8.5 Using classroom talk to stimulate students’ thinking  (Page 2/4)

Teacher: Which of these objects that I have do you expect will sink and which ones will float? (A test question—the teacher already will know the answer.)

Teacher: What other things have you seen that float? Or that sink? (A real question—the teacher is asking about their experience and does not know the answer.)

By asking both kinds of questions, the teacher scaffolds the children’s learning, or creates a zone of proximal development, which we described in [link] as part of Vygotsky’s theory of learning. Note that this zone has two important features, both of which contribute to children’s thinking. One is that it stimulates students’ thinking (by asking them questions), and the other is that it creates a supportive and caring atmosphere (by honoring their personal experiences with real questions). The resulting mix of warmth and challenge can be especially motivating (Goldstein, 1999).

When warmth and challenge are both present in a discussion, it sometimes even becomes possible to do what may at first seem risky: calling on individual students randomly without the students’ volunteering to speak. In a study of “cold calling” as a technique in university class discussions, the researchers found that students did not find the practice especially stressful or punitive, as the teachers feared they might, and that spontaneous participation in discussion actually improved as a result (Dallimore, et al., 2006). The benefit was most likely to happen, however, when combined with gestures of respect for students, such as warning individuals ahead of class that they might be called on, or allowing students to formulate ideas in small groups before beginning to call on individuals.

Helping students to articulate their ideas and thinking

The classroom talk register is well designed to help students articulate ideas and thoughts, particularly when used in the context of discussion. In addition to the conversational probes, like the ones we described in the previous section, there are other ways to support students in expressing their ideas fully and clearly. One way is for the teacher to check repeatedly on her own understanding of students’ contributions as a discussion unfolds. Consider this exchange:

Student (during a class discussion): It seems to me that we all need to learn more climate change.

Teacher: What do you mean by “learn more”? It’s a big topic; what parts of it are you thinking about?

Still another strategy for helping students to articulate their ideas is to increase the wait time between when the teacher asks a question and when the teacher expects a student to answer. As we pointed out earlier, wait times that are longer than average—longer than one second, that is—give students more time to formulate ideas and therefore to express themselves more completely and precisely (Good&Brophy, 2002). In addition, longer wait times have the added advantage of indirection: instead of telling a student to say more, the teacher needs only to wait for the student to say more.