8.5 Using classroom talk to stimulate students’ thinking

The various features of classroom talk characterize the communication of most teachers and students, at least when they are in a classroom and “doing school”. (Communication outside of school is a different matter: then teachers as well as students may speak, listen, and behave quite differently!) As you might suppose, the extent and balance among the features varies depending on grade level, curriculum area, and personalities of students or teachers. But failing to use a classroom register at all can easily create communication problems. Suppose, for example, that a teacher never asks informal test questions. In that case the teacher will learn much less than otherwise about her students’ knowledge of the current material. Then also suppose that a student does not understand teachers’ questions as test questions. That student may easily respond in ways that seem disrespectful (Teacher: “How much is 23 x 42?” Student: “I don’t know; how much do you think it is?”) (Bloome, et al., 2005).

The classroom talk register, then, constrains how communication between teachers and students can take place, but it also gives teachers and students a “language” for talking about teaching and learning. Given this double-edged reality, how can teachers use the classroom talk register to good advantage? How, in particular, can teachers communicate in ways that stimulate more and better thinking and discussion? In the next, final section of the chapter, we offer some suggestions for answering these questions. As you will see, the suggestions often reinforce each other. They are more like a network of ideas, not a list of priorities to be considered or followed in sequence.

Probing for learner understanding

How do you know whether a student understands what you are saying? One clue, of course, is by whether the student is looking at and concentrating on you and your comments. But this clue is not foolproof; we have all had moments of staring at a speaker while daydreaming, only to realize later that we have not heard anything that the speaker said. It is sometimes important, therefore, to probe more actively how much students are actually understanding during lessons or other activities.

Strategies for probing understanding generally involve mixing instruction with conversation (Renshaw, 2004). In explaining a new topic, for example, you can check for understanding by asking preliminary questions connecting the topic to students’ prior experiences and knowledge about the topic. Note that this strategy combines qualities of both instruction and conversation, in the sense that it involves combining “test” questions, to which you already know the answer, with real questions, to which you do not. When introducing a science lesson about density to kindergarten children, for example, the teacher might reasonably ask both of the following: