11 Ways To Get Them Talking About It

"...recap is especially helpful for students...who have memory barriers because they tend to forget the purpose of the lessons as they try to apply new skills. Verbalization not only reconnects the dots for them but also strengthens mental pathways for later retrieval." - Margaret Searle, Causes & Cures in the Classroom, p. 58

One of the surest and simplest ways to promote the learning of the lessons we try to teach our students or staff is to get them talking about the content or skills of focus.

Talking it out reorganizes the material or steps inside our own heads so that it makes sense to us.

Talking it out forces us process, apply, and create output as a result of the daily input; what good is input if it's not translated to output?

We need to be mindful of this when we plan and when we design learning opportunities for our students or staff.

We spend so much time planning, preparing, and practicing dynamic and interesting ways to give our people input, but it's how intentional and planned the output is that will determine to what degree what we've taught is actually learned.

Talking our way through new lessons is tried and true; it's a way to make it permanent in our heads without having to stretch our creative capacity; there's no writer's block or foreign skill set required to talk about what I'm learning.

Here are some ways to get them talking about what we're teaching:

1. Stop class or meeting every 10 minutes and have neighbors turn and talk about what was just taught, done, discussed, etc. for 2 minutes
2. When asking questions to the class have each student write their answer on a little white board and hold up their answers. Before revealing the right answer have neighbors discuss why they answered how they did.
3. Have students send you an audio note using the voice recorder app on their phone, or a website like vocaroo.com summarizing what happened in class today, what was taught, and how it will be used tomorrow and beyond
4. Have students prepare audio notes on the topic of the day taking a certain viewpoint. Use edmodo, a common Google doc, itslearning, etc. for students to have a single spot to post all of their audio notes to and use the prepared statements to springboard further more spontaneous candid discussion the next day in class.
5. Have students screencast as they solve a math problem or construct a thesis paragraph using webistes like screencast-o-matic or apps like educreations.
6. When making slides utilize the narration option; oral presentations don't always have to be live. With that being said...
7. ...Get people up and talking about their work in front of a group. Earlier in the school year I presented to 12 different groups of ~100 students over the course of two weeks; by the 11th time I really really knew my stuff.
8. In a history or literature class have the students Face Off. During a Colonial America unit I may partner students off and have one act as a Loyalist and the other as a Patriot; in an economics class I may have one act as Keynes and one as Friedman; in a lesson on the Korean War one would be Truman and the other MacArthur.
9. Establish a classroom routine where at the beginning of every class someone is the "leader," and they recap yesterday's class and ask members of the class content questions to review and generate discussion. Laura Evans establishes routines that get the students talking better than anyone I've ever seen.
10. If you have a website use it to provide an authentic audience for student spoken work.
11. Make an activity pyramid of options for students to respond to input and processes as they read or listen. The linked pyramid calls for written responses, but could easily be tailored.

Getting them talking about it betters the odds it moves from taught to learned.

How else can we get them talking about it?