I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to manage student talking when they are working – I suppose it’s a result of my quite laid back attitude that I have to work hard at bringing students back on task with a certain group. Most of the time this group are talking about the work but it’s a struggle when certain characters are together … you know the kind of group I mean … we all have them! I’ve also been reading about the benefits of students talking about their work but always find getting them to discuss in pairs is all very contrived (and don’t get me started about pairing-squaring etc .. it’s not my “thang” but I know works well for others) …  it just doesn’t feel like it fits with my teaching style. Believe me … I’ve tried! 

Sometimes it’s the simple things that work and make a difference – driving into work the other day I thought of an idea I wanted to try and it worked really well so I thought I’d share. I was intending to teach the second lesson looking at reverse percentages using bar models and wanted to give the students lots of different scenarios to work through but was conscious that when there is a sustained period of work I’d end up working harder than the students but more importantly I didn’t want it turn into one of those things that the students are just following a process – I wanted them to engage with their thinking about each case they were considering.

So my idea was that the students were to work in pairs, through the questions on the board  – one at a time as a group so that I could control the pace of the questions and bring them back to me between each question so we can discuss the misconceptions. The difference (and here is the idea) was that in each pair only one of them was allowed to write whilst the other gave them the instructions as to how to approach the question. The student that did the writing wasn’t allowed to talk or ask questions but when I brought them back, as a group, it was the writer that answered any questions I aimed at each pair. For subsequent questions the roles were reversed.

What was interesting to see is that after each person had been both the instructor and the scribe their instructions became much more detailed as they knew what it was like to not receive clear instructions. It was fab!

I’m not sure it would work for every topic or style of questions but for ones where the process was effectively the same with some subtle differences in terms of context and so how to approach the questions also differed it worked really well. A side effect was that by only ever having one student talking I halved the noise in the room!!

If you have any ideas for encouraging student talk in a controlled way I’d love to hear them!