Everyone can talk, but does it make sense?

Put a bunch of students together and let them have a chat and quite probably they will enjoy themselves.   They will also start to learn things.   

The trouble is they might not learn what you want them to learn, for without direction they might well move into social talk as opposed to work conversations.

Now there is nothing amiss with social talk – put a group of teachers together and they too will engage in social talk – what they did at the weekend, a programme on TV etc.  But when it comes to a meeting or a discussion which relates to specific aims and the resolving of specific issues, they are most likely to get down to business and engage in work talk.  Somehow they have learned how to do this.

In fact the vast majority of us never need help in engaging in social talk – we learn how to do it naturally.  As we grow most of us get better at reading verbal and non-verbal signals, we discover what works in conversations and what doesn’t, we learn when to smile, what joke to crack, who the leaders of the discussion are and who are the anti-heroes, and overall we find where we fit in.  There’s no academic rigour, no serious analysis, we just do it.

It is fascinating stuff, and a part of education in its broadest sense, but not normally considered to be part of formal education that happens within the school.

So things start to get more educational and more beneficial from a school (rather than social development) point of view when work conversations take place.

These are characterized by a shared and sustained focus on a key theme which is developed through the course of the debate.  What’s more each other’s thinking is questioned – and the more rigorously this happens the better.  The learning that comes out of such a debate is particularly deep, because the meanings within the discussion tend to sink into the long-term memory, and are thus available to us for years to come.

The only question is, how do we set up conversations of this type?

One particularly interesting solution comes through the use of graphic organizers.  Because they provide a shared focus for discussion, and can engage and structure the content of the dialogue as the students constantly refer themselves back to the graphic.

This helps sustain attention and allows the discussion group to focus on the main themes while encouraging the questioning of each others’ comments because the discussion is focussed on what is set out in the graphic organizer.