Researcher Interaction as Teacher Talk

The intent of my participation in this research was to observe the children interacting and only intervene when requested to by the students themselves. That was the intent but as the data shows, I couldn’t help myself but be a teacher. I made a conscious effort to stay out of their discussion and space, however the data shows that I as teacher interacted with the groups.

With Team A during the first recorded session, I added my voice to their discussion.

On reviewing the session I reflected on how I interacted with Team A based on the identified special writing needs of these boys and my teacher’s view of them as learners. In observation of previous writing sessions, Adam had spent twenty minutes starring around him, five of those minutes without his book open. He spent ten minutes hunting for a pencil during which time he gave spelling help to a desk mate, went to the window and discussed the weather when heavy rain started, and asked for a sharpener and a rubber. After twenty-eight minutes, when the classroom teacher reminded them they had seven minutes left, he wrote two sentences and received feed forward when interacting with the teacher. In the last four minutes of the lesson he wrote two words, rubbed out one, wrote two, rubbed out one in a continuing pattern.

Tui, during his observation had moved to the couch with his friends and started brainstorming his ideas. When the recorder was placed next to him it recorded that he was reading aloud ideas, asking questions about his writing, giving compliments, asking for clarification of other ideas he could write down, and writing while spelling and saying the words aloud. As a group they continued telling each other what they were doing, listed things done, discussed dictionary findings, read aloud, and made comments to clarify ideas. Even with this intellectual community of writers talking about their writing, Tui spent three days adding to this brainstorm to organise his thoughts and ideas. During this time he actively sought out the teacher for feed forward.

In Team A’s first session I was instinctively forming and acting on a list of strategies I could to use to enhance their talk. This was in response to periods of silence in which neither talked, or in which one child talked to themselves while using the tool and the other starred into space. However on reviewing the tape in which only 1 of the 6 Teacher Talk interactions were initiated by myself, I reflected that my intervention stemmed from a bias based on my professional knowledge of their levels, my observations from the class and a lack of understanding about them as talkers. I removed myself from their conversations.

In the middle and last recorded sessions there were zero Teacher Talk instances. Tui asked Adam to ask the teacher how to... and he said no and showed Tui how to do it.

For Team A, in observation of their classroom experience, both spent the teacher’s modelling session looking at the floor, fiddling with clothing or objects. Neither volunteered ideas or answers in teacher-led discussion, however when asked to share with a partner they were active in discussion, finding it hard to stop when directed.

Teacher talk usually follows an initiate-respond-evaluate pattern (IRE) where as peer discussion does not. The teacher initiates the discussion, children respond and the teacher responds/comments/moves on (Bacon and Thayer-Bacon 1993, Watson and Young 1986). Teachers use “didactic” IRE talk because of its efficiency and usefulness in establishing a base of information and knowledge. When the learning environment relies almost exclusively on this it’s harmful as children stop engaging in the learning and become passive receptacles.

Here with Team A, I had continued the classroom IRE talk with my own teacher-led “didactic” interaction with them. Bacon and Thayer-Bacon (1993) put talk into three categories in their research; teacher-led discussion “didactic” talk; disruptive, distracting talk; and free-flowing, stimulating reflection “real” talk. Through my Teacher Talk interaction I was filling talk space with didactic talk rather than letting then find ways to fill it with real talk.

According to Bacon and Thayer-Bacon (1993) I was using effective and open mentoring to shift the control of the learning to the child. However the other two recorded sessions show that mentoring by the teacher was not needed to allow Team A to lead their own discussion and understand the purpose of the learning. What was needed was the scaffolding of time and space to allow them to develop their own ways to sustain talk. By leaving them alone to use the modelling session and their own experiences they were active learners who created their own ways to interact and enhance their ‘real’ talk.

Teacher Talk vs. Active Participation

In the classroom environment Adrian is an attentive listener, often using ‘fiddles’ and objects to occupy himself in IRE discussions. He is eager to share ideas, experiences and answers, often becoming impatient with having to wait and bored with the slow speed of discussions. When released from the mat he is active in discussion with others.

In observation of Dee in the classroom she has the appearance of an active listener, however she is often left staring in the direction of the teacher after the children are released from the mat, showing that she may spend the time during IRE discussion in her own creative mind. She is not a willing participant in IRE discussion, however is very active when sharing with peers.

For Team B being active participants is an important part of their personalities and learning styles. The teacher ask- children respond- teacher reacts cycle is ill adapted to their real active learning. The discourse has the teacher doing all the cognitive work of the lesson, and being the only participant actively involved in the analysing, generalising, synthesising (Watson and Young 1986, McCormack 1987, Cazden 1988). For Team B the link between the teacher’s modelling IRE talk of the writing process and their own learning talk needed to be done by the learners themselves.

During any teacher’s modelling session each child is processing the information in one common way. Their short-term memory (STM) stores incoming information and determines the value of that learning for later on. STM sorts each piece of information into the long-term memory (LTM) by associating the bits of information through: 1) rehearsal or repetition 2) associations or relations. Information not sorted into LTM is forgotten (White 1995).

Each child in my study was processing information at their own pace even though they were involved in collaborative work.

The brain is innately social and collaborative. Although the processing takes place in our students’ individual brains, their learning is enhanced when the environment provides them with the opportunity to discuss their thinking out loud, to bounce their ideas off their peers, and to produce collaborative work (Wolfe and Brand 1998, p 11).

Through removing the teacher’s IRE talk and in my case, the teacher, there was scaffold in terms of time to process the new information. My teacher role was to scaffold that processing time through letting them initiate Teacher Talk and by leaving them use talk in their own way and at their own pace.

In their first recorded session Team B initiated only one question about the tool; in the middle session, one about the timeframe; and in the last, zero Teacher Talk. There were many looks my way and comments as Organisational Talk that involved my name. At times they looked confused that I was leaving them to it and had not come over to talk to them about talk levels and behaviour. In the environment of silent writing they are not silent, they enter many different discussion groups, and as a result the classroom teacher moderates their talk and behaviour.

The video recordings are very entertaining to view as they interacted with me through it with reflections on how their session had gone. With regards to my data these comments are Personal Related Talk, however as they often were preceded with a look in my direction they appear to be directed towards me as the viewer of those videos.

As Dee started to internalise her understanding of my actions and accepted that I was not going to change my interaction with them and moderate their talk and behaviour, she looked my way less and took more of an active part in her own learning.

In the pre-interview Adrian had a negative view of himself as a writer.
“...writing I don’t like it much ... I don’t think I will be an author.”
He found it hard to think of ideas and start a piece.
“Ms (named) gave me the idea, I didn’t know what to write about. I introduced my rabbit on the first day so she said maybe you could write about your rabbit.”

After a term of modelling sessions, writing time and feed forward provided by the classroom teacher, which involved many comments involving positive self-image and ‘real’ talk in the shared teaching space, Adrian had this to say about himself as a writer. Sound bite 2.

For Adrian having the control of the amount of teacher interaction and therefore Teacher Talk, and being able to freely talk to Dee about his life, thoughts and writing, made the writing process more enjoyable for him and allowed him to access his bulk of ideas. Being able to do this with humour and laughter turned him on to the writing process.

Children have hundreds of topics to write on from their own life, it’s the nature of human beings to have experiences. As teachers it is our role to value those experiences and help children ‘get them out’. Manning (1999) talks about being a teacher with a box of ‘story starters’ for the child who had nothing to write about. She expresses strongly to teachers to throw out that box and become more active in the role of teacher in freeing the writing voices of our students.

For Adrian the freeing of his writer’s voice was a combination of a writing programme that reflected his learning style of discussion, play and supported independence, and the positive classroom environment developed by his teacher. This idea is also explored with regards to the teacher’s role in modelling humour and laughter in the writing process and Team B’s adoption of those strategies in the chapter on Personal Talk.

Teacher Talk and the Tool.

In Team C’s recorded sessions the instances of Teacher Talk were about the tool, as the computer had a tendency to crash on them. When the children came into the shared teaching space the computers were set up with their work open, so when the program crashed they initiated Teacher Talk. I had not shown them how their files were stored and therefore they lacked the knowledge, and to some extent the experience, to problem solve the issue by themselves. At each of the instances of the programme crashing I opened it up for them and didn’t talk them through the process, as a consequence each repeated crash was followed with the same Teacher Talk initiation.

My role in the program crashing was of technician, and I made that call at the time due to my intention to be a researcher not a teacher. On reflection I see the positives and negatives of that small choice. It was positive in that I maintained my role of observer and researcher rather than teacher. Negative in that by not teaching Team C the skills to manage the crashing program they were unable to problem solve and manage themselves each subsequent time.

Teacher Talk and Learning Styles

For Team B removing the teacher from their learning catered for their preferred learning style and ability to develop their own learning direction.
Team C’s preferred learning style was more teacher orientated. In class observation both girls are talkers throughout the writing process, sharing ideas, compliments, comments, feed forward and social chat. In the environment of silent writing they are not silent, they are involved in discussion throughout. They actively engage in talk when forming their intentions to write, writing and publishing. Due to their consistency in social and work behaviour the teacher leaves them to converse.

In Team C’s sessions there were many comments said louder than necessary and looks in my direction in the attempt to engage me as part of the discussion. Whether to check and see if by a silent reaction they must be on the right track, or to share their ideas with me for feedback/forward or personal acknowledgement. Many times I pretended not to hear their discussion, sometimes moving position in the room, and at other times I catered to their learning style and interacted with a smile or nod. There was no change of this over time, which leads me to reflect that their silent, visual or oral interactions with me were based on personality rather than a development or learning stage.

Teacher Talk and what it means to the classroom teacher.

I found it very ‘eye opening’ to learn from my data how I instinctively interacted with the students based on identified learning needs and observations. As a classroom teacher myself, I learnt from this that we teach a lot (IRE), and perhaps don’t allow our students time to learn. As a researcher the data shows that these children:

My research provided the space and time for the children to learn by removing the continual teaching of the classroom environment.

Each child, depending on personality, enjoyment levels, emotion, previous experiences, feelings, well-being, learning abilities, location, energy levels and many other influences on learning, will have their own level in which their brain’s ability to process information and experience stored in the STM is not optimal. For my research teams, sustained Forming Intention Talk with only child initiated Teacher Talk allowed them to “talk themselves into understanding” (Douglas Barnes’s phrase referred to in Watson and Young 1986)

The next chapter, Forming Intentions, explores the curriculum-based learning that took place when the students were given time for sustained talk and whether their discourse has them actively involved in their own learning.