We need to talk about student talk
For more than a year now, principals, coaches, and teachers in widely diverse schools around the country have been sharing with us very similar stories.
They’re seeing that, since the pandemic, it’s both harder to engage students in classroom conversation and harder for teachers to move from lecturer to facilitator – to try out and expand the kinds of teaching practices that create space for student talk.
These two factors seem to compound each other.
Before the pandemic, Scott’s students spoke in class. But after the pandemic…
Before the pandemic, Scott Petri considered himself to be a pretty good teacher – and pretty good at getting his students talking. Hear his story on the Tech Lasso podcast.
“Before the pandemic, I was a pretty good teacher. My kids would do speeches in class, my kids would do presentations in class.
After the pandemic, I can’t get ‘em to talk in class to save my life. They don’t want to talk to each other. They don’t want to talk to me. They don’t want to ask questions. They just want to go on their device and sit behind the screen and quietly do work by themselves.”
He’s working to help his kids understand that having communication and presentation skills is highly sought after in the working world. And school is where our students develop these skills.
For Scott, this is where TeachFX comes in.
He calls it a “Fitbit for classroom conversations.”
He uses it to give his kids a talk goal. If they read a book, he wants the kids to be able to talk about that book for 10 minutes without needing their teacher to jump in with a question.
The first time Scott used TeachFX, he was surprised to see how much he dominated the conversation. But with each lesson he analyzed, he found more student talk and less teacher talk. He found the moments when wait time morphed over to awkward silence, and was able to bring his students into that conversation – How can we better keep this conversation going next time? How can we bring more voices into the conversation?
And, as you probably know, Scott’s classroom isn’t the only one where teachers need to learn and try new approaches to engage students in classroom conversation.
Educators from around the country join us every other week for live walkthroughs of how TeachFX works. And they often share that these stories resonate with them.
Anxiety about classroom conversation is even contributing to the absenteeism crisis
You probably saw the NY Times coverage that kids are missing school at an alarming rate. There was something in that coverage that feels incredibly important. But it wasn’t the main focus, so many might’ve missed it.
Here’s what one school counselor shared with the reporter (it’s about 19 minutes in, if you want to find it in the podcast):
“The kids at her high school got so used to just Googling solutions during the pandemic that they have a lot of anxiety around taking a test they don’t know the answers to or having a difficult conversation with a teacher…those social skills…acknowledging when you don’t know something and having to have a conversation with someone else, that you then use in the workforce and your adult life, school is a way to practice all of those things.”
Are some of our kids so anxious about the discomfort of engaging in real-time dialogue, risking not knowing the right answer right away, or experiencing not knowing what to say, that it’s keeping some of them from even entering the classroom?
This makes it even more incredibly important – and challenging – for teachers to create more conversational classrooms.
Where schools are engaging students in conversation
When educators are finding that this new paradigm requires new approaches.
Educators tell us frequently that they’ve tried the things they’ve always been told would always work to help change teaching practice and student learning. From purchasing a new curriculum to trying new professional development workshops to adhering to intensive walkthrough and observation protocols, these post-pandemic classroom dynamics persist.
Does that sound familiar to you?
That was what Dr. Kristen Horton of Atlanta’s Continental Colony Elementary School was facing. Her school had just committed to increasing student academic ownership when she attended a conference – and learned about TeachFX.
Dr. Horton shared her story recently on the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast.
With TeachFX, Dr. Horton saw a way to give teachers their own insights into what’s happening in their own classrooms.
She saw that only by giving teachers this window into the reality of their own classrooms would she create a shared point of view on the dynamics that are in place in our post-pandemic classrooms, give teachers the space to identify shifts that can be made, and do so without judgment or evaluation.
Here’s something you might not expect – Dr. Horton and her coaches started by using TeachFX themselves, in their own coaching conversations.
“It was very eye-opening…we saw that we’re asking teachers to create this wait time and this space for student discourse, but we weren’t doing it as leaders. We’re leading teachers expecting something, but as leaders we weren’t doing the same thing.”
They moved on to using TeachFX first with a cohort of teachers, and then expanding more widely through the school.
For three years, Dr. Horton and her school had been focused on increasing student academic ownership. Since launching TeachFX, they’re actually seeing student talk – a measure of students academic ownership – increase in their classrooms. What’s more, the more teachers use TeachFX, the more student talk increases.
How can we help teachers today create more conversational classrooms?
With principals, assistant principals, and instructional coaches spread as thinly as they ever have been, and the challenges in the classroom perhaps more complex than they ever have been, now is the time for a new approach to instructional coaching.
TeachFX is built to help teachers see the dynamics of their own classroom conversations, celebrate what’s working to get kids talking, and identify the places where they – and their students – can grow.
It’s a new way to support teachers; it’s like putting an instructional coach in every teacher’s pocket.
We talk about this every other week in our live walkthroughs of how we do what we do at TeachFX. Join the next one to see how we’re taking a new approach to helping teachers meet the new challenges of teaching and learning.
Administrators & Coaches
Classroom Teachers
