My C.T. last year in 401/402 was a big proponent for allowing adequate time for students to think and generate their thoughts. However, as I experienced first hand this is not always a good thing. I don't want to offer up conjecture as to the Why's because I wasn't in the classroom often enough to be able to, so I will stick with the What's. Basically her students were simply not comfortable with each other. She had not created a learning environment in which her students felt safe expressing their opinions and thoughts with each other in a classroom discussion setting. As a result, the "wait time" she allowed was almost always just an awkward silence in which the student she was waiting for just got more and more anxious. This had rippling negative effects. In general, students were very hesitant to offer to verbalize and share their thoughts and opinions.
What I am trying to say, is that yes I believe that Talk Move number 5 is a very useful and important strategy in creating good/thoughtful classroom dialog. However, if the learning environment hasn't been created and formed in a way that makes students comfortable with that waiting or period of silence, it can actually have the opposite effect than intended. Instead of taking a couple seconds to formulate their abstract thoughts into a concise idea, students might be more worried about what everybody else is thinking of them as the seconds tick by and they are not responding. This is why I think that before this talk move is implemented, you must be sure that you have created an environment in which students are comfortable with this strategy, or else it might backfire.
Dean,
ReplyDeleteI like your perspective on this talk move. It is always beneficial to play the “devils advocate” to elicit other ideas that otherwise would have been missed. You back up your statement with a real life experience and I can understand why this talk move needs to be correctly implemented into the classroom for positive results.
At first I didn’t realize that this talk move could have negative effects. Creating a comfortable learning environment is vital to this move, because like you said, if the students are comfortable with each other, and they don’t trust each other, they are going to be more reluctant to talk because they are afraid of saying something wrong or embarrassing themselves in front of the classroom. From the beginning of the school year, it is so important to create a learning environment where students know it is okay to make mistakes, change their mind and feel comfortable doing that. If they don’t talk move #5 might not be effective simply because teachers might “wait” for a really long time for answers.
Knowing the dynamic of your room and your students is beneficial in deciding the best ways to implement this move.
Thanks for the great post!
~Shannon