Who Is Doing the Learning?

The Theory:

I have worked with many teachers who have videotaped themselves interacting with students over the last few years. Every single one of them (including the one that I see in the mirror daily) have all said, “Wow, I talk way too much!!”

Somewhere I picked up the quotation that ‘the person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.’ As those who know me would tell you, I must be doing a lot of learning! Maybe it is a characteristic of the type of person who goes into teaching? I am trying to curb that tendency now!

There is quite a bit of research done on ‘Wait Time.’ The average ‘wait time’ that a teacher waits between posing  a question and asking a student in the class to offer up an answer is about 1 second. Wow! The recommendation is to wait at least 3 seconds (Kathleen Cotton, “Classroom Questioning”). Doesn’t sound that long until you count it out in your head! When I first read this, I started putting a 5 second interval into practice with the JK's I was teaching. Interestingly, not only did more of the students raise their hand (especially boys), but more actually had an answer rather than “I don’t know” (i.e. ‘I just like raising my hand’). I became a believer! I made it explicit by calling it “think time,” so students would know what they were supposed to be doing (and allowing others to do), and often showed the time passing by counting the five seconds out on my hand.

Connecting the “Think Time” back to ‘the person doing the talking is the one doing the learning’… I am wondering about how we can optimize that ‘kid talk’ in our classroom. We have 30 students, a teacher, an ECE and three one-on-one EA’s.  It is easy for that many adults to talk for kids, or even for kids to talk for one another. Also to ‘do’ and ‘create’ for one another.

The Practical:

A simple example brought this all together for me. As we continue organizing the classroom and the materials, I began to sort the crayons into a tray. Suddenly I caught myself, thinking, “What am I doing?!! I am not the one who needs practice sorting!!!” 

Doesn’t it really come down to:

·         Don’t say anything a child can say  (Reinhart, 2000).

·         Don’t do anything a child can do.

·         Don’t create anything a child can create. (Connecting this to the last blog about the alphabet frieze we are constructing with the students)

We have a sign up now (high up out of the kids' zone) to support us in remembering who needs to be doing the talking, thinking, doing, creating and learning! We are also posting prompts/questions for each of the six curricular areas to support adults in the room in fostering more student talk.  

Doesn’t mean we adults never do any of the talking, doing, creating… LOL… we are just learning to be more strategic about where it is needed!