| How do the words we use help to extend children’s thinking? |
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Research taster
You can help pupils to make their thinking explicit by helping them to use appropriate language. You can, for example, ask them for other terms, play back their words to show you value them and correct them to technical terms as in this example from a primary science classroom  :
T: Who can tell me what a gas is like? This group ought to be able to tell me. What can you do to a gas? P: You can push it. T: I’d say there’s a better word than that isn’t there? P: Squash it. T: Squash it, you can compress it. P: You can squeeze it to a certain amount. T: Yes you can compress it. Can you compress a solid? P: No.
Your evidence
You might like to keep a note of conversations you have with the children in your class over a day or a week when you took the opportunity to help the children explain their ideas more precisely by using appropriate vocabulary to refine their thinking. You could reflect on the extent to which you give your pupils opportunities to engage in this kind of exchange of ideas and how you handled the conversations. Moving forward You might like to consider how you could increase the frequency of these kinds of exchanges and improve your handling of them in another lesson. You may also like to work with a colleague to build a bank of the technical terms that you are looking for and synonyms that your pupils are likely to use, to help you to be alert to opportunities when you could push your pupils to develop and refine their vocabulary. Find out more  Watts, D. (2002) Assisting performance: A case study from a primary classroom Cambridge Journal of Education 32 (2) p.165-182
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society, The Development of Higher Psychological Processes Massachusetts/London: Harvard University Press A summary of Vygotsky’s work is available on the GTC’s Research of the Month website at: http://www.gtce.org.uk/research/romtopics/rom_teachingandlearning/vygotsky1/ |
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