[MUSIC] "Asking or telling?" In your classroom, who speaks? Or at least, who speaks most of the time? Who listens? Or, are your learners listening all the time? Perhaps the question I want to pose today is, what is the balance of your talking and your learners listening? Is there a magical balance that we should work for? And so, through this session we're going to be talking about listening and talking. Now, research in England has shown the ratio of teacher talk to student talk is something like 80 to 20%, and in most of those cases in the research, teachers have underestimated how much they've actually spoken too. So, they had a sense that they were speaking far less than they were actually while teaching it. What is the ration in your class, is it 80 to 20? Is it 50/50? Or, is it just 100% that you talk? What is the ratio? What does your classroom look like? Is it like a basketball game, where there's conversation flowing from one person to the other? Is it constant idea sharing: people talking about experiences, bringing in new intellegences and knowledges into the classroom? Or, is it like a ping pong game? Where it's question, answer, question, answer, question, answer, that can just become very, very tiring as well. What is your classroom like? Is it the basketball or is it a ping pong game? Or, should I be asking, which would you prefer your classroom to be? A basketball game or a ping pong game? I want to talk briefly about the nature of talk. Now, when a teacher introduces a new topic or a new lesson or a new section, she may introduce it through an exposition, or she may tell the learners some information about that topic. So, if the topic was on rivers in South Africa, she may tell the students about the largest river in South Africa, she may tell them about the smallest river, or what happens when rivers have no water. Or she could start off with, "How many of you in this class have seen a river? Or been to a river? Or have been a boat on a river?" And get the learners to suggest some experience and some stories that can come into the class, to get some excitement, to get some hands up in the room. Of course, the teacher could build on that. The teacher would then move onto explanations, and deepen the discussion and the conversation. And she could use very open questions, like "How many of you have been at a riverside?" or she can ask the question, "Are there many trees on the sides of rivers? Yes or no?" And that would be a very closed question. And she can qualify that by asking, "Tell me more about that", which will move back to an open question. Of course, the word of confirmation is very useful when asking questions because sometimes, the teacher could ask a question and learners could give a number of answers that may not necessarily be correct. So, if the teacher asked "How many of you have seen a zebra?", in some of the classes, "Yes, I have seen a zebra, it has spots." And the teacher could say, "Well thank you for the answer, but I'm wondering would a zebra have spots? How many of you would agree with that?" And so again, rather than a ping-pong, you can have a kind of basketball game in the class, where there are more conversations coming in, with multiple students in the class being able to answer and to respond and to participate. Because that's the kind of classroom where learning is social, learners are getting motivated to contribute and to learn, and that's the classroom we want to work from, rather than the teacher just standing up at the front and just talking. Now, I want to bring us back to the learning pyramid that I introduced to you a couple of sessions ago. And in the learning pyramid you would see that right at the bottom: 90% of learning took place when the learning was far more inclusive; when far more learners participated; when the learning was more experienced-based and individualistic; when learners could speak from their own experience, from their own context - and that would be really useful. And as you move to the top of the pyramid, where just 5% of learning takes place, is just where the teacher is talking. Now, listening - Paulo Freire, the Brazilian pedagog, spoke about listening being a revolutionary act. And it is a revolutionary act, because it is so easy to pronounce and to speak things, but it's so difficult to listen. Also, as teachers we feel we need to have something to say about everything. Sometimes it might just be important to press the pause button and just listen. And the 3 kinds of listening that I want to talk about is "Hearing what is said without attempting to, or having the time to, really to understand what the speaker is saying." So, you're really not interested, you're just hearing at that very superficial level. And then there's "Listening carefully to what is being said, and making an effort to convey that his or her viewpoint has been attended to." But there's a deeper listening. It's deep empathic listening. "To go beyond merely hearing and paying attention, to enter into the speaker's shoes, to grasp it from their standpoint and what it means to him or her." If you can get sense of their experience, the tone, the conversation, the feeling of what the speaker is saying. Now, here we're going to give a score to content, meaning and feeling and how we listen. Let's look at score 1. He or she understood the content of what I was saying. Score 2 would be he or she understood the content and feeling, that lay behind what I was saying - the person grasped the context, the content. But look at score 3: how wonderful this would be if he or she understood the content, the feeling that lay behind what I was saying, Now I want to, but most importantly, what that means to me. Now I want to, very quickly, go over a couple of situations in the classroom with a teacher. And one of those is "Withitness". And "Withitness" is about the teacher who has a good sense of the classroom, has a good understanding of what to anticipate, what are the possibilities that may exist in that class, with a strong sense of awareness in that classroom. "Overlapping" is the kind of teacher who is able to read a poem, as you're walking around the room, able to adjust somebody's tie, remove somebody's comic book who's reading it on their lap slyly and should be paying attention, but at the same time, directing or intervening in a little scuffle that's going on in the corner at the same time. That is the teacher who is paying attention to all the dynamics in the room, and having a good sense of what is going on. Of course, "The Ripple Effect" is an example of requiring an early intervention if something is just blurted out or said. Let me give you an example. What if somebody made a very sexist remark in the class, in the middle of a very deep discussion on talking about rivers? What are some of the ways that could take the class discussion in a completely different direction and move away from this deep discussion about rivers and what the teacher needed to say? How does a teacher then bring a positive rapport to what could actaully be a very difficult situation? I remember having a very similar situation where somebody did make a very sexist comment in my class. And before that could have some effect, before people could respond very angrily to this, I asked that learner, "I wonder if you'd be able to help me understand where you first learned this, or why you would say that." And of course, when he had sensed the context of the class and the situation of the class, he was able to very quickly address the point, and we could put that issue aside, and then move on to our discussion on the topic that needed to be. Of course, sometimes it doesn't necessarily have to take that way, because sometimes a deeper discussion will need to happen to address the sexism in the class and to pay attention to those issues as well. "Momentum" is maintaining the flow and being prepared for the unexpected. It's related to managing transitions smoothly, with its coherence to the lessons, and that, with the low points of the lesson transitions are made to where the outcomes of the lesson are being achieved, but also that the learning process is enjoyable and good. Now, "Effective Transition" happens by moving from one activity to another without disruptions. And you can create those transitions using a number of tools and skills: open-ended questions, closed-ended questions, maybe bringing it back to a story or a narrative, or maybe even concluding with a drama that might just bring the whole lesson to a close. "Satiation" is knowing when there is an overload of information, and when enough is enough, and stopping is the right thing to do. And that's when you have to bring it to a close, bring the conversation to closure and then redirect - "This way, let's move our discussion into this direction." [MUSIC]
