Pete Dudley
This blog shares some ideas for supporting pupils to use talk in collaborative group discussions that not only spur on exploratory talk – they also make sure that it is exploratory talk of a quality that helps the group to probe, manipulate and co-develop the subject-specific concepts and ideas that their teacher intended.
General class ground rules for talk
The first step is obviously that you have in place in your classroom a set of ‘ground rules for talk’ preferably devised or co-devised with you by your pupils. These ensure that everyone feels safe and valued when they talk in class: feels comfortable contributing, knows they will be listened to, knows that even through what they say won’t necessarily be agreed with, their contribution will be valued. And reciprocally, everyone listens and critically appreciates the contributions of others.
These ground rules create a climate and an understanding of effective discussion that prevents people getting stuck in disputational or cumulative talk cycles and instead move swiftly into exploratory talk – or more specifically ‘ground-ruled exploratory talk’ where people:
- share relevant information
- engage critically but constructively with each other’s ideas
- give reasons for their ideas
- all actively participate
- check understanding by asking questions
- build on each other’s responses
- strive for agreement
Ground rules for talk work as much on the affective aspect of learning through talk (feeling safe, valued and motivated to join in) as on the cognitive – thinking together, jointly building the thoughts needed to construct mental models of the newly developed knowledge in each participating pupil’s brain that will enable that knowledge (and its associated language) to be retrieved whenever it is needed.
Anticipating the pupil talk that will help these processes to occur naturally in discussion in a specific subject area
But when pupils are being expected to think together and to explore and build knowledge and concepts related to subject or curriculum specific content, it can be trickier to ensure their open discussion naturally explores such areas and requires them to use subject-specific terms that are perhaps quite new to them (and so not yet embedded into their understanding).
This is a challenge that really requires teachers to anticipate the kinds of micro-discussions, interactions, phrases and terms that pupils will need to use in their discussion in order to be able to ‘think’ and communicate:
- the concept, idea or skill with appropriate accuracy and with increasing ‘grasp’ and understanding;
- the directions into which the discussion will need to be encouraged, so that these opportunities can occur naturally as part of the discussion task.
Mock-up lessons
Japanese teachers developing practice through lesson studies will often conduct mock-up lessons when they are attempting, for example, to understand why pupils are experiencing difficulties understanding certain ideas or developing certain skills they are being taught. I will take as an example to give here, nine-year-olds exploring and developing hypotheses about why the moon changes shape (or, to be correct, why it appears to change shape).
In such a mock-up discussion which the teachers would conduct together before planning how they will set up the subsequent pupils’ discussion, one teacher will act in role as the ‘teacher’ setting up the discussion. Two or three colleagues work in-role as pupils (with access to all the supporting materials they are planning to give to the real pupils in the lesson: such as a torch, a large ball (for the earth), a ping-pong ball (for the moon, etc). They engage them in the same discussion they are planning for their pupils and see what difficulties and challenges it throws up, what subject language is demanded for example – and how the teachers go about exploring and piecing together a plausible explanation of why the moon changes shape.
Once you get over the quirkiness of doing this, it can prove a fruitful way of revealing to yourselves as teachers, how successfully your discussion task (and prompts) are likely to prove in practice as a means of keeping the pupils’ discussion ‘on track’ and precisely engineering the kind of phrases they are going to need to use in order to formulate and ‘grasp’ the key scientific reasons why the moon appears to change shape.
Analysing the language demands of tasks
Another approach (which can be used either following a ‘mock-up’ discussion or without one) is simply to analyse the language demands of your discussion task.
This involves first of all identifying ‘key subject ideas or terms’ your pupils will need to try-out and use in order to think and communicate conceptual ideas that support their co-development of a mental model of what is happening when the moon appears to change shape. So, for example, you might list key scientific ideas/concepts like these.
- Reflected sunlight from the moon
- Unlit hemisphere of the moon appears as dark as the night sky
- The (hemi-)spherical (not flat) surface of the moon we can see from earth
- View of the moon from earth changes over the month as it faces a fully lit
hemisphere, the half-lit hemisphere and half-unlit hemisphere, and a fully unlit hemisphere - The gradual re-emergence of lit hemisphere appearing as a thin banana shaped
segment of the moon’s surface – the new moon
It is up to you to determine which, if any of these ideas, will need to be discussed or modelled (by you or a text) in lessons leading up to the group-discussion, or that might be encountered by pupils in a text-book or video.
There may be some pupils (learning English as an additional language for example) for whom you might want to pre-teach some specific key subject idea vocabulary items. But you don’t want to provide too much information. Learning through ground-ruled exploratory talk happens when pupils struggle for quite a while to make sense and find meaning. It has been shown that when such exploratory discussions take place between pupils, and when a clear exposition of the solution is provided to the pupils by their teacher (or a resource like a video), all the pupils accurately learn the science – those whose groups found the correct solution, and those that did not. This is because they had wrestled with the components of the full process sufficiently for the parts to fall immediately into place when the solution is explained.
Read through the model discussion below (that could emerge from a ‘mock-up discussion’) between teachers who are anticipating what discussion might take place between groups of three pupils in the class (if the discussion successfully generates the desired language and thinking) – and try to notice in particular:
a) The key scientific ideas and terms that the activity demands of the pupils
b) The phrases in italics that it would be beneficial for them to use in course of
the discussion
A mock-up discussion of ‘Why does the moon appear to change shape?’
Learner A: I don’t think the moon makes its own light like the sun does. Do you think the light we see from the moon could really be light from the sun that has shone on the moon and bounced off? (Raising a suggestion through a question)
Learner B: So, is what you’re really saying/suggesting that moonlight is actually reflected-sunlight coming to earth from the moon? (Making/requesting a clarification)
Learner A: Yes! I think that makes sense. And if that’s right, then maybe the only part of the moon we can actually see on earth, is the part that the sun is directly shining on. (Making a hypothesis.)
Learner C: … and that part in the shadow could be so dark that we can’t see it at all because it looks as dark as the rest of the night sky.’ (Supports an argument with additional reasoning or evidence.)
Learner A: But if that’s true, then why would the line between the black shadow and the sunlit part of the moon be straight when it’s right in the middle of the moon, but be banana shaped when it’s near the outside of the moon’s face? (Challenges a hypothesis with a counter argument)
Learner C: But we know the Moon [is] like a ball. Think of looking at an orange lit by a table light. One half is always in the light. The other half is always in the shade and the line between light and shade appears straight because it is in front of us. But maybe as the moon and earth move, we see the moon from a different angle each night, with less and less of the sunlit half facing earth. After 14 nights, maybe the unlit half is completely facing earth. And I wonder if that could explain why we see no sunlight at all reflected from the moon – so it appears not to be there. It could also explain why the first thing we see next is a thin, banana-shape of the re-appearing sunlit moon’s surface – and that’s the ‘new moon’.
These italicised phrases create ‘stems’ of key language functions that the pupils will need to use in order to think through the science; to reason aloud in the discussion; to suggest; to clarify; to hypothesise; to probe or counter-argue; and to propose an explanation.
You can draw up a simple table like the one below to carry out an analysis of the language demands of discussion activities you design to get your pupils thinking together and learning through exploratory talk. The process works for any age group and in any subject.
| Analysis of discussion-task language demands: Exploring why the moon ‘changes shape’. Y4. | ||
| Functions | Key idea items | What they might need to say – function phrases |
| Suggesting |
|
Do you think / Could it be / Maybe… |
| Qualifying | What I really mean is… What you’re really suggesting is… | |
| Hypothesising | If it’s true that… then… | |
| Challenging with reasons | But how can that be true if… | |
| Proposing | This could explain why… (and it could also explain …) | |
Using the analysis to scaffold the discussion
You can make sure that there are pictorial or diagrammatic resources at hand that convey the Key Subject Ideas (e.g. that light leaves the sun, strikes the moon and that some is then reflected from the moon to the earth). Even better, you can also use live resources like the different sized balls and flashlight for each group to explore how the light and shade work (as suggested above). These serve as, what linguists term, ‘concrete referents’: helping the spoken language being used in the discussion to become more ‘comprehensible’ and thus make immediate sense.
You can use the Function Phrases to create sentence-stem cards which the pupils can ‘play’ at any point in the discussion they choose. Often, when thinking deeply together with others, one pupil may get a flash of an important idea,[1] but lack the functional language needed to inject the idea into the discussion at an optimal moment or in an appropriate way – they have a glimmer of an idea about what to say, but the function they need to inject it into the flow of the talk is not at the tip of their tongue – so the moment to say it passes. It is never said and soon forgotten.
However, hearing themselves correctly begin a suggestion, a hypothesis or a qualification, (using a sentence stem) can help an idea emerge cohesively and seamlessly into the discussion (and when this happens, the way in which the pupil has expressed it is often immediately internalised for future use).
Alternatively, you can have the sentence stems on the table-top and give each child three (or however many) ‘talk tokens’ which they place on the table every time they have used a sentence stem. When you have used the analytic process above once or twice, you’ll find you no longer need to use the table each time.
How oracy leaders have described using this process in their work with colleagues
These two oracy leaders both explain how vital this process is of engineering talk in their work coaching and developing oracy practice with teachers in different subjects.
Rose (Oracy Lead Coach):
‘When teachers are planning (with me as an Oracy leader), I am mentally going through a process of trying to anticipate some of the sentence structures the children might need to use in order to formulate the mathematics’Greta (Oracy Leader, coached by Rose):
‘An idea I got from Rose was to anticipate – by thinking – what are the children going to need to be able to say, for example, to clarify something. So I have to think, “Well what do I say when I am making a clarification?”. And then, I have to
engineer that talk into the lesson. It’s brilliant!’
A discussion like this can be a great way of assessing what your pupils’
existing levels of understanding are – so it does not always have to happen after
they have studied the subject they are discussing, it can be a reconnaissance
exercise that helps to reveal the ‘strengths and weaknesses of their [existing]
conceptions’ (to quote Harold Gardiner) which can enable the teaching that follows
to be very precisely pitched to their levels of understanding.
Footnotes
[1] This is important to remember when using discussion to help pupils think together and learn through talk. These moments of a glimmer of an idea or even a sudden insight are invaluable in such activities. If the conversation is happening between ‘talk partners’ say, in pairs, there is an immediate problem in holding or developing that thought because it is always your turn to speak next. You simply don’t have the momentary space to think about it. If the discussion is in a group of three or more, then there is always that opportunity to develop the idea and decide whether and how to introduce it.