Education Week - December 11, 2019 - 6

How Much Should Teachers
Talk in Class? Some Say Less

WHAT THE

RESEARCH
SAYS

Performance Flat, But Gaps Widen
In International Assessments
"Program for International Student Assessment Results, 2018"

The United States has gained ground against other
countries in a global assessment of teenagers' reading,
math, and science skills. That's ironic, though, considering
this country has been running in place for years in all three
subjects.
U.S. 15-year-olds made no significant progress on the
Program for International Student Assessment. On a
1,000-point scale, students in 2018 earned on average
505 in reading, 478 in math, and 502 in science in 2018,
statistically unchanged from the last test administration
in 2015. Yet because several other countries declined
during the same period, the United States rose in global
rankings on all three tests. the United States significantly
outperformed the average for all OECD countries in both
reading and science, while it significantly underperformed
the OECD average in math.
The PISA results echo those released last month from
"the nation's report card" that find widening gulfs
between the highest- and lowest-performing students in
reading and math. In both subjects, the top 10 percent of
students have performed significantly better since 2012,
while the performance of the bottom 10 percent of U.S.
students declined.
The 2018 PISA, administered in the United States by the
National Center for Education Statistics and developed
by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, measures the skills of about 600,000
students from nearly 80 countries and education systems.
U.S. 15-year-olds performed on average at proficiency
level on two of six levels on PISA in reading. That means
the average American of that age understood the main
idea and drew basic inferences in a moderately long
text but struggled to understand and compare texts that
included multiple features or competing ideas. They
more readily reflected on texts given to them than located
information or understood and inferred the meaning
of what they read-results that mirror those of the
latest National Assessment of Educational Progress for
reading. The latter skills are sorely needed in a world with
increasingly complex reading demands.
-Sarah D. Sparks

Bottom
quarter

477

461

Second
quarter

502

491

535

Third
quarter

531

Top
quarter

2018 PISA mathematics literacy average score
445 460

Bottom
quarter

475

468

Second
quarter
OECD average

500

517

If you carried a stopwatch into your
district's schools and sat quietly in various classrooms for a week, timing how
much teachers talk and how much students talk, what would you find?
Are lessons dominated by teachers
talking? Do students have a robust
role in discussing what they're learning? Or are they mostly answering
procedural or factual questions? Are
teachers consciously monitoring how
much they talk? Should they be?
Research and front-line teacher
experience suggest they should be.
And some teachers are using new
tools like apps on their phones to help
them reflect on their classroom talk
habits.
Most educators agree that it's important for teachers to get students
talking about what they're learning.
Doing so can get students more involved and interested in what they're
studying and help them understand
it better. It can also yield valuable
insight into what students need, and
improve achievement.
"If you're talking all the time,
how can you hear the impact of your
teaching?" asked John Hattie, a laureate professor at the University of
Melbourne in Australia who has
analyzed research on "teacher talk."
He's concluded that teachers should
talk less and think more carefully
about when they're talking and the
kinds of questions they're asking.
Teachers who have experimented
with changing the balance of student
and teacher talk in their classrooms,
and researchers who study it, say that
simply shifting the ratio isn't enough.
The real goal is finding ways to spark
productive classroom discussions.

'Surface' and 'Deep' Stages

2018 PISA reading literacy average score
448 432

By Catherine Gewertz

533

Third
quarter

558

Top
quarter

United States

NOTE: The OECD measures socioeconomic status based on an index
including family wealth, parent education and other factors.

SOURCE: OCED, PISA, 2018

6 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 11, 2019 | www.edweek.org

There are many ways to do that.
Getting students to talk more about
their learning means teachers must
carefully plan lessons that include
more open-ended questions. But
before teachers can consistently do
that planning, they must navigate
a deeper shift. Educators who have
revamped their classroom talk habits say they've had to reinvent their
roles as tellers and become askers
and listeners.
"It's more than a collection of
strategies. It's a mind shift," said
Rosie Reid, an English teacher at
Northgate High School in Walnut
Creek, Calif.
Therese Arahill, an instructional
coach in New Zealand, described
that mind shift.
"I join their discussion, ... answering their questions," Arahill said via
Facebook. "It's an attitude. Moving
away from teacher ego, toward student voice, student agency."
Research documents the dominance of teacher voices in classrooms. Hattie's synthesis of studies on the topic, detailed in his 2012

book, Visible Learning for Teachers,
found that teachers talk for 70 percent to 80 percent of class time on
average. His own research produced
an even higher average: 89 percent.
All that talking doesn't necessarily
produce good learning. One study
tracked middle and high school students and found their engagement
flagged the most when their teachers
were talking. Others show that most
of teachers' questions seek lower-order responses like factual recall.
On the flip side, researchers have
found that students' comprehension,
engagement, and test scores improve
when they get to discuss what they're
learning. But research hasn't elucidated many details that could guide
teachers, Hattie said, such as the
right ratio of monologue to dialogue
and how talk patterns might need to
shift to suit students' grade level or
the topic being taught.
Hattie's own studies, in classroom
"labs" at his university, suggest that
teachers should talk more as students
are acquiring information and shift
into a questioning mode as they're
deepening their understanding,
he said. He encourages teachers to
split their lessons into "surface" and
"deep" stages and plan distinct strategies for each.

Measuring and Analyzing
Many teachers start with the simplest piece: paying attention to how
much they talk. Some are using a
new app, TeacherFX, on their phones
or laptops to measure it. They click it
open as class begins, and afterward,
the app emails them an analysis of
talk patterns, such as how much the
teacher talked and whether he asked
open-ended questions. Another app,
Visible Learning, designed by Hattie, offers similar tools.
Reid, who is California's 2019
teacher of the year, said TeachFX
helped her spot a pattern she needed
to change.
"I was talking at them too much at
the beginning of class, when my students are at their freshest," she said.
"I realized I need to use that time to
do engaging warm-ups instead."
Jamie Poskin, a former English
and math teacher who developed
TeachFX as a Stanford University
graduate student, said he's been surprised that teachers find the app so
useful by itself, even without professional learning linked to it.
"They're telling us that just seeing
the data profoundly affected their
perspectives," he said. "They're
shocked by how much they talk and
how little their kids talk."
Once they see that feedback,
Poskin said, they "unlock knowledge
they already had" and start using it,
such as deliberately including more
open-ended questions in their lesson
planning and making sure they extend the "wait times" between asked
and answered questions.

One strategy Reid uses is to get
students to reflect regularly on their
own talking. She distributes what
she calls "metacognitive cards" that
the teenagers keep on their desks
during class discussions. They make
notes about things like whether they
built on classmates' ideas or cited
textual evidence and how much they
talked. They evaluate their participation and set goals for improvement.

Finding New 'Moves'
A n instr uctional coach from
Hampden, Maine, Susan O'Brien,
encourages teachers to do what she
did with her 5th grade students when
she was in the classroom. O'Brien
used nine "talk moves" designed by
two Massachusetts researchers to
promote "academically productive"
discussion.
To facilitate conversation, O'Brien
rearranged her classroom so students sat in groups at tables. She
taught them things to say in discussions to help them speak, listen, and
build on one another's ideas, such
as, "Let me see if I understand what
you're saying" and "Can you say
more about that?"
And she had to make another big
change: She had to talk less and
listen more. She started walking
around the tables, eavesdropping on
students' discussions.
"What I saw was that students
started leading their own learning
instead of having me up front doing
sit-and-get," O'Brien said. "They
were challenging each other and
stretching their own thinking."
Cris Tovani, a literacy consultant
and instructional coach whose 2017
book with researcher Elizabeth Birr
Moje, No More Teaching as Telling,
explores ways to reduce teacher talk,
said that one of her favorite strategies for promoting good classroom
discussion is using a simple chart
she developed to record her observations as students discuss what
they're reading, in small groups or
as a whole class. She calls it "the discussion catcher."
In one section of the chart, teachers can jot down quotes or interactions they see that reflect good discussion, like one classmate helping
another understand something,
and share them later with students.
Teachers can also use the chart for
their own planning, noting areas of
misunderstanding that could use a
follow-up mini-lesson.
Revising the kinds of questions
she asked, and waiting longer before providing answers, were important changes Tovani made in her
classroom as she tried to get more
students talking, she said. When
students made comments, she'd
"toss the ball back to them" with
responses like, "Why do you think
that?" or "Tell me more."
"Teachers hate wait time, but
kids hate it more," she said. Talking

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Education Week - December 11, 2019

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