Too Much Teacher Talk Gets in the Way of Student Learning, Right? Wrong
Our subjects are brilliant, yes? We all chose to teach them, so let’s colour them in, and talk them up, says Toby French…
- by Toby French
“In 1930 the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the…anyone? Anyone? The Great Depression. Passed the…anyone? Anyone? A tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act which, anyone? Raised or lowered? Raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the Federal Government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.”
Do you recognise this CPD staple? Many will, I’m sure. It is, of course, the gloriously dull economics teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, proving to us once and for all that talking is a bad thing, and that children need to be engaged through whizz-pop activities, preferably at their level, and definitely using real-world examples, like The Great British Bake Off, Pokemon and Call of Duty (‘BLOPs’ to those in the know).
Yes, talking is bad, cultural relevance is good, and we need to chunk every morsel of information into bite-size spoonfuls, drizzle over some card sorts and serve it all up on a hot plate of creative thinking. So stop talking and start facilitating – you never know, they might teach you a thing or two!
Except that isn’t the case at all. The problem with the Ferris Bueller’s example is that it’s a caricature which loads both barrels for some whilst creating a siege mentality for others: it’s the gun, the smoke and the fingerprints of a teaching thriller – a whodunnit with one conclusion: it was talk, guv’nor.
Activity packs
We’ve worshipped at the altar of the Cone of Learning for so long that many teachers are slaves to its bogus claims.
Apparently, learners are able to remember only 5% of a lecture, and 10% of their reading.
Astonishingly, though, they’ll remember 70% of what they say, which raises the question of how they knew what to say in the first place.
Partly due to spurious nonsense like this, dangerous new ideas about teacher-talk to student-activity ratios are not only hewn from the Cone’s sham rock-face, but then perpetuated in teacher training, whether in some of the more-backward looking universities or after-school CPD sessions.
And we don’t help ourselves. No teacher dreamed of being boring, but too many of us are scared – either because of idealism, training, school policies or a genuine lack of subject knowledge – of making children do the hard work which actually might be most effective.
We’re nice people, by the by, and we’d also like to be liked; we want to be remembered and talked about down the pub 20 years later, about the time we made them sing that Rasputin song. “And it worked, didn’t it?”, they’ll chirp. “I can still remember that chorus now!”
We also want to be ‘good’. Maybe not Ofsted ‘good’ any more, but still New School Teacher Observation Policy ‘Good’. Unfortunately, those doing the actual judging were nurtured in that activity-laden environment, back when it was group work, group work, group work.
That isn’t their fault. It isn’t ours, either, but it’s dangerous nonetheless.
If we spend our time talking about the pedagogic how over the curricular what then it might follow that we don’t learn more about our subjects, and so even if we want – or need – to talk for a full hour because they Just. Don’t. Get. It., we can’t. But it’s okay, because those without the expertise continue to tell us we’re ‘good’.
We’re trapped in our own echo chambers, where the walls are part manager (“Give it a ‘1’, inspector!”), part student (“Can we watch more of the video?”) and part mirror: we see activity and busy, busy bees and think that our youngsters are getting their fill of pollen.
But activity must not be confused with learning, when often it’s a poor proxy for any kind of long-term retention. Activities tend to be stop-start, episodic moments where often what is remembered is not the subject knowledge but the activity itself.
I used to write and record songs about the Cold War and Emiliano Zapata and even Russia in 1917, all to help students remember key events, ideas and actions, but what they eventually recalled was the song, not the knowledge. This might have been fun, but it was a waste of time for them, and for me.
Hard facts
So here’s the rub: we learn when we think hard, and the more we learn the more we want to learn – and this has absolutely been my experience in the classroom.
In my NQT year I was teaching Year 8 about the Spanish Armada. Whilst I have no doubt that I would approach the whole topic very differently now, what I would not change is the amount I talked.
You see, I didn’t have a PowerPoint. That’s right! I was teaching commando, sans l’ordinateur.
I hadn’t prepared the 45-Minute Lesson Plan, or whatever ridiculous bother we were supposed to go through, and so instead had to rely on my knowledge of the subject.
It was probably the first time I taught purely from my own knowledge of the subject, without thinking about activities and hoops and tick-boxes and SEAL and all that guff from a few years back: I just spoke. A lot.
The resulting essays were the best pieces of writing that class produced all year, and a few subsequently told me that it was that lesson which made them choose my subject at GCSE and beyond. And I just spoke.
So why? Why is knowing and talking about your subject, then working really hard on it until it doesn’t seem so hard, such an important and – here comes a terribly misunderstood and misappropriated word – engaging way to teach and learn? It’s simple, really: your subject is ace, and children love to know more once they know something in the first place.
A mistake too many teachers make is to underestimate the importance of knowledge. “Oh, but we all teach knowledge!”, they say, but too often that just isn’t so. We’re so beleaguered and badgered by appallingly trite phrases like ‘rapid and sustained progress’ that we forget that learning is liminal and knowledge is everything. And so I start the year now by stating the immediately unpopular, but ultimately rewarding:
“You’re going to work incredibly hard. I’m going to make you write. A lot. You’ll have to remember lots of facts, but I’ll help you do that. We don’t have time to waste, so I’ll be talking most of the time, and then questioning you. You’ll realise that [insert your subject here] is a bloody great, and that if you listen and ask questions you’ll want to know more and you’ll eventually enjoy it more.”
Our subjects are brilliant, right? We all chose to teach them, and some of us even studied them at university! So let’s colour them in, and talk them up. Talking and knowledge and facts and details shouldn’t be boring but illuminating, and too many activities will darken that verdant palette. We’re the experts, so let’s act like it for once.
Toby French is a teacher, a lead practitioner at Torquay Academy in Devon. He is a renowned and respected edu-blogger, writing at mrhistoire.com about how less is more, talking is paramount and knowledge is everything.
