Why bother with 'turn & talk'?
Understanding the purpose of paired discussions
Beyond the notion that it’s nice for students to chat, or ‘do oracy,’ is there any real merit in getting them to talk to each other during lessons?
There are lots of things that can - and do - regularly go wrong with ‘turn & talk’:
Students don’t know much abou the topic
Students don’t have the language to speak well about the topic
Students can be slow to start talking
Speaking time tends to be too brief for students to articulate anything meaningful in the time given.
One student will dominate or one will be reluctant to participate
Students may give each other incorrect or misleading information
Students are too embarrassed to talk to each other
Teachers don’t know what students are talking about
Whilst all of the above are real problems that I have seen play out in lots of different classrooms, I’d like to suggest that they shouldn’t happen if you know why you’re using turn & talk. It’s a bit like saying hammers are ineffective because they’re not good at tightening or loosening screws.
Previously, I’ve written about the need to solve three distinct problems every lesson:
How do I know if all students are paying attention?
How do I know if all students are making sense of what I’m teaching?
How do I know if all students are getting better that the things I want them to get better at?
Thinking about lessons in this way is, I think, something of a game changer. Instead of choosing to deploy a pedagogical technique for its own sake, teaching moves should be employed to helps us answer these three questions.
Sort of like this:
If we were to map ‘turn & talk’ onto this grid we’d need to ask ourselves what problems it helps solve.
So, does getting students to talk to each other help us to know whether they’re all paying attention? No, not really. We can scan a room and get a rapid sense that all students are in engaged in talking but to find out whether they’re talking about the thing we want them to talk about requires listening in to each individual conversation. We could of course wait until after the talk phase and cold call students to see if they have great contributions but all this really reveals is whether a student was definitely not attending. It’s of little help in detecting whether those who are faster on their feet were actually on task. Using MWB routines and cold calling are both more effective, efficient ways to create a culture where students pay attention to you and each other.
Neither will turn & talk but much use in answering the question about students getting better at specific skills. (Unless you’re wanting them to practise turning to each other and talking, which would, I think, be weird.) But, you might be thinking, I do want my students to consolidate their ability to use academic language and key terminology. So do I. But, turn & talk is not very effective at this as all students are speaking at once and whilst the teacher should always try to listen in to as many conversations as possible, they won’t have time to correct or scaffold students’ language use. The only way to do this effective is after turn and talk during teacher-led discussion.
Where T&T comes into its own is in collecting data on whether students are making sense out of the content they’re encountering. Typically, when teaching I’ll go through process like this:
Incorporating turn and talk into this sort of process not only provides an essential opportunity for students to test out new understandings and articulate how new ideas fit within their existing view of the world, but also mitigates against most if not all of the concerns about paired discussion:
Although they may not know a lot, the process is so tightly focussed that they only have to think about how new knowledge connects to existing knowledge.
Vocabulary is provided and modelled to ensure students get off to a quick, purposeful start
Because focus is deliberately narrow (a single sentence response to a prompt) there is enough time for both students to express their understanding
Because students are explicitly asked to share what they’ve heard, it’s hard for one student to dominate
Embarrassment is a function of unfamiliarity. If this kind of routine is regularly built into teaching sequences it quickly becomes normalised.
Part of the point should be to identify & intercept misconceptions. (Not using turn & talk doesn’t get rid of misconceptions it just makes them harder to spot!)
The other benefit to using paired discussions is that a far higher proportion of students are participating in the process of sense making.
I don’t want to claim there’s anything clever, original or special in any of this: quite the reverse. Effective, engaging teaching should be easy. My point is that, like so many other teaching strategies, turn & talk is a useful tool in a teacher’s arsenal that, if deployed to solve particular problems, is much more likely to be effective.