Silence might be golden, but talk is magical.
It is interesting that the latest focus is on oracy when the past decade has been obsessed around silence. We’ve obsessed around silent students, silent classrooms and silent corridors. The major proxy for learning has been silence. SLT have been patrolling corridors to see that classrooms are quiet. Good teaching has always been marked by the amount of silence there is. Silence is golden. Noisy is excrement.
As a parent, I know that a silent child is not a good thing.
Silence is easy to create, patrol, police, enforce, control, make and monitor. In fact, in schools it is the one thing that is pretty easy to get. Our obsession with silence is because of the messiness of talking. It defies structures, lists, ticklists and so on. It is ephemeral. It is chimerical. It is a shapeshifter. It is so much harder to define, observe, and teach than silence. And that’s the crux of it. Silence is easy. Talking is difficult.
The irony now is that these silent classrooms now need to show some oracy. Some talk. Some chattering. Some blethering. We have schools scrabbling to write oracy policies, as nothing shows Ofsted that you take something seriously like a policy. But, like using a pneumatic drill to crack a nut, we are destined for sledgehammer approaches. We’ve some of these already like forcing students to only speak in full sentences. Boy, that must make answering the register. Sir, I am here sat on my chair. Sir, I am also here. Or, we will see enforced talking opportunities in lessons. We will see everything turned into a debate. Right, we’ve covered hot and cold colour so let’s debate about our favourite colour! Or, we might see a continuous pattern of chat before you write approaches adopted by schools.
Because oracy is messy and complex we really struggle to frame it in lessons. We know for reading and writing that there are a number of processes to think about before students read or write. We know their level of proficiency. We know what we can do to help them. We know that we can approach reading or writing from a particular ange to be more conducive to learning. Do we have the same for talking in the classroom? The answer is no. We tend to narrow talk to those that are compliant and those who are not.
If a school is going to tackle oracy, then then need to look at the processes involved. And, I mean really look. Those could mean joining an existing conversation , showing the speaker I am listening, keeping a conversation going, changing the direction of a conversation and so on. There is so much to pick. So let’s start with turn taking. Something that every teacher can work on in most if not all lessons.
How do we teach turn taking in lessons?
It is important to think about this in conversations and in particular for some SEND students. We make assumptions about these things.
Think about these questions:
What is a turn?
What do I do if I want a turn?
What does it mean when it is my turn?
How long is a turn?
How do I start my turn?
How do I end my turn?
What do I do when it is someone else's turn?
What do I do if I don’t get a turn?
The insistence of cold calling means that some of these things are not reinforced in the classroom environment. They are also not reinforced at home or at meal times. As a parent, you know that you tend to do a lot of this learning over meals. Can I finish what I was saying first? Let your sister finish what she was saying.
From a teacher’s perspective, these questions are important to have because we are the modellers and course correctors in lessons. Look at these possible comments by a teacher.
Tom, what do we do when we are waiting for our turn?
Tom, you didn’t get a go. What should you have done?
Tom, you need to think about others having a go now.
Tom, that isn’t what we do when we want to show we’d like a turn.
As you can see, it is the teacher indirectly reinforcing the rules. The teacher is teaching turn taking through their interaction and their questions or comments. They are not doing it before and frontloading things but as they speak. And that’s the rub. Oracy is done in the process and not frontloaded before the process. Teachers have to get their hands dirty and teach in the middle of the process as it is going on. It isn’t a checklist. It isn’t a Powerpoint slide. It isn’t a worksheet. It isn’t a YouTube video.
Oracy is far more complex and I worry that schools are over simplifying it to the point of it being ineffective. Children need teachers to be course correctors in speech. Schools need to be looking at lessons and thinking how teacher interactions can support oracy. And, that is largely in the moment. If it was me, I would be looking at student and teacher conversations in lessons in training. What could the teacher have said here to support oracy?
Thanks for reading,
Xris
P.S. I plan to blog more on oracy over the next few weeks.
