Collaborative talk – How to use it effectively and efficiently
Charlotte Lander offers some advice for making effective and efficient use of collaborative talk within your lessons…
- by Charlotte Lander
- Teacher of English and psychology & Talk for Learning specialist
When we plan and implement collaborative talk effectively, our learners have an opportunity to learn how to become more articulate and confident in both their speaking and writing.
Initiated classroom discussion must, however, have purpose. Without purpose, the discussion will lose value and creates disengagement whilst increasing the likelihood of off-topic chat.
As teachers, this is naturally concerning in terms of both behaviour management and the time constraints we’re under within our lessons.
Creating opportunities for intentional collaborative talk in the classroom can, however, be extremely valuable when anchored to clear and explicit learning goals.
Timing talk
Once you’ve established the learning goals behind the collaborative talk, it’s important to consider timing. Peer discussion during the initial stages of a task can be a useful tool for activating prior knowledge and exploring emerging ideas.
By essentially ‘thinking out loud’, we give learners the chance to conceptualise and translate abstract ideas into their own words.
What’s more, this ‘visible thinking’ will allow teachers to ascertain any potential barriers and challenges ahead of a task by exposing misconceptions early on.
Peer talk essentially lowers the threshold for participation, when compared to traditional whole-class discussion. In turn, it provides a safer and more comfortable space in which learners can share their tentative ideas.
Often, the goal for peer talk is metacognitive – when students articulate the steps in their thinking, we encourage self-regulation.
And when we expose students to the thought process of their peers, they have the chance to hear how others would approach the same problem.
Being clear as to the intention behind the discussion will therefore allow you to better consider when and where in the lesson the activity is likely to hold the most value for learners.
Explicit teaching of how to talk
The threat of classroom talk must be low for its effectiveness to be high. This is because students won’t engage if the environment feels threatening and uncomfortable.
As we know, many students can struggle with the thought of speaking in front of the class. Even seemingly confident pupils are liable to feel some fear and anxiety.
Before introducing a ‘talk to your partner’ (TTYP) activity, model the expectations of this type of talk by conducting an example interaction with a student in the class.
You could show a less effective example (one-word answers, or an off-topic conversation), followed by an effective example (using full sentences, providing justifications for answers). Then ask your class which was more effective and why.
Talk ‘rules’
As observed by Neil Mercer in 2008, in the book Exploring Talk in School, we must make the unspoken rules of talk explicit. Pupils need to develop shared ‘rules’ for group talk so they can collaborate.
I’ve often found that displaying talk ‘rules’ or ‘moves’ on the board can serve as visible expectations of what students’ collaborative talk (and listening) should look like in practice.
Research has since shown that promoting and utilising active listening during peer-to-peer classroom conversations can help students feel more confident in expressing themselves. Ultimately, it can strengthen their perceptions of the educational experience.
Structured discussion of this sort can be very effective when used with small groups. This is especially true if you’re giving members of said groups a specific discussion ‘role’.
The oracy framework progression tool produced by the education charity Voice 21 sets out clear ‘talk tactics’. These include explicit discussion roles such as ‘instigate’, ‘challenge’ and ‘summarise’, with sentence frames to support.
Allocate students a specific role in the conversation. Alternatively, they could choose which tactic they want to use and practise delivering their thoughts and ideas using this method.
The roles themselves can vary. This means that you can allocate tactics based on a student’s level of confidence or language acquisition.
If a student assumes the role of ‘summariser’, for instance, the focus will be on their ability to listen to and absorb the suggestions their peers are presenting. This puts less pressure on them to help formulate initial ideas.
Distinctions between types of talk
A cornerstone in the development of my own pedagogy as an educator came when I first learned about the distinctions between types of talk.
In 1976, Douglas Barnes explained the difference between ‘exploratory talk’ and ‘presentational talk’. The former sees a student essentially thinking out loud through pair or group discussion – formulating their ideas without an audience, so to speak.
The latter entails a student voicing their ideas in front of the whole class – this time with an audience, of course.
With a traditional TTYP activity, we might give students a topic to talk about with their partner for 30 to 60 seconds. We then call upon a handful of learners to share the ideas they’ve discussed.
In this way, we’re often asking students to transition between two different types of talk without hesitation. Yet are we providing the students with enough scaffold and support to be able to do so?
We could, for example, display verbal sentence starters help to frame students’ thinking, as well as their articulation.
By essentially scaffolding the students’ exploratory talk, we’d be supporting their transitions to presentational talk.
Ways of scaffolding classroom talk
Similar to writing, effective talk must be explicitly taught and modelled. Writing frames and sentence starters are both tried and trusted methods that many of us will use to support our learners in articulating their ideas in written form. So how can we provide effective scaffolding for collaborative talk?
It’s important to note that many of our students face barriers to conversation. These can include their level of confidence, having English as an additional language and their general level of articulacy.
Creating a framework where all students are encouraged and supported to vocalise their ideas is therefore fundamental.
Sometimes, however, the main barrier can be a student’s ability to actually form an opinion or idea, let alone communicate it.
When faced with this, I’ll opt to use a resource that visually illustrates the topic of discussion, with pre-populated differing viewpoints shown in a series of speech bubbles.
I’ll then encourage students to choose which viewpoints or opinions they agree with, or simply like the most. They can use that as a platform to promote their own thinking.
Acknowledging other perspectives
The additional benefit here is the modelling of differing viewpoints, in a way that promotes the value of healthy discussion and structuring debate.
Over time, students’ understanding will widen as they’re supported in acknowledging perspectives they may not have previously considered themselves.
Students who may struggle to form an opinion are thus encouraged to base their opinion on one of those provided, and then justify it.
You’re more likely to succeed in creating a visible and easily identifiable set of benchmark expectations for collaborative talk when they’re consistently implemented across the wider school.
If we’re explicit from the outset about our intended purpose for talk and why we value it; if we can meet the challenge of students’ confidence in talking by modelling the talk we want to see; and if we can scaffold their attempts and ramp up the opportunities they have to talk – then we can empower their voices, and ultimately work to address those inherent inequalities that many students currently face.
Charlotte Lander is a teacher of English and psychology, and specialist in Talk for Learning.
