CPD Reflections: Classroom Talk

By Will Glydon

What got me thinking about this topic? Classroom talk can be tricky! It can be difficult to ensure that all students are fully participating in pair and group work as some students find it difficult to share ideas and are overpowered in conversation by their more extroverted classmates. As well as this, comfort with class talk can certainly vary depending on the stage of your career. As an early career teacher, I know that maintaining solid behavior management can cause teachers to steer clear of group work activities as it can feel risky to let go of complete control. Where did I find some research on this topic? Researchers Doug Lemov and Martin Robinson answer questions on Classroom Talk in 'What does this look like in the classroom?' by Carl Hendrick and Robin Macpherson. I have selected three questions, which the researchers responded to, that particularly piqued my interest as I felt they were applicable to WA. I also looked at the Bitesize Research from last week which had some of the School 21 oracy strategies. Below are some responses that pick out tactics and techniques to tackle Classroom Talk.

How can I make sure that classroom discussion is rich rather than superficial?

I picked out this question as I personally find this difficult. I find that sometimes students are talking without offering much substance or deep thought. The researchers Doug and Martin offer these pieces of advice:

• Writing the key question on the board and leaving it there is an easy way to keep the topic on track
• Think of the extent to which you are valorising ‘outside the box’ comments by saying things like “Oh, that’s so outside the box!” It is important to encourage different ways of thinking, but to generate rich, rather than superficial discussion, what teachers should be aiming for is to generate very insightful ‘inside the box’ comments. They argue that explicitly explaining this to students is important.
• ‘Meta feedback’ is important for students who go off-topic. Language that can be used can be something like “she made an excellent point, let's respond to that first before we move onto a new topic”
• ‘Charting it’ is the final technique mentioned. This involves writing the ‘golden nuggets’ of the conversation on the board to refer back to throughout the lesson. This is not only praising rich and insightful comments made, but as we all have working memory overload and forget conversations quickly, it means the comment will not be forgotten.

Another technique that was mentioned in the School 21 blog post last week is having ‘Talk Detectives’. This involves choosing students to walk around the class, listening to conversations, and monitoring the level of discussion. This could be a great way to encourage the students to think carefully about the richness of conversation whilst in group work. How do you ensure that all students contribute in pair activities, small and larger group work? I have noticed that some of our students are much quieter learners, however, it is still important to encourage these students to fully participate in classroom talk activities. Some of the strategies that the researchers Doug and Martin share are as follows:

• It is important to ensure that students are writing something before they go into their groups. That means their conversation will be Version 2.0 of their thinking and give them more confidence to share their ideas instead of feeling rushed and panicked. This technique also encourages deeper thought.
• For pair activities, a good technique is to ‘manage turns’. This is achieved through the teacher instructing the person on the left to speak for 30 seconds and share their ideas first, then the right. This allows both students to have equal time in sharing ideas.
• For group work, teachers should be giving ‘Meta feedback’. This involves giving large groups feedback on their ability to speak and listen to others and not dominate the activity. The skill of listening should be praised.
• It is important for students to get into “Habits of discussion”- These habits can be achieved through providing sentence frames for the students to follow. Maybe these habits will be too prescriptive for KS4, but they could be beneficial for KS3 to build listening and speaking skills?

How can I get pupils who are used to talking informally (i.e. in slang) to be able to adopt the register required for success in exams and beyond? I chose this question as I have noticed that some of our students can have incredible thinking and brilliant points, but sometimes it is not articulated in quite the right way. The researchers suggest:

• Consistently make a point to upgrade student language. This can be done through responding with something like “good point, but now put that same point into the language of a geographer”
• Putting technical tier three vocabulary on the wall of a classroom can help. This way, students can refer back to it and the teacher can point to the vocabulary to assist them.
• It is important to make a point of the fact that the students don’t need to have classroom talk in the same way that they write in an exam. However, it is important to explicitly say that there needs to be a formal level to classroom discussions, it should not be ‘playground talk’. This will encourage students to think more about what they are saying.

I hope that you find some of this research useful and there are a few ideas that you might find useful to use in your own practice. If anyone would like to talk about some of these ideas any further, then drop me an email and we can arrange a time to meet up to have a further discussion. Likewise, if anyone tries some of these techniques or any other to develop classroom talk, then let me know your findings!