Close your eyes and picture yourself in your classroom or learning space. Where are you standing or sitting? What are you doing? I did a quick survey of family and friends (both in education and other fields) and the resounding response was that the teacher is standing at the front of the class talking. What might your students (or teachers) say about you?
How many questions do you ask per day? Some research indicates teachers ask between 200 to 300? (Hattie, 2020) How many do only one student answer? How many do the same 6 or 7 students answer?
What percentage of the lesson do you talk? 40% or more? Various research papers show teachers currently talk between 40 - 90%. (Hattie, 2020; Kostadinovska-Stojchevska & Popovik, 2019)
As teachers we need to figure out when talking is helping learning and when it would be better learning if the students were talking. What might that look like?
What strategies do you have to reduce teacher talk and increase student talk?
Idea 1: Get the facts - time yourself
Seriously, how long do you think you talk, generally at the start of a lesson? From experience, we underestimate how much talking we do. What if you made yourself some challenges or ‘rules’ and asked your students to help you keep them. For example:
3 minutes is the longest I will talk without students talking
50% of explanation time has to be student talk or silence
I will start each lesson with 5 minutes of student talk (better at the start as the end sometimes gets filled up)
What other ideas do you have?
“Teachers who have experimented with changing the balance of student and teacher talk in their classrooms, and researchers who study it, say that simply shifting the ratio isn’t enough. The real goal is finding ways to spark productive classroom discussions” (Gewertz, 2020).
Idea 2: Don’t be afraid of silence
In our blogish post ‘Who is doing the talking in your class?' the suggested Talk Less Move for giving instructions deliberately uses pauses to create silence. It takes time to process information and figure out if you have understood the instruction or not which is the purpose of the pause.
What other routines do you use that deliberately include silence? Think-Pair-Square-Share? Chalk Talk? One of our favourites is the Rapid Sharing protocol (Figure 1). We have used this with adults and 5 year olds in groups of 3. After each group member has chosen their name - A, B or C - follow the sequence as outlined in Figure 1. You will need to keep track of the time and have a signal for the next step. One round takes about 3 minutes - so 9 minutes all up.
Figure 1
Once students have learnt the routine you will be able to use it whenever the need arises to spark these discussions.
(FYI - There are 13ish questions in this article)
Another idea!
You might be interested in these Edutopia 60-Second Strategies:
Traverse Talk https://www.edutopia.org/video/60-second-strategy-traverse-talk or
References
Gewertz, C. (2020, January 3). How much should teachers talk in the classroom? Much less, some say. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/how-much-should-teachers-talk-in-the-classroom-much-less-some-say/2019/12
Hattie, J. H. (2020, August 3). John Hattie: ‘Teachers must see their impact to believe it.’ TES Magazine. https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/john-hattie-teachers-must-see-their-impact-believe-it
Kostadinovska-Stojchevska, Bisera & Popovikj, Ivana. (2019). Teacher Talking Time vs. Student Talking Time: Moving from teacher-centred classroom to learner-centered classroom. The International Journal of Applied Language Studies and Culture. 2. 25-31. 10.34301/alsc.v2i2.22.
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