Teacher language
Let’s continue by considering your own language as a teacher.
Your voice is your main teaching aid. You can actually, consciously use its pitch, tone and pace to underpin the shape and changes of the lesson. Do you drop and slow your voice when moving from a lively passage to a quiet one?
As we’ve said, the lesson has its story. This is what your plan is based on. We will do A; this will enable us understand something (we’ll call it B). B will be defined in a transition and then carried forward into the next activity, C. It’s the carrying forward that counts. There is thread, not a series of separate activities. If you have a clear and simple story, you have a coherent lesson. Obviously, then, pupils are most likely to make sense of the lesson if they understand the story, too.
There’s nothing childish or twee about this idea of lesson story.
We may at times think that our Western, modernist culture has abandoned narrative, has relegated story-time to the nursery.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Culturally, we are besotted by stories. We are obsessed with television soaps and crime dramas. We perceive politics and world events in terms of stories. We make up stories about real people (‘celebrities’) to make them available to us. This last is a key thought. A famous footballer and his tuneless wife become accessible to us because of the stories which are created about them.
So the lesson story is crucial to accessibility. It lives in planning of coherent and connected activities, as we’ve said; it can also live in teacher language. I don’t mean that you should be using the phrase ‘lesson story’ with pupils (although you might: what about ‘Tell me the lesson story in three sentences’ as plenary?). A plot is a series of connected events; the lesson becomes a story when the connections are clear. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be explicit about the story from start to finish. You sketch out the whole story at the beginning. ‘We will do this, and then, having established that, we will do this other thing…’ The route map-a sketch map – is laid out before them in words, and perhaps literally, in a whiteboard diagram. And then at each key transition moment, the lesson stage is explicitly announced. ‘We are now moving into a period of quiet. We’ve had some animated discussion, but the next stage is where we need to reflect and jot some personal thoughts…’ This is more than instruction or task-setting; it’s more than the (sometimes deadly) writing of the lesson objectives on the whiteboard; it’s recurring and explicit reminder of where we are, what stages and moods we’re leaving and entering. ‘We said that we’d pause at this point to gather thoughts. That’s where we are now. We’ve reached that point…’ The lesson moment is given explicit identity and value within the overall lesson shape. Don’t just talk about the learning; talk about the lesson.
This is not the only way in which your own language generates a constructivist atmosphere. Teacher-talk is vital and is often at its best when most explicit. We’ve already talked about questioning and the need not only to plan a range of questions but to be explicit. and straightforward about your own questions. It’s good to say, ‘There’s no right answer to this question…’, or to say, ‘This question does have a right answer.’ Or you could ask the pupils: ‘Do you think my question is the kind that only has one answer?’. When pupils start discussing the language of the lesson, as well as its facts and ideas, they are involved in meta-learning. They are thinking at a high level.
But teacher-talk is more than questioning. Teachers shouldn’t talk for too long, of course; but they shouldn’t be afraid of teaching. They should be authoritative in subject knowledge as well as learning management. How are you explaining things to pupils?
Differentiation (see Chapter 6) can be achieved by teacher language. When you know what your key moments are – the golden moments of explicit explanation, the confirmation of ideas, the rich transition content – how are you using language to present a range of access to your thoughts? You can plan two or three ways of describing these key points, but can we be more systematic than that? For example, are you using figurative language?
Figurative language is imagery – similes, metaphors. Please keep reading; this isn’t a section for English teachers. A simile is a comparison, and poets and politicians – who are, like teachers, professional communicators – love them because they make accessible the inaccessible. That is precisely what teaching does. So here is a language technique which is designed to do exactly what teachers need.