharing ideas without critical analysis.

Research on these kinds of talk suggests a link between strong communication skills and better critical thinking, leading to calls for more focus on these skills in classrooms and teacher education, including in the context of technology. This approach is known as “Thinking Together.”

Mercer’s work on educational discourse uses sociocultural discourse analysis, a theory about how language is used to share meaning, create common knowledge, and enable interthinking. The Thinking Together approach has been used internationally, including in Mexico and Chile.