| Who talks during whole class teaching? |
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When you work with the whole class, for example, during lesson introductions and plenaries, you probably want to achieve a high level of pupil participation. This can be hard to achieve in a full class with pupils who vary in their eagerness and ability to contribute.
 Teachers can inadvertently dominate classroom talk by using a teacher-pupil-teacher-pupil pattern of interaction. In this context pupils can only share half the conversational turns between them and evidence suggests that it’s high achieving girls who are usually most likely to join in these discussions. Counterbalancing this risk seems to involve experimenting with a range of ways of expanding the numbers of pupils taking on active parts in classroom conversation.
Evidence and reflection
Adapted from Reflective Activity 13-1a
You might wish to find out more about who is speaking and who is listening during whole class teaching in your classroom, and for how much time. It will be helpful if you use a fairly quiet room with little background noise to tape record or video record a 15-minute session. When you review the tape, you could consider who is talking, how much and to whom? The following suggestions may be helpful. • Identify the range of different strategies you use to involve students in discussions • Tally the number of times you speak. • Tally the number of times pupils speak to you. • Tally the number of times pupils speak to each other. • You might wish to use a stop-watch to time how much talking you or the pupils do in any five minute segment. • You could listen again to the pupils voices to identify who speaks and how often. • You could calculate the proportion of pupils from the class who speak during the recording. • Are there any differences between high and low attaining pupils, or between boys and girls in terms of who speaks and who listens? Do any of your findings surprise you? Moving forward Now you have discovered more about the current patterns of talk in your classroom, is there anything you’d like to change? Are there particular pupils you would like to become more involved in classroom talk? Would, for example, increasing the use of brief interludes for discussion in pairs or a no hands up rule help you and your class be more inclusive? Find out more  Myhill, D., Jones, S. and Hopper, R. (2006) Talking, listening learning: effective talk in the primary classroom, Open University Press, Maidenhead Developing learning through talk: research report http://www.ex.ac.uk/~damyhill/talk GTC Research of the Month summary at: http://www.gtce.org.uk/research/romtopics/rom_teachingandlearning/effective_talk/ |
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