Bitesize Research: Classroom Talk & Oracy

By Jaya Carrier

I hope everyone’s having a great week so far! This week, following our student-centered blog theme for T3, I was really interested in a piece on Edutopia about classroom talk that showcases some of the School 21 oracy strategies. Objectives: To outline some of the strategies from School 21’s acclaimed work on classroom talk and oracy. Summary:

Some of the strategies highlighted include -

• Create discussion guidelines. These include: always respect each other’s ideas, and be prepared to change your mind.
• Use ‘talk detectives’. These are students that circulate whilst group or pair discussions are taking place with a copy of the discussion guidelines. Then they write down the names of students who evidenced the guidelines you’ve set, and what it is that they said. This supports developing metacognition around oracy.
• Consider carefully the groupings of your students. This is both in terms of the students themselves but also the different types of positions they are in.
• Model and clarify what good listening looks like. Be explicit about asking students to demonstrate good listening behaviours which could include looking your partner in the eye, considering their talking volume and giving their partner personal space.
• Create discussion roles. These include: instigator, builder and summariser. One strategy used by School 21 is that they film staff having conversations in these roles and students use these videos to identify the roles being taken.
• Create structured talk tasks including controversial ‘talk point’ statements, ‘ghost reading’ and ‘collective writing’.
• Build up confidence in shy students by giving them talking sentence starters.

How does this impact me and my practice?:
Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• What is important to me about oracy and student talk in my lessons and in my subject?
• How does oracy and student talk benefit student learning in my subject?
• How am I already integrating student talk into my lessons? How successful has it been? How do I know?
• Which of these strategies could be helpful in a lesson I’m planning to teach in the near future?

If you would like to discuss this further with me - please let me know! I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.