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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
We need other techniques on which we can draw to help pupils embed learning and make progress. After all, how can we be effectively checking progress and understanding when it is we who are doing all the talking? How can we be certain that the sea of 'attentive' faces before us is not simply contemplating lunch? The solution is here: a vast bank of exciting, engaging, practical ways to allow learners to access and understand complex topics and skills without relentlessly bending their ears. Strategies which not only prevent pupils from being passengers in lessons, but which also make progress visible to both teacher and learner. In an entertaining and practical way, Talk-Less Teaching shows you how to encourage learners' responsibility for their own progress without compromising test results or overall achievement. Discover hundreds of tried and tested practical tips for helping pupils understand difficult concepts and learn new skills without you developing lecture-laryngitis. Talk-Less Teaching was shortlisted for the ERA Education Book Award 2016.
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To every teacher who has ever forgotten to listen during a meeting, to every student who has ever felt confused during a lecture and to little Charlie, who despite valiant attempts to pay attention, eventually fell asleep during ‘carpet time’.
Contents
Introduction
What is Talk-Less Teaching?
When well-known comedians take to the stage, they face an audience full of avid listeners. They look down at a sea of eager faces, each belonging to a devoted fan who has paid for the privilege of drinking in their every word. Sometimes a lesson can feel like that for the teacher and the learners. Sometimes – but not always.
Imagine for a moment that the topic the stand-up intends to talk about isn’t especially amusing. Imagine that it isn’t familiar or even apparently relevant to the audience’s frames of reference. Imagine that rather than having paid for the privilege of listening, the audience are there by obligation. Perhaps they are small children with ants in their pants or teenagers who have more ‘important’ things to be thinking about. Imagine, just imagine, that the comedian isn’t a born entertainer whose mere facial expressions are enough to induce rapture and delight. Would the audience still listen attentively, absorb, understand and remember everything the stand-up said?
This imagined scenario is far closer to the reality of a classroom. It’s a brave teacher, indeed, who would assume that their ‘audience’ is capable of listening attentively to and taking in every part of a 30-minute speech. This won’t stop the odd teaching colleague from telling you, ‘There’s nothing wrong with talking to a class all lesson if that’s the only way to get the information across to them!’ The problems with this theory are tenfold:
1 It is never the only way to get the information across, as the strategies in this book will demonstrate.
2 Talking can be the quickest way to impart information (so it can feel like the most efficient and satisfying way) but it is often not the most effective way to secure understanding and embed it in the long term.
3 The ‘turn-up-and-teach’ method is sometimes misused as an alternative to thoughtful planning – which means differentiation (among other aspects of good teaching) goes out the window.
4 It’s impossible to get feedback from your learners about what they are understanding while you are the one doing the talking. So, if you talk for a long period of time, you run the risk of subsequently discovering that not only have some learners not understood you, but others haven’t been actively listening at all.
5 If you’re observing someone else’s lesson for personal development or performance management purposes, you’ll know that, as long as the teacher is talking, you have no gauge to assess the impact of that teaching. You will remain completely ignorant of whether learners are actually listening, and therefore making progress by gaining new knowledge and eliminating misconceptions.
6 This theory is often offered by that colleague who has always liked the sound of their own voice, and doesn’t realise that not everyone else around them feels the same.
7 This theory is sometimes offered by Mr or Mrs Charisma Incarnate. This is the colleague who probably could have been one of the celebrated comedians mentioned above, but having taken to the classroom, has only to open their mouth to have every single learner mesmerised. It’s easy for this person to mistakenly believe that every colleague around them possesses the same rare gift.
8 Having to listen to someone speak for a long period of time can cause an audience to feel restless and rebellious.
9 The longer the teacher talks for, the less time learners have to think for themselves, and the less time there remains for learners to ask questions they need answers to or discuss concepts so that they can understand them better.
10 Adhering to this theory can result in a sore throat.
Point number 7 is a particularly important one: outstanding teachers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There is no one way to teach a lesson, no single style that beats all the other styles hands down. As long as our learners are making fabulous progress, then we should stick with what we’re doing (unless it’s mind control or lobotomy).
Reduced teacher-talk is not desirable in essence. It is desirable to reduce teacher-talk when it is getting in the way of learners making the best progress that they can and when it is getting in the way of making learning meaningful, purposeful and, dare we say, even enjoyable at times. So, teacher-talk should only be viewed negatively if it is of poor quality or if it is impeding pupil progress. If you’re confident that you’re one of those gifted orators who can get every single learner in your class making progress through talking to them for long periods of time, or if you have a class made up entirely of learners with exceptional auditory processing skills who are indisputably benefitting from your lectures and have little need to practise the skills or use the knowledge that you are telling them about, then go ahead and talk till the cows come home. For the rest of us, we need to have a sizeable bank of alternative strategies up our sleeve to help learners to stay motivated, understand difficult concepts and make visible progress. This is what you will find in this book.
Of course, you may be reading this book because you want to help colleagues who, for one or more of the reasons above, are unwittingly impeding pupil progress through an excess of teacher-talk or inadvertently turning people off from learning through requiring them to be passive recipients – not just occasionally but on a daily basis. There are plenty of ideas in the chapters that follow to support teachers of any year group, and of any subject, to engage and enthuse their classes so that learners take responsibility for their own learning, and so that progress is highly visible and measurable. In fact, the strategies in this book are specifically designed to stop learners from relying on an apathetic takeaway approach to school (‘You do it all for me and I’ll pick up the nice grade at the end, thank you very much’). Instead, the practical strategies we outline support a MasterChef approach to school, where every learner is encouraged to be responsible for their own progress, and to use and practise what they learn with increasing confidence and skill.
Because that, dear teacher friends, is what talk-less teaching is all about: a way of teaching that engages and involves every learner, offers a variety of experiences in the classroom and has a demonstrable impact on the quality of lessons and on pupil progress. Talk-less teaching can improve outcomes for learners from nursery to university. Talk-less teaching shows you how to foster active and independent learning without compromising exam results or knowledge acquisition. It is all about making sure we have realistic, practical ways to help learners understand difficult concepts and learn new skills without making the poor dears listen incessantly to the sound of our voices, and to raise attainment without resorting to mind-numbing and formulaic teaching-to-the-test.
But talk-less teaching is much more than that. From the thousands of teachers with whom we’ve worked, one response in particular has chimed out above all others: talk-less teaching makes teaching irresistible. It doesn’t just put the delight back into the learners’ experience, it makes teaching thoroughly enjoyable too.
So, to fully appreciate the wonder of strategies which do not require long periods of passive listening, let’s start by putting ourselves into the shoes of the people we teach …
The best way to do this is to consider a typical staff meeting. Now, it should be fair to assume that the agenda in these meetings is pretty important (latest test results, changes to the curriculum, health and safety, etc.), but who among us has not, at one time or another, despite their best efforts to concentrate, experienced a scenario similar to the following:
Chairperson: If you look at page 4 of the document, you’ll see that … blah, blah, blah.
Your brain: The refreshments at meetings have really gone downhill since Janet left. I miss those little pink wafer things we always used to get … I wonder if she used to get them from that little shop in …
Chairperson: John! Did you want to mention anything about that problem?
Your brain: Argh! I stopped listening! What is he referring to? Think! … No – just look pensive … And pray that someone else chips in!
Your mouth: Um. No, I don’t think so.
Your brain: Oh. My. Goodness. Now I look like a complete imbecile. [Brain continues along this line of thought for another five minutes while the chairperson continues to talk.]
No one can deny that it’s extremely easy for our minds to wander when all we’re required to do is listen. Even if we know we genuinely need to listen. It’s the same if we are given something repetitive and easy to do – our minds wander while we do it. However, get us to do something that requires us to be active and mindful, and our attention is suddenly captured.
Try This …
Use a video camera to film a lesson. Focus the camera on the learners rather than on the teacher. Look out for elements of the learners’ body language and facial expressions that indicate levels of engagement and attentiveness.
What do you notice about the levels of learner engagement when the teacher is addressing the class, compared to those when the learners are required to be actively doing something other than listening?
At which points of the lesson do you see the most yawns occurring?
While the learners are required to take in information aurally, are there any indications that some learners may not be listening or understanding?
You may have experienced the potential strain of ‘sitting and listening’ during staff development training. This is another common experience that we teachers share with students when we are occasionally required to be passive recipients of new learning; that is, we are required to listen to someone speak for a relatively long period of time. There are a number of reasons why we might not always get the best out of this passive listening experience and these can be directly compared to the experience of learners in our own lessons.
While it is clear to see how a lot of passive listening can automatically impede progress and frustrate the learner, it is also worth pointing out that learners will sometimes prefer to be passive if they possibly can. Many teachers of post-16 will be familiar with teenagers who exclaim: ‘Sir, can you just tell us the information we need to know and we’ll take notes? We don’t want to have to do anything!’ Of course, these teenagers would prefer to take the easy route, the passive route, the route that requires them to do no thinking whatsoever. It’s a perfectly understandable human reaction. Let’s be honest, many of us may at some point have headed off to a professional development course thinking, ‘I hope it’s not the kind of course where I’ll have to do stuff … I hope I’ll just be able to go unnoticed and have a relatively relaxing day.’
What we need to remember in this scenario is that while some of our learners might prefer to be passive in every lesson, it is important that we don’t allow them to dictate to us how we teach. As the educational experts, we know that if they sit passively taking notes, do little thinking for themselves, ask no questions and make no attempts to develop their learning further or challenge themselves, then it is highly unlikely that they will achieve their potential – not just in the upcoming exam, but in life too! Similarly, a class full of 4-and 5-year-olds can frequently be beside themselves with excitement at the prospect of watching a film in their lesson, but this does not mean that they will learn more from sitting passively watching a TV screen than they will from role-playing, enquiring and actively investigating.
It’s no secret that human beings learn and embed their learning most successfully by doing and being actively involved in their learning. We have only to take the example of learning to cook. If we had never cooked before and someone were to sit and tell us how to prepare a Sunday roast, it would be very difficult to replicate what we had just been told, and even harder to remember it the next day. However, if we were allowed to experiment, discover for ourselves what worked and what didn’t, discuss things as we went along, collaborate, watch and do, then we are likely to be able to produce increasingly tasty roast dinners for years to come. Learners can achieve their absolute best in this way – if we expect it of them, believe in them and persevere.
To put it bluntly, learning delivered primarily through teacher-talk is often the easiest option for both learners and teachers. It usually requires the least planning (assuming the teacher’s subject knowledge is good) and it releases learners from an obligation to think, practise and explore.
It’s hardly surprising then that, with so much work to get through, the busy teacher can often find themselves over-relying on teacher-talk as the quickest way to impart learning. However, as your car’s sat-nav sometimes fails to realise, the shortest route is not always the best route – especially when there are roadblocks and gaps in the road ahead.
Our anxiety to ‘get through the syllabus’ is usually the overriding reason why our automatic talk buttons get stuck in the ‘on’ position. It is a widely accepted notion that students’ success can be measured by their performance in standardised tests and exams, and so, by extension, the competence of their teachers can be similarly assessed. When there is a whole lot of crucial content to cover, our default method for conveying information and skills to our learners is to talk … and talk … and talk. It’s a natural human instinct: what do most of us do when we’re anxious or under pressure? We talk – ten to the dozen. And, let’s face it, we teachers are under huge amounts of pressure most of the time.
How many times have you heard inspirational and innovative colleagues lament the fact that they ‘simply don’t have time to use creative or engaging teaching strategies any more because there just isn’t room in the syllabus to make the learning enjoyable’? There is a pervasive notion that vast amounts of test-related information must be transferred or ‘uploaded’ from teacher to learner, and that the best way to effect this transfer is through the power of talk. Any alternative method would amount to ‘stopping’ and wasting time in an already tight schedule.
So, the commonly experienced ‘lecture laryngitis’ that results from talking too much to our classes isn’t necessarily a sign of an uninspiring teacher who doesn’t care about making learning intriguing and exciting. In fact, it is far more likely, we believe, to be a symptom of that understandable fear that if we talk less in lessons, it will be impossible to get across all the vital information needed by learners to succeed.
Of course, most teachers acknowledge that didactic, lecture-style teaching fosters a culture of passivity in learners, where learners come to expect to have learning ‘fed’ to them – to be told the answers, rather than taught the skills to discover the answers themselves or even consider the possibility of alternative answers. However, despite active, independent learning being an unarguably worthy concept in itself, we can still feel that we’re stuck in an impossible bind between, on the one hand, building independent learning skills, and on the other, cramming the content necessary to get the results on which we (and our learners) are ultimately judged. The upshot? We are still at risk of allowing lessons to be dominated by the sound of our own voices.
Most teachers have experienced that utter sense of exhaustion that can descend at the end of a busy day in the classroom – that moment when the last learner exits the room and we sink dejectedly into our chair, nursing a sore throat. It’s a moment that should be filled with a warm feeling of satisfaction for a job well done, but often the overriding thought that creeps naggingly into our brain is: ‘Hold on … did I just do almost all of the work back there? Did I just bust a gut for a whole hour only to get my pupils to do a tiny bit of work?’ This realisation is then usually followed by a further insidious thought: ‘What if it turns out that some of them only looked like they were listening? What if I take their books in and it turns out I just wasted all that time?’
It will sometimes be necessary for learners to be passive recipients of their learning, but if they come to expect their schooling to take this form on a daily basis then they will become experts in the takeaway approach and never aspire to MasterChef status.
The sad fact is that most of us will, at certain points in our career, have uttered something similar to the following:
‘No, Jemima, I will not draw the people for you just because you say you’re “rubbish at drawing”.’
‘Daniel, why didn’t you just ask for a pen instead of sitting there doing nothing?’
‘Sophie, if you and Letitia really didn’t understand, you could have asked for help, rather than chatting about boy bands.’
‘Oscar, you’ve seen this word before. Don’t wait for me to tell you it – try to sound it out.’
‘Why did you all stop working just because I had to talk to Mr Hopps for two minutes?!’
‘How about if I do the first bit for you? Will that help?’
‘Henry, I have practically told you exactly what to write in my written comments! Why have you not made these changes in your final draft?’
‘Stacey, please don’t expect Mrs Teeay to do it all for you. She’s here to help you, not to do your work for you!’
‘Jonathan, I understand that you weren’t sure about that question, but if you had just written something you might have picked up a couple of marks.’
‘Penny, you can’t be stuck already because you haven’t tried yet. How can you know you can’t do it if you haven’t even tried?’
What we need is to feel confident in the truth that we can foster a classroom culture of independent thinking and improve progress and performance – yes, in tests too – by using teaching techniques which allow learning to go far deeper than it does when it is mostly administered aurally. What we need are techniques which protect against the potential for information to go ‘in one ear and out the other’ and which intrinsically motivate learners to learn. What we need is a vast bank of exciting, engaging, practical ways to allow learners to access and understand complex topics and skills without relentlessly bending their ears.
So, next time those learners look at you as if to say ‘Talk to the blank stare, ’cos the brain ain’t listening,’ here’s what you do: take a deep breath, remind yourself that there is another way and use the strategies in the following chapters to get the learners working harder than you, thinking harder than you and talking harder than you.
Chapter 1
The Chameleon Teacher
Tailoring Your Teaching to the Needs of Every Learner
If we’re going to know for sure that learners are making genuine progress in our lessons, then we need to establish a starting point from which that progress can be measured. In other words, before we begin, we need to have an accurate understanding of learners’ prior knowledge in relation to the topic we are teaching. Sometimes this important element of successful teaching and learning can be overlooked and we can instead resort to simply making an assumption about the starting point of our class.
A great teacher doesn’t swan into the classroom with a second-by-second lesson plan and stick to it religiously, regardless of whether the learners are responding well or not. A great teacher doesn’t drop in a quick ‘progress check’ or mini-plenary just for the sake of it and ignore what the exercise reveals about the understanding or skill of their learners. No, a great teacher craves any evidence they can get to assess the impact that their teaching is having, and they use this to inform how they teach their learners subsequently.
A great teacher assesses the impact of their teaching as they go along and adapts their teaching according to the information they glean. A great teacher is a readily flexible, ultra-adaptable ‘chameleon teacher’.
A key element of talk-less teaching is about getting to know our learners better – what makes them tick, what helps them to understand and what their natural ‘roadblocks’ are. The less time we spend talking, the more time we have to ascertain this useful information. What pairings would work best for this particular activity? What specific examples are really capturing their interest? Who is already streets ahead with this topic? What part of this task are they struggling with most?
Talking less to our classes doesn’t mean that we will be withholding vital information or being obtuse and unapproachable. On the contrary, to forge the best working relationships with our classes, we need to spend more time listening and creating opportunities for two-way communication. Of course, we know how all-important feedback is in the classroom, but we must remember that feedback in the classroom doesn’t simply mean the constructive, diagnostic advice that the teacher gives the learners. There is, arguably, an even more important type of feedback that occurs in the classroom: the feedback that we teachers get from the learners about what they are taking in, remembering and understanding.
It is this feedback from the learners that should act as one of the greatest influences on our planning and delivery. This goes far beyond accessibility. We are not just talking about pitching the challenge at the correct level, but also about eliciting feedback about all the other vital elements of learning.
Are there any adverse learning behaviours that could be rectified through an alternative approach to the lesson?
Are there any learners who are not actively involved? How can they be drawn into the learning?
Have I ‘hooked’ the class? How can I better engage their interest in the topic?
Does the class have access to the right support materials? Are they asking questions that could be answered with an additional resource rather than depending on the teacher?
Are there any pockets of learners that require additional support?
Is the task I have planned for the learners coming together as I had hoped? Would it be beneficial to adjust the length or breadth?
Try This …
In the staffroom, sit and talk to someone you don’t know very well. Spend about five minutes telling them about your experiences of teaching, your challenges and achievements. Don’t leave any gaps in your monologue. After five minutes of explaining this to them, consider the following:
How much have you found out about your colleague’s struggles or triumphs in the classroom?
What have you learnt about what you could do to help your colleague?
How do you know whether your colleague understands what you have explained?
OK, so we’re being a bit facetious here – but you get the general message. If you have just engaged in that cringe-worthy conversation with a colleague, you will have found that you got some frustration out of your system and gave yourself an opportunity to toot your own horn, but you will have received no answers to the probing questions above. Your own monopoly of the talking time will have prevented you from getting any feedback (and from making any new friends in the staffroom!).
All of this brings us to a potentially uncomfortable revelation: plenaries do not belong exclusively at the end of a lesson. We can’t risk waiting until the last 10 minutes to check on understanding, only to discover that half the class just haven’t ‘got it’. This may be an uncomfortable revelation because many of you will remember that for years, the good old National Strategy had us all exploding into a flurry of Q&As, presentations, evaluations and, no doubt in some cases, ritual chanting at exactly 10 minutes before the bell. Deeply ingrained though this practice might be, it’s time to step away from formulaic, prescriptive lesson structures and claim back the greatest skill we teachers have: great professional judgement. It is our professional judgement that will allow us to see when progress and understanding need to be checked, and consequently when and where we need to intervene to support and stretch our learners.
For example, our great professional judgement should tell us never, ever to interrupt learners who are busy making progress, simply to ‘prove’ the progress they are making!
Being a Chameleon Teacher
You may well have heard the famous assertion that to progress into being a ‘good’ teacher you need to tighten up, but to move from ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’ teaching you need to loosen up. What this aphorism highlights is just how important it is that, once we have ascertained information about our learners’ prior knowledge, we use that knowledge to teach accordingly.
This can feel like a rather courageous mission at times. Of course, we will have a core plan for our lessons, but being a chameleon teacher can sometimes mean acknowledging that we will have to go into a scheme of work feeling a little ‘blinder’ than we would wish, and then think on our feet when it comes to the delicate, responsive selection of activity and focus for each learner.
Helping learners to make sustained progress requires frequent evaluation of their level of skill, knowledge or understanding, so that we can subsequently set just the right tasks to help them move onwards and upwards. In this chapter you’ll find plenty of practical strategies to help you do just that.
Begin at the Beginning
By establishing the all-important starting point, any pupil progress made in your lesson will be far more visible to you and to the learners themselves. This is crucial, both for allowing you to assess the impact of your teaching on pupil progress, and for enabling learners to feel motivated by and proud of the headway they’re making. Remember that, unless you’re teaching a class full of identically programmed robots, this starting point will differ from learner to learner. Therefore, individuals’ outcomes at the end of the lesson (or series of lessons) need to be measured against each individual’s original starting point.
Of course, we’ll usually find out very quickly if we’ve pitched the level of challenge inappropriately high (learners’ blank stares and multiple mutterings of ‘I don’t get it’ are a fairly good giveaway). At some point, most of us have had the experience of planning to illuminate a skill, such as writing a formal letter, only to discover five minutes in that some of the learners don’t even know where they live, let alone how to spell their address. What is far harder to spot, however, is when a task has underestimated a learner’s prior knowledge. In these situations, the learner may complete an activity with great aplomb, but what genuine, measurable progress will have been made in their skill, knowledge or understanding?
We can’t measure progress unless we first establish a starting point from which to measure it. This is a fact that is easily forgotten or ignored because it’s far simpler to assume a common starting point, and teach to the middle, than it is to provide a differentiated learning journey for every child. The indisputable reality, however, is that Naheed has a far better grasp of events in Macbeth than Jordan does (because Naheed’s father once took her to see a theatre production of it), and Henry knows more about serving in tennis than Jasmine does (because there’s a tennis court behind his house).
Kick Off
Once you have a clear idea of the position from which each of your learners will be kicking off, you are ideally positioned to see exactly how to help each learner make genuine progress. Your initial ‘needs analysis’ will enable you to ascertain where the gaps in understanding and knowledge are for various groups of learners in your class, so you can ensure that the learning activities you use will target those gaps with impressive precision. But how do we conduct this all-important needs analysis?
KWL is a well-known way to help learners to see and celebrate their learning journey over a lesson (or series of lessons). Standing for Know, Wonder (or Want to know) and Learnt, this acronym lends itself well to the establishing of a starting point from which progress can subsequently be measured at the end of a lesson or unit of work.
Asking learners to articulate what they know at the beginning of a topic is clearly a must. Asking them to review what they have learnt at the end is similarly crucial. Asking them what they are ‘wondering’ can sometimes feel a little dangerous, as we may be nervous that their curiosity and pondering will become irrelevant and throw the lesson off track. However, ascertaining and celebrating learners’ ‘wondering questions’ can be a valuable activity and cause progress to occur in unexpected ways. It can also go a long way to giving learners the motivation they need to investigate and think about a topic more carefully.
Gathering learners’ questions and queries is also, obviously, an effective way of establishing current levels of knowledge and understanding. Doing this at the beginning of a lesson, and then allowing learners to answer their original questions at the end, is a useful technique to make the learners’ progress highly visible to themselves. Of course, this will only work if, having ascertained their needs at the beginning of the lesson, you use your chameleon teacher skills to ensure that the teaching and learning that ensues helps them to close those gaps!
There are many fun and effective ways to collect questions from your learners (there are lots more ideas for doing this in Chapter 5). In the meantime, here is a particularly useful one to help you tailor your teaching to the needs of your learners from the very outset of a lesson or scheme of work.
Strategy: The Wonderball
Those of you who have read Pimp Your Lesson!, and are already well-practised in the benefits of inflatable fun in the classroom, will enjoy this useful activity immensely.1 Simply follow these easy instructions:
1 Share with learners the topic or ‘core objective’ that they are going to be working on in this lesson or unit of work.
