Student talk to promote learning does not just happen. Some students will talk completely un-prompted (and sometimes about the topic at hand) whilst others are more reluctant to talk.
When we ask adults and children, “What does quality talk look, sound and feel like?”, the common response is about facing the person and eye-contact. Quality talk is less about the physicality of talking and more about the interaction of listening and responding.
Among other things, quality talk about learning has the potential to facilitate metacognition, helping students watch and hear themselves thinking. It is also an opportunity for teachers to engage in assessment through eavesdropping and observation to make decisions about the next steps in the learning process
How do you currently make quality talk clear?
Idea 1: End Point Rubrics
Teacher modeling, peer observation, feedback, single-point rubrics and checklists are all ways we can make criteria for quality talk clear. Another technique is End Point Rubrics (see Figure 1).
Students are generally pretty confident about what quality talk IS NOT! You can see on this End-Point rubric that the detail at the ‘More of…’ end sounds less like student speak, and there is a good reason for that. Most of these ideas were not suggested by students at the initial brainstorm but added over time with practice using anchor charts, sentence frames and cycles of feedback. Students place themselves on the continuum depending on which aspect they are focussing on. The ‘What else?’ is also deliberate to call out that the better we get at this, the more refined our criteria can become.
Idea 2: Adding detail using visuals
The teacher adding detail using visuals of what quality talk looks like - less of one person doing all the talking and more of people taking turns and monitoring their talk time is another technique for making quality talk clear (see figure 2). The comments under the image are the students' suggestions of what the visual is showing. Using either of these examples students can self-assess, give their partner feedback and the teacher can also give 1:1 student feedback.
Another idea!
You might also be interested in the Edutopia 60-Second Strategy: Talk Detectives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juR87aAg4vM
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