Turn and Talk and the Craft of Teaching
How you help students learn is a craft, not an art.
Simple, repeatable actions, lead to stunning progress. The actions for English teachers, heads of English and their line managers are spelled out in my book, The Full English.
It is very easy to see teaching as an art or craft - to lump these two together. But an art requires talent, a touch of brilliance, inspiration. A craft requires simply the right kind of practice. We can be taken in by teaching’s complexity, and reject the idea that there are easy fixes. We might argue craft takes time, practice and more practice.
It does. But how much time; how much practice?
In Dickens’ day, an apprenticeship lasted 7 years. The word ‘masterpiece’ did not come from the work produced by master craftsmen. Instead it was the name of the final work produced by the apprentice, for the master, to prove their level of skill. We tend to believe we have to be master teachers.
I disagree.
Like modern day apprentices, no one wants to wait for 7 years. Indeed, the 7 year rule was scrapped because parliament recognised it was just a way to exploit workers for low pay, long after they were ready.
We do the same in schools. We bombard teachers with CPD and blogs and overthinking. We find ways of not practicing the right things to improve their craft. We keep teachers as apprentices, when we could train them to produce the ‘masterpiece’. With teaching, like a Victorian apprentice, you don’t need to be a master to have great results.
Instead, there are a manageable range of techniques which are easy to acquire, practise and perfect - certainly in the first 3 years of teaching.
Turn and talk is one such method which I’ll use to illustrate what I mean about all the techniques.
Turn and Talk
This is why you should use turn and talk.
Students wake up - literally and figuratively - when they are given the chance to prove they know something to a partner, or try to articulate what they think and understand.
Students and the teacher can quickly listen for misconceptions.
Brains pay attention when they register a mistake - students try to correct it, whether they want to or not.
Students can identify each other’s misconceptions.
50% of what students teach each other is right (which means that if you don’t turn and talk they’ll keep believing what is wrong).
Cold call works perfectly once students have considered what they think - no one can say ‘I don’t know’ or panic.
Cold call also allows you to catch the 50% of thinking which is wrong, as it doubles your sample size - each question goes to a pair.
Turn and talk is a retrieval event, which builds long term memory.
It allows you to build the 80% success rate that Rosenshine tells us is the sweet-spot for learning and motivation.
How to Run Turn and Talk
Chunk your lesson by asking questions which tests understanding.
Keep your time limits short - 30 seconds is plenty. If it is a really meaty conversation, allow 60 seconds. (I’m not joking about this).
If you want to discuss multiple ideas - who is most responsible for the death of Eva Smith, for example - don’t. Break it up into each character at a time. Do the same with any concepts in your subject. Your final question can decide on which is most responsible.
The goal of turn and talk is not to build to this form of discussion - your bread and butter will be questions which build understanding:
Why do Birling’s words about looking “after himself and his family” summon the Inspector?
Why does Mrs Birling think that Gerald is “clever” to bring out the engagement ring?
Why did Priestley pick his victim to be Eva Smith, rather than John Smith?
Why does Gerald give Eva alcohol before he lets her eat?
What is a comma splice?
Is this use of the colon correct: or incorrect, and why?
How many lessons would you need to run this before you became good at it - asking the right questions, keeping the short time limits, diagnosing the misconceptions. 20, 30, 100?
Call it 100. At 20 lessons a week that is just 4 weeks. In your first 3 years you would still be perfecting it for a further 97 weeks.
That’s what I mean. How many such techniques would you need to be good at before your teaching is excellent?
Probably 15. With the right techniques you can devote 100 lessons to each of them - that would make you an excellent teacher in your first 3 years.
The trick is finding the best techniques. To do that, be specific. For example:
You can’t train to be good at questioning, and asking different kinds of questions. Questioning can be interpreted differently by every teacher and is plagued by nuance not just about the types of questions, but how you should ask them, in what order, in what depth, to which child etc. Because it is nuanced we would all justify different answer to each of these.
Instead, if you train Turn and Talk, Retrieval Practice, Show Call, and Cold Call, you will deliver 80% of the questioning you need. These all mean something - and you can easily see whether you are developing the skill or not. Little nuance - you can make quick and reliable judgements for yourself.
The remaining 20% is an art. How you build relationships, build passion for your subject, reach the hard to reach, help students discover their curiosity or an unexpected talent - the parts of your job which drive your emotions and those of your students - those can only be built by experience, not practice.
Not so the craft. You can choose to be great at that now.