Done Well, Done Badly: should we compare MWBs with Turn & Talk?

Why unhelpful comparisons distort educational debate and make it harder for schools to improve

This post is inspired by Adam Boxer’s recent article, “When Done Well”: Why Schools Don’t Improve.

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One of the most persistent problems in education is not that we lack evidence but that the evidence we have routinely makes unhelpful comparisons.

A great many arguments about teaching, curriculum, assessment and professional development depend on a sleight of hand. We point to an approach with impressive results, cite promising trials, invoke vivid examples of expert practice, and confidently assert that this is what schools should do. But often the comparison underlying the claim isn’t a fair one. We don’t not comparing like with like. What we tend to compare is the very best version of a thing we like with the business-as-usual version of the thing we’re less keen on. In so doing, any old nonsense can be made to look persuasive.

By the same token, anything can be presented in the worst possible light, no matter how efficacious it could be. It might seem reasonable to conclude that if we see a strategy being used badly that the strategy is at fault. Often that’s a fair judgement; some ideas are flimsy at best. But not always. Just as it’s a mistake to compare the ideal version of one approach with the everyday version of another, it is also a mistake to assume that because something can be done poorly it must therefore be inherently poor.

Adam Boxer’s example of Turn and Talk is a useful case in point. The scenes he describes are recognisable enough: students sitting alone, pairs lapsing into awkward silence, one student dominating, others finishing almost at once and drifting off task. Anyone who has spent time in classrooms will have seen such moments. But there is a leap in the argument from observing these failures to treating them as evidence that the strategy itself is, in most cases, not worth the bother.

After all, what exactly has been demonstrated? If we have evidence that Turn and Talk can be badly implemented, should we therefore, conclude Turn and Talk is a bit shit? There are, I thinnk, at least two other explanations available. The first is that the teachers weren’t sure why they were using Turn and Talk. The second is that the surrounding classroom culture and routines were too chaotic to make the strategy viable. In neither case does it follow that Turn and Talk is the problem. In fact, it may be acting less as the cause of failure than as a litmus test for classroom culture.

Turn & Talk is too often viewed as performance routine in which children are given opportunities to talk for the sake of having opportunities to talk. This is, in my view, a mistake likely to lead to the problems Adam idenitifies. If, on the other hand, we conceive of Turn & Talk as a cognitive routine designed to reveal the meaning students are making and as preparation for articulating that understanding to a wider audience, then whilst it still perfectly possible to do it badly this happens far less often.

Its value lies in giving students the chance to rehearse language, test out half-formed ideas, encounter uncertainty and hear another mind at work. These benefits are easy to miss if one is mainly judging whether talk looked smooth from the back of the room. Productive talk can - maybe, should - be hesitant. It can involve false starts, pauses, partial answers and moments of dependence on a partner. Indeed, those features may be signs that students are genuinely thinking.

There is also a risk that critics of Turn and Talk judge it by an oddly perfectionist standard. If one student dominates, if a pair goes quiet, if some discussions are superficial, the strategy is treated as having failed. But by that measure many other classroom techniques would fare poorly too. Cold call can produce panic, guessing and formulaic responses. Whole-class questioning can easily be derailed by the same few confident students.

Yet we do not usually conclude from these predictable imperfections that, say, asking questions is inherently suspect. We recognise instead that classroom practices are always mediated by context, training, culture and curriculum.

The deeper issue may be that Turn and Talk exposes deficits we’d rather ignore. If students don’t know enough to begin discussing a question, that’s certainly a problem. But perhaps the problem is not that they were asked to talk. Perhaps the talk simply revealed that the prior explanation, modelling or curriculum sequencing was insufficient. If one student routinely dominates, perhaps that says something about the norms of the classroom, or about the social dynamics of the group, that a more teacher-controlled method merely conceals. All these are the exact same objections that many people level against using mini-whiteboards, otherwise known as ‘the penis problem’.

A sceptic might point out that mini-whiteboards often privilege speed over depth. They are excellent for checking whether students can produce a brief answer, identify an error, select an option or recall a definition. They are less well suited to extended reasoning, exploratory thought or the shaping of language. A board held aloft can create the appearance of participation without much genuine engagement. Some students learn to wait, copy and reveal. Others offer the most superficial answer possible because the medium encourages brevity and discourages development. The teacher sees a room full of responses, but what’s visible is not always what is most important.

The same critic might go further. Mini-whiteboards can reinforce a view of learning as the rapid production of atomised answers. They lend themselves to what’s easy to check rather than what’s most worth thinking about. They can make classrooms feel highly controlled, but that control may come at a price. Students may become adept at compliance without becoming much better at explaining, elaborating or arguing. In some hands, the routine becomes an endless cycle of guess, show, correct, repeat.

And just as Adam observes bad Turn and Talk, others have experienced poor mini-whiteboard use often enough to dismiss them as not worth the faff. That is to say, mini-whiteboards are just as vulnerable to caricature if we judge them by their poorest enactments. It’s very easy to say, “I have seen hundreds of these and most were mediocre, therefore the strategy is overvalued.” But that argument merely shows that many teachers are not yet especially skilful at using them, or that the conditions under which they are being deployed are not conducive to effective implementation.

After visiting hundreds of schools over the years I’ve seen pretty much everything done badly and everything done well. Everything I’ve seen done badly is either the result of poor school culture or flawed implementation due to lack of skill, lack of understanding or lack of willingness. And, conversely, everything I’ve seen done well is due to great school culture, or the determination of individual teachers to make the thing work.

The issue, then, is not whether one can find examples of bad practice. The poor in practice are always with us. The issue is what kind of learning problem a strategy is trying to solve, and what kinds of trade-offs it involves.

Turn and Talk is often useful when the aim is rehearsal of language, testing of thought, collective sense-making or lowering the threshold for participation before whole-class discussion. Its weakness is that it can drift, and that its quality is harder to monitor. Mini-whiteboards are very useful when the aim is visible participation, retrieval, rapid checking for attention or revealing misconceptions. Their weakness is that they can flatten complexity and reward short, easily checked responses. Neither is simply good or bad; each makes some things easier and other things harder.

The most sensible conclusion is not that Turn and Talk is usually not worth it, or that mini-whiteboards are straightforwardly superior, it’s that educational arguments become distorted when they mistake anecdote for decisive proof. Some strategies may come with more risks and pitfalls than others but the key is doing anything well is to understand the boundary conditions within which success is likely and then commit to practising until you get good at doing the thing.

I use both mini-whiteboards and turn & talk in every lesson I teach. I flatter myself that I do both well. As result of practice I no longer get the problems of deploying either of these tools badly. It’s worth noting that although I’m no longer a classroom teacher, 100% of the lessons I teach are observed by other teachers and that I’m almost always teaching children I’ve never met before. I don’t say this to show off but to make clear that I’m not working in optimal conditions where I can rely on routines and relationships built over time. In every lesson I teach I have to build these routines and relationships from scratch. Consequently, I have to explicit and specific about precisley how I expect children to use MWBs and how to conduct themselves in a T&T. In addition, I know exactly why I using both strategies and am completely clear about where they are designed to achieve.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s essential to model lessons in this way so that observers are clear about what successful implementation looks like. It’s the most imeediate and unambiguous way to show my receipts.

Adam warns that “Some things can’t be trained, and other things aren’t worth the effort.” He asks, “Is Turn and Talk worth investing in over training in strategies like mini-whiteboards?” The implication is that MWBs are a better bet and that T&T can’t be trained and isn’t worth the effort.

This is akin to arguing that hammers are much easier to use than fret saws and that therefore we shouldn’t bother with fret saws and instead invest all our energy in hammers. The fairly obvious point s that these tools are each designed to achieve a different end. If we want to cut intricate shapes a hammer won’t be much use. Simialrly, if you want to give all students opportunities to articulate and respond to ideas, MWBs are of limited use.

But more to the point, I’m genuinely a bit baffled at the notion that is hard to do turn & talk well. I‘m in no position to refute Adam’s lived experience but I feel very clear that turn & talk is eminently trainable and no more difficult than MWBs to do well. If you’re interested, I set out how I operationalise T&T here:

Why bother with 'turn & talk'?

My view is that if a school has a good behaviour culture T&T is cheaper and easier to implement well than MWBS but that MWBs probably have a wider use case and therefore a greater pay off. What’s more, I see MWBs as a mechanism to make the implementation of turn & talk more effective as I would almost always get students to jot down what they intend to share before asking them to talk. In turn, T&T results in more focussed use of MWBs as students learn that it helps them articulate their ideas and improve their understanding. The techniques are mutually reinforcing. Using one without the other would be to make my life unnecessarily harder.

However, if a school does not have a good behaviour, neither of these techniques is likely to work well and time put into training teachers to use them would be better spent on improving behaviour norms.

Lessons in which teachers are not using mini-whiteboards are full of missed opportunities. Teachers asks a question and accepts answers from the usual few with hands up or cold calls students who are unable or unwilling to participate and forces unproductive confrontations. Children check out; they learn that it’s easy to be a passanger. Misconceptions remain hidden, inattention is easy to disguise, and teachers leave with the comforting illusion the class has understood when, in fact, only the keenest or quickest have really kept up.

Lessons in which students are not given opportunities to talk suffer in different ways. Meaning remains private; half-formed thoughts stay half-formed. Students don’tt get the chance to rehearse vocabulary, test tentative ideas, or discover what they think by trying to say it in a low risk setting. Again, teachers mistake silence for understanding when in reality students are confused, passive or merely compliant. Talk makes thought visible.

When people watch me teach, they often comment on how warm and vibrant the atmosphere is, how much the children interact, and how much they seem to enjoy the lesson. I am always pleased by this, of course, but I am also at pains to point out that these things are not the thing itself. They are by-products. They emerge from being very clear about what I am teaching and from using tools in service of that clarity. The purpose is not mini-whiteboards, or Turn and Talk, or any other routine as an end in itself. The purpose is to ensure that all children are paying attention, making meaning and getting better at the thing they are being taught. Once that becomes the focus, it becomes much harder to use these tools badly, because you are no longer using a technique, you’re solving a teaching problem.

It’s often not until teachers see techniques “done well” that they understand their purpose. Doing anything for the sake of doing it is never likely to be optimally effective. If they never see something “done well” how would they know how to do it well themselves?

The question is not whether Turn and Talk or mini-whiteboards can be made to fail. Of course they can. It’s depressingly easy to do anything badly. The question is whether we are prepared to think seriously about what these techniques are meant to achieve, the conditions under which they work, and the kinds of classrooms in which they are likely to pay off. It’s easy to dismiss what we have seen done badly. It’s harder, and more useful, to ask what those failures are telling us. Sometimes they reveal a weakness in the strategy. Sometimes they reveal a weakness in our own understanding. More often they reveal a weakness in the school.

If we want better professional conversations, we should avoid treating anecdote as grounds for making a verdict and start making fairer comparisons. Only then can we make sensible decisions about the opportunity costs involved in working out what’s worth doing, and what’s worth getting good at.