Exploring Talk in School

Inspired by the Work of Douglas Barnes

Neil Mercer, Steve Hodgkinson, Neil Mercer, Steve Hodgkinson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781446242766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement primaire

Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine, January 2010

Classroom talk, by which children make sense of what their peers and teachers mean, is the most important educational tool for guiding the development of understanding and for jointly constructing knowledge. So what practical steps can teachers take to develop effective classroom interaction?

Bringing together leading international researchers and drawing on the pioneering work of Douglas Barnes, this book considers ways of improving classroom talk. Chapters cover:

-classroom communication and managing social relations;

-talk in science classrooms;

-using critical conversations in studying literature;

-exploratory talk and thinking skills;

-talking to learn and learning to talk in the mathematics classroom;

-the ?emerging pedagogy? of the spoken word.

With an accessible blend of theory, research and practice, the book will be a valuable resource for teachers, teacher-trainers, policy makers, researchers and students.

1

Exploratory Talk for Learning

Douglas Barnes

Summary

Barnes begins by outlining a ‘constructivist’ view of the nature of learning, and explores its implications for teaching, including the idea that coming to terms with new knowledge requires ‘working on understanding’ which can most readily be achieved through talk. Two kinds of talk, ‘exploratory’ and ‘presentational’, contribute to learning, but each has a different place in the sequence of lessons. Since learning in schools is a social activity, the discussion of learning moves from the individual to the group. A distinction is made between ‘school knowledge’ and ‘action knowledge’, and teachers are advised to consider whether their pupils’ conception of the nature of learning is appropriate. The chapter concludes with the discussion of some practical implications for teachers.

For Discussion

1. What are the main elements in the view of learning called ‘constructivism’?
2. How must these elements be modified to take account of a ‘social constructivist’ perspective?
3. What are the practical implications for teaching these views of learning?
4. How can ‘exploratory’ and ‘presentational’ uses of language in lessons be distinguished from one another? At what point in a scheme of teaching is each likely to be appropriate?
5. In what ways can some pupils’ preconceptions about the nature of learning prove to be unproductive? What might be done about this?
6. In what ways might the distinction between ‘school knowledge’ and ‘action knowledge’ be relevant to teachers in their work?

In this chapter I shall summarise something of what I have learnt from my years as a schoolteacher and as a researcher about how pupils learn in school and how teachers can best help them. During my years in the University of Leeds I set out to investigate what role spoken – and written – language can at best play in young people’s learning in classrooms and laboratories, though later on I came to define the issues less in terms of language and more as the kinds of access to the processes of learning that teachers made possible. The communication system that a teacher sets up in a lesson shapes the roles that the pupils can play, and goes some distance in determining the kinds of learning that they engage in. Thus I shall deal not only with pupils’ learning but also with what teachers do to influence this. I want to acknowledge, however, that a teacher’s attention is not given solely to the content of what is being taught; it is also necessary to manage social relations in the classroom, and failure in this latter respect will endanger any progress in learning. The management of these two responsibilities – which can at times seem almost to be in conflict – is central to the skill of teaching.

My own years as a schoolteacher have taught me that learning is never truly passive. One often hears the phrase active learning used with approval, so it is worth considering what exactly is being approved. When is learning active, and what processes does active learning include? Being ‘active’ does not imply moving about the room or manipulating objects (though either of these might be involved), but rather attempting to interrelate, to reinterpret, to understand new experiences and ideas. Whatever teaching method a teacher chooses – question and answer, guided discovery, demonstration or something else – it will always be the pupil who has to do the learning. He or she will make sense of the lessons only by using the new ideas, experiences or ways of thinking in order to reorganise his or her existing pictures of the world and how it can be acted upon. This is partly a matter of relating the new ideas to what a learner already knows. It is only the learner who can bring the new information, procedures or ways of understanding to bear upon existing ideas, expectations and ways of thinking and acting. That is, the learner actively constructs the new way of understanding.

The central contention of this view of learning, which is nowadays called ‘constructivism’, is that each of us can only learn by making sense of what happens to us in the course of actively constructing a world for ourselves. One implication of this is that learning is seldom a simple matter of adding bits of information to an existing store of knowledge – though some adults will have received that idea of learning from their own schooling. Most of our important learning, in school or out of it, is a matter of constructing models of the world, finding out how far they work by using them, and then reshaping them in the light of what happens. Each new model or scheme potentially changes how we experience some aspect of the world, and therefore how we act on it. Information that finds no place in our existing schemes is quickly forgotten. That is why some pupils seem to forget so easily from one lesson to the next: the material that was presented to them has made no connection with their models of the world. This implies that retrieving and transforming what we already know is a crucial part of learning.

It was Piaget who pointed out that new knowledge and experience can be assimilated when they fit comfortably into our existing schemes for understanding the world, but that other new ideas, that do not fit, force us to accommodate them by changing our schemes (Piaget and Inhelder, 1969). So some new ideas, experiences or information will require a radical revision of some part of our view of the world, and this we sometimes resist. To take one classroom example. When a teacher passed a beaker of cold water through a Bunsen flame, many of his pupils thought the droplets of water that appeared on it had either condensed from the air or spilt over the edge, both of these being familiar ideas. It required a major accommodation of their ideas about the relationship of water and fire to take in the idea that these droplets were a chemical product of the burning of the coal gas. Much of school learning requires an equally radical revision of our pictures of the physical or social world and how it works.

Since we learn by relating new ideas and ways of thinking to our existing view of the world, all new learning must depend on what a learner already knows. When we are told something we can only make sense of it in terms of our existing schemes. A child who has had no experience of blowing up balloons or pumping up bicycle tyres will make much less sense of a lesson on air pressure, however clearly it is presented, than a child who has had such experience. Most learning does not happen suddenly: we do not one moment fail to understand something, and then the next moment grasp it entirely. To take another example, compare a child’s understanding of electricity with that of an adult. A child may well use the word correctly, but may lack the ability to analyse and explain, as well as to make links with those purposes and implications which make electricity important. The difference between the child and the adult will be even more marked for those who have studied physics. Most of our systems of ideas – call them schemes, frames, models, or concepts – go through a history of development in our minds, some of them changing continually throughout our lives.

The constructivist view of learning carries with it a radical requirement for teachers since it implies that their central task is to set up situations and challenges that will encourage their pupils to relate new ideas and ways of thinking to existing understandings and expectations in order to modify them. I find it useful to think of this as working on understanding. Working on understanding is, in essence, the reshaping of old knowledge in the light of new ways of seeing things. (Of course, ‘seeing’ here is a metaphor for various ways of symbolising, not just visual ones.) Only pupils can work on understanding: teachers can encourage and support but cannot do it for them. In this reshaping, pupils’ ‘old’ knowledge is as important as the new experiences that are to challenge it. It is this challenge that provides the dynamic for the accommodation, the changing of previous ways of understanding for new ones. Adults and children alike are not always ready to make such adjustments and sometimes cling to views of the world that are familiar but are also ineffective or even untrue. It can be uncomfortable to have to change our ideas about how things are or how we should behave or interpret the world about us.

There are various ways of working on understanding, appropriate for different kinds of learning. Teachers commonly ask pupils to talk or write in order to encourage this, but drawings and diagrams, numerical calculations, the mani pulation of objects, and silent thought may also provide means of trying out new ways of understanding. At the centre of working on understanding is the idea of ‘trying out’ new ways of thinking and understanding some aspect of the world: this trying out enables us to see how far a new idea will take us, what it will or will not explain, where it contradicts our other beliefs, and where it opens up new possibilities.

The readiest way of working on understanding is often through talk, because the flexibility of speech makes it easy for us to try out new ways of arranging what we know, and easy also to change them if they seem inadequate. Not all kinds of talking (or writing) are likely to contribute equally to working on understanding. A great deal of the writing that goes on in school is a matter of imitating what other people have said or written, and the same is true at least in part of the talk.

It is clearly important to consider what kinds of discussion contribute most to working on understanding. When young people are trying out ideas and modifying them as they speak, it is to be expected that their delivery will be hesitant, broken, and full of dead-ends and changes of direction. This makes their learning talk very different from a well-shaped presentation such as a lecture. For this reason I found it useful to make a distinction between exploratory talk which is typical of the early stages of approaching new ideas, and presentational talk (Barnes, 1976/1992). Exploratory talk is hesitant and incomplete because it enables the speaker to try out ideas, to hear how they sound, to see what others make of them, to arrange information and ideas into different patterns. The difference between the two functions of talk is that in presentational talk the speaker’s attention is primarily focused on adjusting the language, content and manner to the needs of an audience, and in exploratory talk the speaker is more concerned with sorting out his or her own thoughts.

I can illustrate exploratory talk by quoting a short extract from the recording that in 1970 first challenged me to think about its nature and functions (Barnes, 1976/1992). Four 11-year-old girls were talking about a poem that they had read. They were discussing what would happen if, as in the poem, a pupil fell asleep in class.

Anne:	Well the teacher’s bound to notice.
Beryl:	Yes really … because I mean … I mean if …
Carol:	Or she could have gone out because someone had asked for her or something … She probably felt really sorry for him so she just left him … The teachers do …
Anne:	What really sorry for him … so she’d just left him so they could stick pins in him. [Tone of horrified disbelief.]
Dinah:	Oh no she probably … with the ‘whispered’ … said ‘whispered’ …
Beryl:	Yes.
Carol:	Yes but here it says … um … [rustling paper] … Oh ‘Stand away from him children. Miss Andrews stooped to see.’
Beryl:	Mm.
Anne:	So you’d think that she would do more really.
Beryl:	Yes … you’d think she’d um … probably wake … if she would really felt sorry for … sorry for him she’d …
Dinah:	She’d wake him.
Beryl:	[continuing] … wake him.
Carol:	Oh no! …. No, she wouldn’t send him home alone … because … nobody’s …
Anne:	His mother’s bad.

Although many of the contributions were disjointed and hesitant, the girls were undoubtedly sorting out their thoughts and making sense of the poem, and a few moments later arrived at an insight crucial to its understanding. The broken utterances, the changes of direction, the corrections of themselves and one another, even the disagreements, all were part of their struggle to assign meaning to the poem. The talk, for all its incompleteness, seemed to be enabling the girls to use their existing knowledge of people and behaviour to construct a meaning for the words of the poem. Soon after making this recording I began to realise that it was not only in reading literature that we need to bring existing knowledge to give meaning to what we hear or read. All understanding depends on this, whether in school or elsewhere. This encouraged me to gather material from other parts of the school curriculum that would throw light on how putting ideas into words contributes to learning.

Exploratory talk provides an important means of working on understanding, but learners are unlikely to embark on it unless they feel relatively at ease, free from the danger of being aggressively contradicted or made fun of. Presentational talk, on the other hand, offers a ‘final draft’ for display and evaluation: it is often heavily influenced by what the audience expects. Presentational talk frequently occurs in response to teachers’ questions when they are testing pupils’ understanding of a topic that has already been taught. It also occurs when anyone, child or adult, is speaking to a large or unfamiliar audience. Such situations discourage exploration: they persuade the speaker to focus on getting it right, on ‘right answers’ – providing expected information and an appropriate form of speech.

Much of the talk that teachers invite from pupils is presentational in nature, and it is not my intention to deny the value to learners of having to order ideas and present them explicitly to an audience. Teachers should, however, consider at what point in the sequence of learning this should take place. In my view many teachers move towards presentational talk (and writing) too soon, when pupils are still at the stage of digesting new ideas. In the earlier stages of a new topic, it is likely to be exploratory talking and writing that will contribute more to the interrelating of old ways of thinking and new possibilities: in other words, they will be more likely to enable learners to ‘work on understanding’. Requiring presentational reports, spoken or written, before pupils have come to terms with new ideas is to ask for confused speech or writing. Both presentational and exploratory talk are important in learning. Teachers need to be sensitive to the differences between them and use them appropriately.

In teaching both adolescents and adults I made much use of small-group discussion as an element in an overall pattern of learning, partly because it makes it more likely that a larger proportion of a class will be actively involved in thinking aloud. However, I do not want to overemphasise small groups in spite of the role they played in my investigations. I was often more interested in finding out how young people use talk as a tool of thinking in the absence of adult guidance than in recommending small-group methods. It is important not to allow ourselves to idealise group discussion: it is a valuable resource in a teacher’s repertoire but it is not a universal remedy. Not all group discussions are as successful as the poem discussion quoted above: the very presence of a researcher with a tape-recorder encourages young people to put on a show. Group discussion should also never be seen as a laissez-faire option. Successful group work requires preparation, guidance and supervision, and needs to be embedded in an extended sequence of work that includes other patterns of communication. With new classes some instruction in the ground rules may be needed. (Neil Mercer and Lyn Dawes in this volume discuss an approach called ‘Thinking Together’ intended for this purpose, and Courtney Cazden describes an approach called ‘Fostering a Community of Learners’ which had been strikingly successful.) By early adolescence some young people have already developed considerable social abilities, no doubt from sharing in the life of a family and the activities of other groups as well as from school. However, the ability to think aloud and to share thoughts with others is not universal, and is not necessarily linked to academic intelligence. Some young people need help to develop these skills and even to discover what discussion is.

I do not want to seem to suggest that class discussions led by the teacher are less important than group work. On the contrary, they are essential. It is important, however, for teachers to make it possible for pupils to think aloud even when they are talking with the whole class. This is difficult, as every teacher knows, since in a lively class the competition to hold the floor will discourage extended speech. Moreover, pupils competing for attention do not always listen to and reply to one another’s contributions, and it is part of the task of the skilled teacher to persuade them to do so. There are other problems as well. One unpredicted ...