Productive Talk

Let’s talk about talk. Talk is the sea on which ideas float. In productive dialogue, participants bob up and down in this sea, taking their turns as they share ideas, listen, encourage others to participate, and build on their own and each other’s thoughts. 

There is persuasive research evidence about the importance of stimulating classroom talk, including student-to-student talk. The teacher’s role in such talk is to coach, support, and encourage; to prompt for relational thinking that includes analogies, alternative hypotheses, and elaborative clarification.* Students have higher cognitive engagement and increased learning when instruction includes opportunities for them to ask questions, evaluate each other’s contributions, and construct their own meaning.**

Interestingly, students are more likely to use a sentence frame that has been introduced by a peer rather than a teacher. When a student says something like, “What do you think, ________?” or “I (dis)agree with ____,” the use of these phrases escalates as the discussion continues. Researchers call this the “snowball effect.” Student talk gets bigger and bigger.***

To harness this power, teachers can reduce the time students work alone, increase the time they work with each other, and prompt for the specific types of thinking and talking described above.

In your classroom, school, or district, is there an emphasis on student-to-student talk? What are you doing to make it happen more?  This kind of talk time is so good for students! It is also good for grown-up learners!

Now that you’ve thought about increasing student-to-student talk in the classroom, let’s think about increasing peer-to-peer talk among educators, including PLC meetings and coaching conversations. Is there an emphasis on peer-to-peer talk in your school or district? Review the bolded recommendations above. What are you doing to make these things happen during collegial conversations?

Although the research cited above deals with student talk, I feel confident the impact would be mirrored if educators’ talk were studied. Let’s talk about talk!  In the classroom or the PLC room, learning increases when it floats on a sea of talk.

* Lin, T. J., Jadallah, M., Anderson, R. C., Baker, A. R., Nguyen-Jahiel, K., Kim, I. H., ... & Wu, X. (2015). Less is more: Teachers’ influence during peer collaboration. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(2), 609.
**Alexander, R. (2008). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk (4th ed.). Dialogos UK Ltd.
***Anderson, R. C., Nguyen-Jahiel, K., McNurlen, B., Archodidou, A., Kim, S. Y., Reznitskaya, A., ... & Gilbert, L. (2001). The snowball phenomenon: Spread of ways of talking and ways of thinking across groups of children. Cognition and Instruction, 19(1), 1-46.
 

This week, you might want to take a look at:
 
7 types of rest everyone needs: 
 
https://ideas.ted.com/the-7-types-of-rest-that-every-person-needs/
 
 
14 printable Bloom’s Taxonomy posters:
 
https://www.teachthought.com/critical-thinking/14-brilliant-blooms-taxonomy-posters-for-teachers/
 
 
Enduring practices from remote learning:
 
https://www.edutopia.org/article/enduring-practices-remote-teaching
 
 
The value of rereading picture books:
 
https://teachersbooksreaders.com/2021/02/22/read-them-again-and-again-and-again/
 
Ensuring teachers’ professional learning is impactful:
 
https://www.rethinked.com/blog/blog/2018/01/24/seven-strategies-prof-learning/
 
 
That’s it for this week.  Happy Coaching!
 
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