Book: Using talk effectively in the primary classroom

Richard Eke and John Lee

Eke, R. and Lee, J., 2009. Using talk effectively in the primary classroom. London: Routledge.

pg 1

…the professional standards for England which state that in order to qualify as a teacher, student teachers much evaluate the impact of their teaching on the progress of all learners. This means being able to identify pupils’ cultural, linguistic and emotional development.

In the context of whole class teaching we argue that it is very imporant to be able to analyse what is happening in the classrooms so that we can learn lessons from good practice.

pg5

so the linguistic development of the child is part of their deelopment as a social being, they do not develop language use by themselves.

pg 7

te sociologist Basis Bernstien refers to those children arriving equipped for school language as having a sort of cultural subsidy. These children know you can have a pink elephant in a maths actiity or in a story but you can’t have them in your news books.

pg 8

… he is talking about the way meanings are made and encoded.

Pg 9

When children first enter school, they encounter some rather strange examples of language use. Initally these are often associated with classroom rules of behavior. Basil Bernstien calls this the “regulatory discourse”. The latter focuses on knowledge, what children are expected to learn, often for the purposed of tests. So managing the children becomes bound up with teaching them.

…It is too easy to forget how the social arrangements of school seem to produce the strange and articial talk associated with these arrangements. Here are some examples of the strangeness of the regulatory discourse:

“let us all sit on the carpet, please. “

This looks like a polite invitation. Invitations by their nature may be refused, however, you know that there are penalties for refusing if you are a Reception class child. It is not an invitation, it is a command.

“Would you like to tidy the bookshelf? “

This also looks like an invitation. The weak modal verb “would ” suggests the possibility of refusal. You might be asked “would you like another drink? “and you would feel very happy saying no. Of course, the child who refuses to tidy the bookshelf will find themselves in some trouble.

pg 12

… school language is different from out-of-school languages – and sometimes this is because teachers have to interact with larger numbers of children all at the same time. But it is also caused by the way in which school knowledge is transmitted.

… we can set out what kinds of knowledge should be taught in a fairly precise manner.

pg 13

Harold Rosen… argues that the code description used by Bernstein, specifically his description of the restricted code, ignore the ways in which working-class speakers are proficient users of narrative.

What Edwards (1987) shows us is that the power of the teacher in defining not just what but how something can be said, cannot be ignored.

Pg 14

Chapter 2: The Importance of Talk In Whole Class Teaching

About whole class teaching

Improving the quality and quantity of pupils ‘ classroom talk, and thus teacher-pupil talk, is often seen as key to improving classroom learning (Barns, Britton & Torbe 1986; Rosen & Rosen 1973; Cazden 2000). Quality of this kind may be characterised by a focus on the use of language to explore new concepts and to initial new ideas as well as a focus on learning outcomes.

pg 15

A common sense view about improving the quantity and quality of language interactions between a teacher and their pupils is to focus on one-to-one relations. In some way, this focus arose form the idea that it was possible to model classroom talk on family talk. this common sense view, to some degree, dominated certain kinds of thinking about primary education from the late 1960s almost until the present. What was being stressed was the child as investigator and, at times initiator and the teacher as facilitator and guide. In some cases this arose from a misreading and fundamental misunderstanding of the world of the psychologist Jean Piaget.

Research published in 1970 showed that the system of streaming was ineffective and this…led to the abandonment of streaming – although ability grouping was still coming. Regardless of whether the classes were streamed or of mixed age, whole class teaching was the norm and it has become part of teachers ‘ and policy-makers ‘ folk memory that things were better then because of the way teaching was organised.

Pg 16

Neville Bennett’s 1970 study Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress examined what was going on in a samples of primary school classrooms. As he showed, a good deal of whole class teaching took place, but pupils made most progress when teachers capitalised on one particular style. In short it was consistency in pedagogical approach that was the best indicator of good pupil progress.

Pg 17

Why Change?

This question of failing pupils has been a major concern of educationalists, politicians and policy-makers, certainly since the 1950s. What they and we can see is the way in which pupil performance is powerfully correlated with social class. This in turn may be compounded by race, ethnicity and gender. … we need to search for explanations.

Pg 18

Often implicit in the cultural explanation was the idea of linguistic deprivation or disadvantage. It was proposed that the kinds of language that poor socio-economic group pupils brought to school in inadequate and did not enable them to comprehend the instructional form and content of classroom talk. Oddly enough the idea of linguistic disadvantage often drew on the very early work of Bernstein, where he had proposed the idea of “restricted ” and “elaborated ” codes of language.

… we need to think about the differences between classroom talk and ordinary social talk. Studies tend to treat classroom talk as natural. If we look at classroom talk, particularly the talk of teachers, we might better describe it as weird.

Pg 20

The social and organisation contexts in which talk occurs powerfully impact on the kinds of talk used. So different social contexts allow for looser or tighter thematic talk, … One of the aspects of the skilled teacher talk is the way in which it maintains a thematic unity while at the same time enabling pupils to express opinions and ideas. While this appears conversation-like, unlike social conversations it has the intention of increasing formal learning. This kind of skilled talk is often described as “scaffolding ” and draws heavily on Vygotsky’s ideas of assisting pupil performance.

What [Bernstein] calls the “regulatory discourse “is the one that teachers use to construct and maintain order in the classroom. But it does more than this; it establishes the relationship between the pupil, the teacher and the knowledge being transmitted. Pupils who rapidly grasp the strange statements that teachers use become identified as the ideal, the kind of pupils who will quickly learn.

Pg 21

What we know from teacher’s own accounts and from research is that some pupils enter school and are unfazed by the strongness of school talk. They seem to know how it goes and what it means without needing lengthy explanations. Clearly these children have an advantage. They also comply with the content rules of classroom talk; they have some appreciation of what Bernstein is saying when he talks of ‘classification’ and ‘framing ‘.

Pg 22

.. psychological ideas of Vygotsky and his interpreters. The key idea is “social constructivism”, which identifies the way in which language and nation come together but also language in use as action in the classroom. This involves assisting pupils’ performance through the selection, chunking and sequencing of classroom curriculum knowledge and the use of appropriate activity and talk.

Pg 23

Chapter 3: Children’s experience of primary school

The problem that almost all teachers face, except for those working in a one-to-one situation, is how to interact with and teach large numbers of children at the same time. In our everyday life, we do not have to speak with twenty-five to thirty people at the same time.

pg 24

…what the teacher might do is mirror the activity of a caring parent and design work for each individual pupil. This is called “individualization “and has been recommended as the best practice for primary school teachers. Of the many documents that comment on primary education, the Plowden Report (CACE 1967) is one of the most important, because it set out an ideal way of teaching. It placed the child – not the curriculum – at the heart of education.

…Report’s chapter 2… Individual differences between children of the same age are so great that any class, however homogeneous it seems, must always be treated as a body of children needing individual and different attention. Until a child is ready to take a particular step forward, it is a waste of time to try and teach him to take it (CACE 1967, Chapter 2, para 75: 25)

Pg 25

It is often assumed or claimed that there were a number of schools where teachers treated pupils as individuals and planned lessons on the basis of pupils’ interest … So teachers planned for individual work, often of an exploratory nature. More than that, in these classrooms the divisions between subjects were not apparent. Teachers did not plan English or mathematics lessons but took a theme such as “water” and drew the subject knowledge out of that. Subjects were integrated and it was said that was the way children would learn best. … called “Plowden progressivism”. While it is true that many claims were made for this kind of teaching, there is scant evidence of it in practice.

pg 26

Paul Croll puts this very succinctly:

It is clear from the figures [percentages of teacher-pupil interactions] that however much teachers try to increase their individual interactions from their already high level, there can only be a very small impact on any individual child’s experience of one to one interaction with the teacher (Croll in Croll & Hastings 1996: 20)

Pg 27

Probably the most influential study of primary teaching is the one that focused on what we now call “school effectiveness”, conducted by Mortimore and colleagues in junior schools in the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA).

.. a clear relationship between whole class teaching, single subject teaching and higher pupil achievement. The study casts into doubt the efficacy of individualization.

Pg 28

Whole class teaching almost inevitably means that the teacher and the class will focus on one curriculum subject. This enables teachers to organise knowledge in a way that makes it clear to pupils what they are learning. It also enables both the teacher and the pupils to identify what has been learnt. So each subject is clearly defined as a separate set of skills, facts and activities. Both pupils and teachers can say, “before play we were learning maths but now we are doing English”< Knowledge in this case is strongly classified, and the fact that pupils and teachers have an understanding of what is being and what has been learnt tends to make the pedagogic process rather more visible. Strong classification of this kind is associated with clear sequences of instruction, strong framing.

Pg 29

The belief (ideology) that all learning emanates from the child’s natural curiosity and interests is not really tenable in a system that defines knowledge and prescribes the order in which it is to be taught.

There is a clear danger that in whole class teaching pedagogy is developed on the principle that “one size fits all “- and this brings as many problems as it solves, in that some pupils learn more quickly and some more slowly than others. To be effective, whole class teaching must have the flexibility to plan for group activities as well as whole class activities.

Pg 32

Chapter 4: What does an effective whole class pedagogy look like?

We argue that an effective and successful pedagogy reaches most of the pupils most of the time, and it includes all of the pupils.

Pg 33

Andrew Pollard’s The Social World of the Primary Scholl (1985)…shows how talk has special meanings for pupils and teacher which may be rather different from everyday use. Studies like these enable us to understand the way in which people in schools interact in a social manner.

Pg 34

Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) present a model of the way in which lessons are structured and offer a basic structure which is common to all classroom talk. They describe teaching as following this sequence: initiation, response and follow-up (IRF). That is, the teacher starts the idea or theme and usually through questions gets pupils to respond, and then the teacher gives the pupils feedback (follow-up).

A good way of looking at IRF sequences in more detail and of thinking about how talk sustains learning can be found in the metaphor of “scaffolding “. Both David Wood (1998 2nd ed) and Jerome Bruner (1986), drawing on Vygotsky’s ideas, use the metaphor as an explanation and description of the process of supporting learners when they are learning.

When you build a house, you have to put down foundations; these foundations are crucial if the building is to stand up. As you begin to build, you use scaffolding and this scaffolding enables you, the builder, to reach the developing height of the building. But the scaffold also functions to support the brickwork while the cement and other bonding materials harden and dry. What we have just staid celebrates the use of scaffolding in a particular way. Scaffolding, though, has other uses: sometimes we use it to repair a building, to stop buildings from collapsing, and also as the backbone of barriers designed to keep people out. It is worth bearing all this in mind when you read or hear the word “scaffolding ” used to describe what a teacher is doing.

…in order to take ownership of new knowledge, pupils need the opportunity to put things into their own words.

Pg 36

Tharp and Callimore (1988) … do not present their categories as discrete but rather “the means of assistance are necessarily intertwined, occurring in combinations and sometimes simultaneously”(ibit. : 47). Here are some specific examples of these categories in use.

Modelling – showing pupils how to do things

Psycho-motor – physical demonstration by the teacher.

T: We start at the top, we come down and we flick up.

T: Alright, notice something I’m going to take the decimal points out here.

Cognitive demonstration – ways of thinking about the classroom task

P. Erm, because we just put the noughts in and added it all together but we put the points in the wrong place. 

Contingency management – managing pupils’ behaviour (e.g. keeping pupils on task)

T: Right, if you have an orange booklet in front of you then write your full name, and school on the front top, please

T: Right, OK now, where are your eyes supposed to be?

P: I’m going first

T: Shshsh, hands up

T: Right, everyone altogether.

Feeding-back

T: Very nice drawing being done here, very careful.

T: Good boy, zero point zero one, now I’m going to write them in columns.

Pg 37

Instructing – telling pupils what to do

T: You haven’t measured it well. Let’s measure it quickly. Put it on there.

T: See if yours matches up with what we’ve got on the board.

Questioning

Assessment questions – checking pupils’ learning

T: What do you notice between bread and cereal? 

Assisting questions – intended to provide new thinking

T: Do you think Goldilocks was right to eat the porridge?

Cognitive Structuring

Type 1 – structures of explanation, helping pupils to organise ideas in ways new to them

T: You had a change the axles because the other axles wouldn’t let the wheels go round OK, yet?

Type 2 – structures of cognitive activity, helping pupils to understand how to organise ideas

T: There are odd numbers and some special odd numbers, so three and seven aren’t like nine.

A key probably for understanding classroom talk is the nature of question used. In Tharp and Gallimore’s (1988) case, it transpires that many apparent “assisting questions” turn out to be requests for correct answers. Young (1992) helpfully identifies a series of teacher and pupil turn-taking, that help bring clarity to the question/answer process. Here are YOung’s categories: 

What do Pupils Know? (WDPK)

WDPK1 – Teacher reminds and checks

T: Do you know what else is made from milk? 

WKPK2 – Pupils reproducing what has been taught

T: What’s the first thing you do when you paint a landscape?

Pg 38

Guess What Teacher’s Thinking? (GWTT)

GWTT1 – Demonstrates teacher control and illustrated by an emphasis on answers worded correctly. It is common in new work and development stages.

T: So perhaps we could think of // quickly put it as a question. We could say what…?

GWTT2 – Terminology guessing. The teacher expects children to guess what is in their head. The practice is embedded in other utterances and may involve clue-giving.

T: We could call them “protein” or we could say …

T: A surprise, Mark, what’s the proper name for a surprise, Mark?

Discursive (D)

D1 – Teachers work with children to make things clearer. They also use talk to collaborate with children in solving problems and seek pupil involvement in paraphrasing and the confirmation/disconfirmation of statements.

T: Thank you, who’s going to put that in their own words? Hayley, yeah?

D2 – Teacher inquires into what the pupils think or feel.

T: Right, OK, how the world got here, right over o you, what are your thoughts?

Uptake

Closely associated with discursive utterances is the notion of uptake (Nystrand et all. 1997). We take this to be the acceptance and following-up of one pupil’s ideas by the teacher or other pupils who incorporate them into subsequent talk. 

T: Ah now, Amy said something interesting there, “your soul”. Right now, just let’s think about that for a second. All of you, just look this way a minute, where is your soul?

Pg 40

According to Moyles et al. teachers take cognisance of the following:

• Assessing and extending pupil knowledge
• Reciprocity and meaning
• Attention to thinking and learning skills
• Attention to pupils’ social and emotional needs/skills.

Pg 41

POlicy-makers and advsiors to teachers…urge teachers to provide ‘space’ for pupils to speak, listen and respond to both the teacher and each other.

Speaking Listening and Learning Key Stages 1 and 2 Handbook (QCA 2003) states very clearly that “excellent teaching of speaking and listening enhances children’s learning and raises standards further”. 

Alexander (2004) … “dialogic teaching harnesses the power of talk to engage children, stimulate and extend their thinking, advance their learning and understanding”. 

Key to this is reciprocity, which requires teachers to listen to children’s ideas and consider alternative viewpoints. 

Pg 42

Mercer (2003) makes the point in this way:

“For children to become more able in using language as a tool for both solitary and collective thinking, they need involvement in thoughtfl and reasoned dialogue, in which conversations partners ‘model’ useful language strategies and in which they can use language to reason, reflect, enquire and explain thinking to others […]

Providing only brief factual answers to IRF exchanges will not give children suitable opportunities for practice (QCA 2003: 76)

[My note – does lunch in schools where akonga sit together to each lunch in small groups improve social and langauge skills?]

Pg 45

Chapter 5: Checking and discussing – teaching literacy

Pg 48

The classrooms, the teachers and the children

Purple Class

…The class teacher, Sheila, calls them to order and tells them to sit on the carpet; they do this. There is a big book displayed on a stand in front of the carpeted area. The teacher sits on a chair in front of them, theatrically rolls up her sleeves for work and asks “Where should your eyes be? ” “On the text”, the children chorus.

What’s happening here? The rolling up of the sleeves is the teacher’s personal way of establishing it is time to work. But it is more than this, as it is culturally significant, too. The working-class culture these pupils have grown up with recognises this signal as showing that work has begun. … This is an extremely effective and efficient management strategy using non-verbal signals.

Pg 49

She [the teacher] used contingency management (regulatory discourse), ensuring the conditions were right for the teaching and learning. The move between control and teaching is seamless, the instructional discourse is intertwined with the regulatory where necessary, but the highest percentage of Sheila’s utterances are instructional.

In this lesson, over 70 per cent of Sheila’s utterances are focused on learning outcomes; they are world-level outcomes, “ea” phonemes, other phonemes and high-frequency words. What this involved was a return to previous work, a revision of word-level work on phonemes and teaching the recognition of high-frequency words. It is this clearly focused use of language that enables Sheila to be effective and efficient. In this use, she demonstrates that she does not expect a great deal of discursive talk from the pupils because that is not the aim of this lesson. We can see a rapidity of utterance use; each one is really short but always to the point. The children recognise that they are being reminded of what they know. When she nominates pupils, she is attempting to ensure they are engaged with the content.

Pg 52

Pupils with special educational needs are regularly called on, nominated, this strategy keeps them involved. But Sheila does more than this. She restricts the number of learning outcomes she expects them to respond to, but ensures they meet those outcomes that are core.

Sheila is carefully differentiating the content to be covered. But she does more than this. In her interactions with pupils, she is constantly reminding and checking the pupils ‘ understanding by asking them to reiterate what they have been taught. So the pupils are regularly revisiting what they have learnt.

Pg 53

Blue class

This is a year 5-6 class with thirty pupils on roll… 14 with special educational needs. .. well-established working-class suburb… teacher is male. 

…teacher introduces the camera operator and indicates they will be able to talk to him after the lesson. In doing this, he ensures the pupils’ attention to the tast rather than to the camera operator. He told te children what they were going to do, and in doing so also reminded them of the world completed on MOnday and Tuesday.

Pg 55

In contrast to Shila, Graham makes little use of utterances of the type “guess what I’m thinking”? , but like Sheila he is keen to check what the pupils are learning and, in doing this, is keeping them focused on the tast. He uses the checking form particularly when he is discussing word-level work, as did Sheila. 

In order to ensure that the pupils are able to engage with the task, Graham is unafraid to slow the pace of the lesson. So he uses longer utterances and often visits only one learning outcome. And important consequence of this is that he gets longer pupil utterances. 

Lessons to be learnt

Good and effective teachers focus their utterances on cognitive outcomes. They make sure their talk is on task and expect the pupils to follow this example. 

Whole class interactive teaching makes good use of checking, i.e. formative assessment questions and interim summative questions. 

… Graham links learning outcomes to everyday knowledge… He is also prepared to ask shorter questions and to make more use of formative and interim assessment utterances. Like Sheila, he makes careful use of nomination. A result of all this is that pupils with special educational needs are prepared to risk volunteering answers to questions addressed to the class as a whole. 

To help [special educational needs achieve [learning outcomes] teachers use nomination. This has a tendency to move the lesson towards a form of individualisation, and this produces a differentiated pace. By this we mean that all pupils experiences a change or difference in pace. 

Pg 68

Chapter 7: Checking learning and engagement and opening a dialogue in mathematics.

…the teaching of mathematics in recent year…. Has focused on the manipulation of numbers – particularly the mental manipulation of numbers… much of the teacher’s time in many schools, arithmetic rather than mathematics is addressed, which less time being spent, for instance, on geometry.

Pg 69

Alexander (2000) define the concept of pace as having five aspects

• Organisation pace  – the speed at which lesson preparations, introductions, transitions and conclusions are handled
• Task pace – the speed at which learning tasks and their contingent activities are undertaken
• Interactive pace – the pace of teacher-pupil and pupil-pupil exchanges, and contingent factors such as maintaining focus, and the handling of cues and turns
• Learning pace – how fast pupils actually learning (Alexander 2000: 424)

… skilled teachers have at least an intuitive understanding of the complexity of pace.

Pg 70

The daily mathematics lesson

Green Class

…taught by a woman with the support of a learning assistance. 11 boys and 4 girls from year 2; 8 boys and 4 girls from year 3. 

…. The teacher begins with quick mental calculations. 

Pg 71

This part of the lesson was characterised by speed, with the teacher employing “what do pupils know?’ questions to check pupils knowledge from previous lessons and engagement with the current lesson focus. 

The teacher is able to keep up the rapidity of momentum of the lesson because of the fact that she knows what the pupils know and uses that knowledge is the distribution of the questions. 

She blended the checking questions with careful modelling of how to write numbers in sequence. She uses questions both to check that the children can sequence and that they have followed her model of the writing process. This careful use of language accompanied by practical demonstration means that she is also able to check the quality of her own instructional utterances and the development of pupil understanding through the pupil’s responses; she gets the right answers from the pupil she nominates. 

Pg 74

Although the teacher occupies the largest percentage of talking time, what she does is open up the possibilities of the task and enables the pupils to engage in a dialogue. They are confident that they can argue a case and challenge the teacher. The result of this is that the pupils understand what they have to do but the task is open-ended; she has put the in a position where they have to think. 

Red Class

…. Taught by a man… 6 boys and 4 girls from Year 5… 12 boys and 11 girls from year 6… 

Pg 75

… he modelled cognitive activity.. Showing how he analysed and thought about the problem…

Another feature of the teacher discourse is the use of statements that are offering cognitive structuring to the pupils. … You could see this as a sort of “thinking out loud” process. The teacher was telling the pupils what to do, showing the what to do and explaining how things are done. The use of checking questions enables him to confirm that the pupils are following the lesson and are developing an understanding of the topic. 

… a pupil was able to introduce a new learning objective, not merely for himself but for other pupils.

Pg 76

What is happening is that the teacher is accepting the pupils’ ideas and using them – a very good example of what Martin Nystrand (in Nystrand et al. 1997) has called “uptake”. This does not mean that the teacher takes up the theme immediately; he returned to it later. 

After this brief interjection and the teacher’s uptake of the pupils suggestions, the teacher returns to main theme of the lesson. 

… the interjection means he has had to adapt his teaching strategy, since he wanted to enable the pupils to engage with their own ideas and problems. 

Pg 78

.. the teacher enables the pupils to be discurve by letter them talk to each other and by avoiding telling them what they mean. He does not gie a definitive answer to their problem; he doesn’t know the problem until they explain it to him. He realises that pupils need new information and proceeds to identify their own errors. The pupils go beyond this and offer an explanation of how the error arose by exposing their thinking. The teacher then rehearsed the main learning outcomes one more time and then set the pupils to work on identified tasks. The lesson comes full circle. 

The sequence of the lesson is interesting. In both cases the learning objectives are differentiated and, at the beginning, the younger pupils are nominated to answer questions that are their level of challenge; older pupils are drawn in more towards the middle of the lesson and are asked more challenging questions. 

The lessons proceed at a brisk rate and can do so because the learning objectives are carefully articulated so that the topic covered is in the minds of all participants, including the teacher. 

Pg 80

CHAPTER 8: 

Pupils saying what they think and clarifying their meanings using contemporary communications technology

Pg 90

ICT should not simply be some kind of attractive gizmo. .. ICT should be about children making and sharing meaning. 

The teacher’s job is to develop talk that challenges and clarifies meanings.

cHAPTER 9:

Pg 91

From checking and instructing to predicting and describing – teaching science

Pg 92

Proper enquiry requires action and exploration, but it needs more than that it needs purposeful talk,. Through speech, pupils can make their meanings clearer and can begin to explicate some fo the complex abstract concepts used in science. 

Pg 93

The expected dialogic shit was to raising questions, and this idea of raising questions has been a constant theme of science educations seeking to improve the quality of learning in science. 

… it is children’s questions, not just the teacher’s questions that are important.

Pg 94 

‘Turning questions into investigable ones is an important skill since it enables teachers to treat difficult questions seriously but without providing answers beyond children’s understanding. It also indicates to children that they can go a long way to finding answers through their own investigation, thus underlining the implicit messages about the nature of scientific activity and their ability to answer questions by ‘asking the objects’. (Harlen 1996)

… whole class teaching can engage with pupils in ways which are didactic, that challenge the to think and to explore, and this can be done in science teaching… 

Pg 95

Unlike the teaching of mathematics and English, good science teaching has always been seen as requiring a set of practical activities through which the teacher supports investigatory actions. 

Guest and POstlethwaite (2000; 136)

“Teaching science to primary school age children is about providing experiences and helping children to structure those experiences. Sometimes children will need guidelines, direction or even detailed explanations. 

… pupils talk of measuring distance in centimetres, having rejected the metre as too large. They also discus how the angle of inclination affects the acceleration of the vehicle and the distance it will travel. Two pupils use the term “accelerations”, although it was not introduced in this lesson. This shared use of technical language demonstrates a confident conceptual understanding and models the use of such language for their peers. 

Pg 97

… investigation is not simply giving pupils objects and telling them to discover something. .. the lesson has been planned with clear objectives and the apparatus carefully selected and presented. This does not mean that children have to get the “right answer”. The process of investigation, in this case, requires predictive observation and drawing judicious conclusions from available evidence. It is the process that is the main aim of this lesson, a process that is generalisable to other science activities. 

Pg 98

… is trying to set up a scientific discourse. She is supporting the pupils in their use of language as much as she is supporting them in the task. ..

Recording is a very important aspect of any scientific investigation, because it enables recount and reflections and , importantly, enables repeatability. 

Pg 100

Lessons to be learnt

… primary science has now established a tradition of exploratory group acting.  

What skilful teachers do, when they begin and usually end with the whole class, is to make the task to be done explicit and ensure that the pupils can identify that the group task is part of the whole lesson. 

Pg 102 

Chapter 10

Responding to individual need in whole class teaching

…the key pedagogical concepts of “match”, “differentiation”,  and “personal learning'” 

Match

The Plowden REports (CACE 1967) emphasised the need for teachers to match curriculum and learning activities to the child’s stage of development.

Pp 103

Any failure on the part of the teacher to do this leads to boredom and inattentiveness. 

… children of around the same chronological age can be at very different stages of development. 

In effect, this kind of match leads to individualisation and is virtually impossible to achieve in primary classes, because it requires sustained one-to-one interaction with the pupil. 

… reconceptualise the idea of “match” by focusing attention on “curriculum match”…

• Prioritising knowledge
• Using a subject-based curriculum
• Using logical sequencing on tasks
• Covering the ground
• Identifying the centrality of mismatch and repairing it 

Pg 104

Another way of thinking about match is to consider it through the lens of social constructivism…

• Prioritising classroom discourse
• Drawing on Vygotskian ideas
• Working in zones of proximal development
• Valuing children’s meaning-making activities

Differentiation

‘Differentiation’ has a range of meanings…

Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools (HMI) suggest there are four broad strategies that teachers use to match work to differing pupils’ abilities: 

• Outcome
• Rate of progress
• Enrichment
• Setting different tasks (HMI 1992)

Pg 105

Perhaps the most common use of differentiation in the system is for pupils identified as having special educational needs, now often referred to as “additional needs.”

Pg 107

Responding to difference in whole class teaching

Pg 108

…teacher’s pedagogical repertoire…

• The teachers readily nominated speakers and used nomination as a means of including pupils with difficulties into the lesson
• Given the nature of the literacy strategy, we are not surprised at the discrepancy in utterance and the number of utterances when we compare pupils with difficulties with all the rest
• These teachers narrow the focus of the lesson and slow the pace of the learning for pupils with difficulties. They visit fewer learning outcomes with these pupils and do not introduce other learning outcomes into the mix. In brief, they do not flip-flop from outcome to outcome, neither do they do this with the rest of the class.
• Where pupils take the content back, the teachers integrate that into the next episode of the lesson
• They use a tighter selection of means of assistance with pupils with difficulties

Teachers worked on one learning outcome at a time, creating an episode structure for the lesson… skilled teachers:

• work with the youngest learners first
• focus, when working with them, on one specific learning outcome at a time
• begin by asking cognitively challenging questions and rehearse pupil responses with other pupils
• check that they know that the youngest learners are following the content of the lesson. The questions do not exclude the older pupils, although older pupils are not normally nominated at this stage
• engage with the older learners in the middle of the lesson. Again, they begin by asking cognitively challenging questions and then rehearse responses and use checking questions targeted on older pupils.
• enable older pupils to address content and mathematical questions in their own way
• engage, at the very end of the lesson, either the younger or older pupils in discursive questioning, before the pupils move on to individual or group work.

Pg 110

… to mean the criteria for personalisation withing whole class teaching the following are necessary but probably not sufficient:

• running a lesson within a lesson
• narrowing the focus for target groups whilst keeping the interest of the whole class
• modifying the pace of lessons, slowing and speeding up the changes between learning outcomes in response to pupil utterances and substantive learning outcomes
• ensuring an inclusive pedagogic discourse such that no pupil is left outside the lesson. the important principle applies to issues to gender, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity and specific learning difficulties as well as those we have explicitly visited.

… skilled teachers structure their lessons in a subtle manner, so that they do not ignore groups of pupils at given times.

Chapter 11: Remarks in conclusion

Pg 114

It is commonplace to say that language and thought are bound together. Good teachers model how to organise ideas and they do this through their use of language. They also prompt pupils to use language in such a way that they make their thinking clearer to themselves and to other pupils. Teachers who do this well recognise that hesitations, repetitions and fillers are signs of productive thinking, not things to be eradicated from pupil talk. What is recognised is that the closer classroom language can be brought to ordinary language use, the better the opportunities for learning will be.

Pg 115

Alexander (2000) makes the point that the way that group work is set up and managed is critical to the way that pupils experience pace.

The teachers …by their use of language and the organisation of their classrooms, try to make their pedagogy visible – particularly to those pupils who may need additional support to make the most of their learning. What these teachers do is use talk in a discursive manner; they are happy to draw upon pupils’ own cultural knowledge, viewing pupils as thinkers and thus enabling them to develop the cultural capital of formal school learning. In doing this, they include all pupils by the way they distribute school knowledge.

The process of teaching is not just about instruction but about the development of thought. Pupils who have had modelled the kind of discursive language use we show in our examples are more likely to become confident learners and creative thinkers.

…there are some general principles which underpin an effective primary pedagogy. But, … this does not mean that teachers talk with their pupils in the same way all the time. Instead. they tailor their teaching to meet the variety of pupil audiences in their classrooms.

… skilled teachers ask the pupils to clarify what is being learnt and are willing to take the risk of following the pupils direction even under the pressure to deliver content in specified time. They do not “park” the learners understandings in order to pursue their own