Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021
Technique 43: Turn and talk
Building ratio through discussion
Stephen Covey observed more than thirty years ago that “most people do not listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply.”1 This observation has perhaps never been truer than today, when we risk running classrooms that echo the increasingly dominant and counterproductive forms of discussion evidenced on social media—one side blasting a point of view they are sure cannot be wrong or even nuanced at the opposite side, who are busy preparing an equally righteous return salvo. The goal of being proven right in a discussion is very different from the goal of learning from it. Without careful listening, a clear shared purpose, and a sense that discussion is supposed to add to our collective and individual understanding, we're not really getting what we should out of it. Perhaps without those things we're not even discussing at all.
It is at least worth asking whether our classrooms might unintentionally be contributing to the larger social trend of discourse characterized by an excess of righteous pronouncements and far less listening or seeking nuance. Do we teach our students to listen well? That a question can be more powerful than a pronouncement? To assume their first impression might be wrong, and just maybe to believe they have succeeded if and when they changed their thinking? Wisdom, mostly, is realizing how little you know. How much talking there is and how avidly it’s offered is often the criteria by which we measure our discussions. Talking, after all, is easy to see and measure. But we might be better served by socializing students to listen and proceed with a mindset that says, “I probably have a lot to learn from others.” It would be harder but perhaps more valuable to measure our discussions based on listening as much as talking.
Effective discussions in the classroom are rare. Many people might say this is because it's hard to get students to talk. In fact, what teachers tell students they want them to do during discussion is almost always to talk more. Students are graded on their participation and that usually means how often they talk, and perhaps with bonus points for strength of opinion. A good discussion, in this paradigm, is lots of students talking, and a great one is lots of students talking and expressing opinions strongly and confidently. Colby argues forcefully and repeatedly about the Kansas-Nebraska Act and we are happy. Look at him fighting for his ideas!2 He knows what he believes and won't be swayed!
To talk a lot is to succeed. To talk louder, to be more ardent in one's opinions and beliefs, is to succeed more.
But talking only improves student thinking if it is part of an exchange and if people are listening to one another—ideally with open minds inclined to consider and potentially change initial reactions and opinions. A true discussion requires students to listen well and respond after careful consideration. Perhaps the idea that Colby is sure of what he believes and won't be swayed is not an entirely good thing.
Further, for a discussion to be effective, the purpose must be more than to prove that you are right and others are wrong. The name for that is a debate. In the classroom, the goal should be to learn from rather than win the discussion—to inform rather than confirm what you thought you knew. All participants then are working to ultimately answer the question: what have I or we learned from this process?
In this chapter I am going to talk about talking but I am going to try to talk at least as much about listening. While we should encourage speaking, it's the listening—and maybe ideally the speaking in conjunction with careful listening—that's most valuable in our discussions.
A clear mental model is a good starting point. Something other than “talk more and talk louder” should shape our purpose. If we aren't clear on how discussion is different from students merely talking, students talking may be all we get.3
In this chapter I discuss tools for building more productive discussions. I'll begin with Turn and Talk, a procedure for pair discussions. One benefit of a classroom where pair conversations are excellent is that those conversations can support and improve many of the habits that support larger whole-group discussions. Second, I'll talk about Habits of Discussion, which describes how to build productive habits to foster collaboration and cohesiveness in discussions. I'll then discuss Batch Processing: letting students speak after and respond to one another often in short sequences. I'll close with Disciplined Discussion, which suggests that helping people stay on topic and follow a thread is an overlooked skill. We tend to valorize “outside the box” ideas but “inside the box” comments are often far more valuable.
Technique 43: Turn and talk
Turn and Talk—a short, contained pair discussion—is a common teaching tool used in thousands of classrooms and it offers a lot of benefits. Among others:
· It boosts Participation Ratio. You say “Why is Scout afraid? Turn and Talk to your partner for thirty seconds. Go!” and suddenly fifteen voices are going at once instead of just one. In a short time you've allowed almost everyone the chance to share an answer.
· It can increase reluctant students' willingness to speak in larger settings. A student rehearses an idea she might not offer in front of thirty people, and finds it comes out well or earns admiration from her partner. She becomes more willing to share her idea with the whole group.
· It's a great response when the class appears stuck. You ask a question, get only a smattering of hands or perhaps none at all, and respond: “Hmmm. No one seems quite sure. Turn and Talk with your partner for thirty seconds. See if you can come up with some ideas. Go!” Suddenly you have a workaround for explaining the answer.
· It can allow you to listen in on conversations and choose valuable comments to start discussion with, as in, “Maria, would you mind sharing what you and Justine talked about?”
But there are challenges to go with the benefits. Because it can result in fifteen people talking at once does not mean it will, and a disengaged Turn and Talk where there's little turning and even less talking is a culture killer. And there are a variety of accountability challenges:
· Conversations may wander off the assigned topic and may never even address the topic at all. (It is, after all, exciting to have the chance to chat with your friend in the middle of class.)
· There is the risk that students in a Turn and Talk listen poorly—that their partner is merely a target for their own words and not a source of insight.
· Even if everyone is on topic and listening their hardest, erroneous information could still spread. Billy Knowsforsure tells Tammy Tendstobelieve that to take the square root of something means to divide it by two; she nods, begins committing it to memory, and you never know it. Education researcher Graham Nuthall, carefully observing students during lessons,4 found that students frequently persuaded their classmates that erroneous information was true. The most credulous were likely to be those with the weakest knowledge on a topic.
So used frequently does not always imply used well. The details of execution are critical. BreOnna Tindall's execution of her Turn and Talk in the video BreOnna Tindall: Keystone provides a road map. Students have read a short passage about the idea of “blind justice” and have been asked to discuss whether the idea of justice being blind is supposed to be a positive or a negative symbol. BreOnna gives a direction: “One minute to Turn and Talk. Share out your response with your face partner. Go!” Suddenly, the room crackles to life.
Her success starts with the directions. They are crisp and clear, without an extraneous word, economy of language exemplified. The speed and energy of the transition capped off by the cue to action “Go!” means that everyone starts at exactly the same time. No one has time or incentive to glance around and see if their peers are really doing it. In these ways her directions exemplify technique 28, Brighten the Lines.
Of course it's critical that Turn and Talk is a familiar procedure. BreOnna has taught her students how to do Turn and Talk well and they've practiced it. You can see their familiarity with it in the video. They know who their partner is without having to ask; they start their conversations comfortably and naturally; they speak at the appropriate volume. And perhaps most of all, the practice has taught them that since everyone is going to join in the Turn and Talk with energy and enthusiasm, they can safely do the same. This lack of hesitation is one of the main reasons why just seconds after the prompt, the room crackles to life.
Interestingly, it's not just one procedure. As the phrase “Turn and Talk with your face partner” implies, there are face partners and also shoulder partners. BreOnna can keep things fresh by shifting which partner students talk to. Her room layout is designed around Turn and Talk!
And don't overlook her phrase “share out your response” as it implies something important. Of course, they have plenty to say. Students have written first and are sharing what they wrote. As with whole group discussions, writing first means a more substantive and inclusive partner discussion (see technique 40, Front the Writing). As we will see, Turn and Talk works best when designed for synergy with what happens before and after.
Finally, BreOna tells her students they will have (just) one minute to talk. This helps them gauge the appropriate length of their comments. And, ironically, keeping the Turn and Talk short maximizes its value. It's a preliminary to the larger class discussion, so BreOnna wants students to have more to say, still, when it's over. She doesn't want them to say everything yet.
You can see many of the same themes in the video Sarah Wright: Keystone. First, Sarah asks a question: “Imagine you are Tio Luis [in Pam Muñoz-Ryan's novel Esperanza Rising], what would you say?” This is a reiteration of a question they have already responded to in writing, and now they get to share their brilliance. There are hands in the air. Lots. Students are eager to talk so this might seem like a surprising moment to choose a Turn and Talk. One of its best uses, I noted earlier, is to help build engagement when students are hesitant. But here it's useful for the opposite reason. When you have lots of eager hands, Turn and Talk can be a great way to let everyone get to talk and to minimize the I had a great answer and didn't get to share it frustration.
Like in BreOnna's classroom, Sarah's directions are crisp and clear with no extra words. They end in a consistent in-cue—the same as Breonna's, “Go!”—and again the room crackles to life. You can then see Sarah circulating, listening to answers, sharing her appreciation, and also perhaps deciding whom to call on.
But again, not every Turn and Talk looks like these. How does a teacher build this level of energy and productivity?
The first step is ensuring that students feel responsible for doing the task in front of them to the best of their ability. Once you've done that, you can begin to design the activity for maximum rigor. This “all in” attitude is achieved mostly through intentional habit-building. In the videos, neither BreOnna nor Sarah tells their students, “Be attentive; be active; do your best, and talk about the topic at hand.” Those things are understood. Students do them automatically, which means they are carefully taught and reinforced until they become routine.
Build the Routine
A Turn and Talk is a recurring classroom procedure; a common means for students to engage ideas. The more frequently something recurs in the classroom, the more important to make it a routine—to map the steps of the procedure, then rehearse and repeat it until it happens smoothly and with almost no drain on working memory. You can read more in Chapter Ten about installing routines but some specific aspects of the Turn and Talk routine deserve specific comment.
“My Turn and Talks actually used to be pretty ineffective,” BreOnna shared. “[Students] would not talk—or they would talk about something else.” Now, though, she builds in “an extensive rollout where I explain ’this is what I'm expecting [active on-topic conversations; asking questions of each other], this is the type of language I want to hear [academic vocabulary]. I want to see these actions [nodding; facing each other; showing your partner you're listening].’ It could seem a little Type A but I honestly think kids just don't know how to have an academic conversation in a way that brings out the best in their partner. I try to make sure they have all the tools before they need them.”
Who partners with whom should be set in advance so that conversations can begin without further action or discussion, as they do in BreOnna’s and Sarah's classes. Generally, partners should be pairs who are sitting side by side and should commonly remain partners for the duration of a lesson—although, as I noted, BreOnna's students have two potential partner pairings: a shoulder partner and a face partner. In Sarah's class, there is just one partner but in both cases, that partner is clearly established before class begins.
The value is not just in the fact that when students are chatting with a partner within two seconds, they're using time efficiently. It's that a fast and familiar transition preserves continuity of thinking. Whatever was on their mind as they were writing remains in their working memory as they enter the Turn and Talk. Five or ten seconds spent looking for a partner or scanning the room to see if everybody is doing the Turn and Talk is more than enough to remove a key thought from working memory.
In other words, for the sake of the thinking, the transition needs to be smooth, precise, and almost invisibly efficient.
The In-Cue
Watch the students during the Turn and Talks in the video Christine Torres: Keystone. The first one starts with Christine asking: “How does the image show implore? Fifteen seconds with your teammate. Go!”
A few minutes later she asks: “What caustic remark might the judge have made? Fifteen seconds to Turn and Talk. Go.”
In each case the cue is short, crisp, and sharp and the response is decisive momentum-building energy—enthusiasm might be a better word—from the class.
Think high school students won't do that? Watch Denarius Frazier's students at the beginning of the video Denarius Frazier: Keystone: “Tell your neighbor what you want to remember every time we're doing synthetic division.” Or Sadie McCleary's at the beginning of her Keystone: “With your partner: What happens as you increase temperature to the pressure of a gas and why, based on particle motion? Go!”
There's not an ounce of reluctance or cynicism in sight. Students in these videos are showing us that they perceive and react to classroom norms. If students look around the room and see hesitation, if they don't see others turning and talking right away, they won't perceive the activity to be the norm. Some students won't do it and those who do will be likely to feign as much participation as is required but to seek to do the bare minimum.
But if students perceive in the first fractions of a second that universal positive engagement is the norm, or if they assume—as they anticipate the Turn and Talk coming—that everyone will naturally participate with interest and enthusiasm, then you get the kind of crackling energy you see in Christine’s, BreOnna’s, Sarah’s, Denarius’s, and Sadie's classrooms.
It's critical that Turn and Talk become a familiar and well-rehearsed procedure, in other words, and it's critical that it be launched with an in-cue that is both a direction—here is what to do—and signal to start and so should be short, crisp, and clear. You need just enough words to clarify the question and the task; beyond that, keeping the in-cue short and punchy creates energy.
It's no coincidence then that the in-cues we see are so similar.
The recipe is Frame. Name. [Time]. Go! in almost every case. Teachers frame the question clearly, then identify that the task is a Turn and Talk, and then (sometimes) set a time context. Then they give a consistent signal to start. That the signal is so often “Go!” is no surprise, given the goal of building an immediately visible norm of positive engagement.
It's worth lingering for a moment on the first step, framing the question. Once a strong procedure has been installed (see techniques 49 and 50 in particular for guidance on this critical step), the framing is the trickiest part. It's very hard to jump into a discussion with energy and verve if you're not clear on the question or what it means. And this means, for teachers, the question for discussion should be carefully phrased and quite possibly drafted in advance. Sometimes you will use one reactively in the moment—“Hmm. We're a little divided on the answer. Turn and discuss with your partner…”—but for the most part teachers like the ones we've watched have likely drafted their Turn and Talks in their notes. You can see an example of how Christine prepares this part of her lesson in Chapter Two.
It's worth noting, too, that there might be cases in which you'd want to vary your cadence, tone, and inflection when framing a question. For example, if I thought the question was especially challenging and thoughtful and wanted students to think carefully as or before they began to Turn and Talk, I might give my directions with a slower cadence and a reflective tone. I watched Rue Ratray (then of Edward Brooke Charter School in Boston) do this masterfully in one of his lessons recently. Students were reading an interview with Lois Lowry about her novel The Giver, and came upon a sentence that required close reading. “I agree with Nijah,” Rue said. “We do need to break down the phrase ’Rejecting the authority and wisdom of the governing body.’ What does that mean?” he asked. He spoke slowly and tilted his head slightly in apparent befuddlement. He paused for a few seconds to let the question sink in. Then: “Turn and Talk to your partner. Go!”
As he said this the class came to life. The phrase Rue used, “Turn and Talk to your partner. Go!” was central to this success. It was familiar because he'd been using it steadily for weeks as he dispatched them to Turn and Talks. But here he combined it with a bit of Wait Time beforehand … four or five seconds to begin reflecting before they spoke. Denarius Frazier, too, uses a long stretch of Wait Time before his crisp cue to Turn and Talk at the beginning of his Keystone to set a cerebral and reflective tone.
If the transition into Turn and Talk is crisp and the routine familiar, you can cue up a Turn and Talk on the spur of the moment. Notice how the Turn and Talk unfolds in the video Alonte Johnson: Mother's Courage during Alonte's lesson on on Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem “The Courage That My Mother Had.” Alonte's Turn and Talk is unplanned—a reaction to the small number of hands he sees when he asks his question. He thinks—Ah! They're reticent. I'll let them talk it out to build their ideas and their confidence. He even shares that intention with them at the end: “Glad to see so many more hands.…” Only when the routine is seamless and clear can you drop it in impromptu like this. But if you can it's an ideal tool for responding to crickets.
Managing Turns and Listening Behaviors
A quick, consistent Turn and Talk in-cue helps foster energetic discussion among all students. But to return to one of the themes of this chapter, the value of the discussion that comes after relies as much on the quality of the listening as it does on the quality of the talking, so it's worth taking a moment to consider some of the ways teachers can build and reinforce listening behaviors during Turn and Talk.
One of my favorites is the occasional use of managed turns—intentionally cuing one partner or the other to start first. This is valuable because we can make two important assumptions about most Turn and Talks. First, the talking within them won't be split evenly. Sometimes the first person to talk will talk through the whole Turn and Talk. This can be for legitimate reasons—the Turn and Talk is short, and it takes a while to make a point, or they're caught up in an idea. Second, we can assume that some students are more inclined to talk than others. They are likely to interpret the phrase “Turn and Talk to your partner, go!” as a cue to start talking themselves. Others are more reserved by nature. They are likely to interpret the phrase “Turn and Talk to your partner, go!” as a cue to glance at their partner and encourage them to start talking. Not always, of course, but there are tendencies, stronger or weaker, among specific students. If we pair them neutrally, those who tend to talk more will talk more—when perhaps it would be more beneficial for them to practice listening—and those who are quieter will be more inclined to listen—when perhaps it would be good for them to talk a little more.
Eric Snider of Achievement First Bushwick Middle School used the idea of managed turns to address that in a recent lesson. His class was reading Ray Bradbury. During a tense scene, Eric looked at his students. “What is David, the son, feeling worried about?” Pausing briefly, he added, “Long hair to short hair.” That phrase was their prompt to Turn and Talk. It meant that the member of each pair with longer hair would start the conversation. Other times when Eric used the in-cue, he would say, “Short hair to long hair,”5 to reverse whose turn came first and ensure balance in participation. Other times, of course, he would not specify who began and would leave it to students instead. The idea is to occasionally increase voice equity by balancing the talking and listening roles.
A related tool that can balance voice equity during Turn and Talks is to insert an intentional switch point. For instance, “We're halfway through your ninety seconds. Please be sure switch partners if you haven't already.”
Another useful tool for socializing listening in Turn and Talks is to ask students to refer to their partner's idea when calling on them afterwards, as in: “Rodrigo, what did you and Kelsey talk about?” Or, after Rodrigo says, “I think the reaction is going to give off heat energy,” asking, “Did Kelsey agree?” Or, on occasions when students spontaneously mention their partners’ thinking—“We weren't sure but Kelsey thought it would be exothermic”—saying “Thank you for referencing your partner's ideas.”
You could also be more meta: “I'd love to hear from some class members whose partner shared a particularly useful example during the Turn and Talk.” Or “I'd like to start with someone whose partner said something surprising.” Letting students know that we notice and care when they show they value their partner's contributions is one way to get them to do more of it.
“In questioning after a Turn and Talk, I ask about the conversations,” Bill Wilkinson, deputy head of science at Beechen Cliff School, in Bath, England, noted. He suggests asking such questions as: (1) Which pairs disagreed on the answer at first? (2) Which pairs agreed by the end? (3) Which of you changed your mind? Tell us why. (4) Don't tell me what you thought, tell me what your partner thought.
The Accountability Challenge
Here are some tools that can help to ensure that your Turn and Talks are accountable and focused—that is, that students feel gentle pressure to do their best work and stay on task.
Use Cold Call (technique 34) to set the expectation that everyone should be ready to talk about some insight he or she gleaned after the Turn and Talk is complete. Have a positive tone and make sure you sound genuinely interested: Magalie, tell us a bit about what you and Donald spoke about… If this is relatively predictable, students will know they have to be ready to summarize their conversation. You can often make this likelihood of a Cold Call more transparent by letting students know beforehand that it's likely to occur: “One minute to discuss the imagery you noticed with your partner. I may Cold Call a few of you to share, so be ready with what you and your partner discussed. Go!”
Circulating during the Turn and Talk and listening in on conversations gives you a double bonus—it allows you to show appreciation for and interest in good work and tacitly ensure students are focused and productive. You can see in the following pictures of Christine Torres, Sarah Wright, and BreOnna Tindall how they use body language and posture to show their interest in what they hear students say as they circulate. In some cases they are actually responding verbally. In others they are merely listening and showing how much they appreciate top effort.
Turn and Task. You can also turn your Turn and Talk into a Turn and Task. You can see a great example of this in the video Gabby Woolf: Keystone. After a round of FASE Reading (technique 24) with her class, Gabby assigns students to read the next section of text to one another in pairs. It's partner work but the work they do together is something other than discussion. That might mean saying: “With your partner, come up with a list of three words to describe the setting,” or “With your partner, write a hypothesis describing the results you think you might see from the experiment.” “With your partner, solve problem 4. I'll Cold Call some of you to hear your answers. Go!” Having a clear deliverable emphasizes accountability a bit more because the task is clearer. If it's a written task, it serves this purpose even better: you can observe the writing as you circulate. You can ask students to “share what you wrote.” You can even collect the work to review it later.
One small lesson for teachers from the year 2020 and online instruction comes from doing Turn and Talks online via breakout rooms. The most common reason why pairs are off task in an online breakout room is that students can't remember or are not clear on the question! So making sure that the question is absolutely clear—and possibly even written down somewhere if the Turn and Talk is more than a minute in length—can help remind people of what they are supposed to be discussing.6
A final note on accountability and focus. Students engage fully in Turn and Talks in large part because it is their habit to do so. We want to avoid letting them get into the habit of sitting looking at each other during a Turn and Talk because they have little to say. In fact we want to avoid their even having that experience. We want them to assume the conversation will be active and useful. One reason why students might have experiences with disengaged and passive Turn and Talks is because otherwise productive Turn and Talks went on too long and resulted in awkward moments when they and their partners were all talked out. That's my first topic in the next section, but it's worth noting that keeping Turn and Talks short also plays a role in keeping students engaged.
Design and Sequence for Rigor
Recently I watched a lesson from a middle school science class. The topic of the lesson was friction. The class had read an article on how friction might affect the movements of a basketball during a game, and the teacher asked his students to Turn and Talk to discuss what they'd learned. The teacher's in-cue was crisp, and he had established a culture of positive accountability, so students buzzed into action, sharing their energy, their excitement, and, as it turned out afterwards, a great deal of misinformation.
When the teacher asked students to share the ideas they'd discussed in pairs, the first three out of four shared ideas that misapplied or misunderstood how friction worked. Almost everyone, the data was telling him, had shared and believed misreadings about the article. Suddenly, he had some mopping up to do.
There are times, this story reminds us, when even with efficient and accountable systems, Turn and Talks can be dominated by the spread of low-quality ideas—or erroneous ones. In the class I watched, the teacher stumbled on this fact through the good fortune of hearing answers that revealed the problems, and the wise decision to process the Turn and Talk through a broader, teacher-led discussion afterwards. But let's pause here to consider all of the Turn and Talks where misinformation has blithely and earnestly been spread among participating students who did not know that what they were hearing (or saying and driving into memory) was dead wrong, all without the teacher being aware of it. As Graham Nuthall points out in The Hidden Lives of Learners, peer-generated misinformation can be profoundly influential on student thinking.
A Turn and Talk by itself is a great tool for boosting Participation Ratio, then. It multiplies voices and gets everyone going by giving them a low-stakes way to share ideas, rehearse a larger thought, develop their first impression, or hear an alternative reaction, all in semi-private, where saying, “Whoops, actually that was a really bad idea!” is fine. But Turn and Talk can also involve students sharing ideas that need development and clarification. It can involve the spreading of misinformation and confirmation bias. It can generate thinking that requires more reflection and direction.
Perhaps the most useful way to think about Turn and Talk is as a rehearsal for some other activity: a whole-class discussion, a written synthesis, a charting and comparison of ideas generated. The Turn and Talk's purpose is generative—let's get a lot of ideas going, figure out what makes sense, and why. After a Turn and Talk, the ideas that were generated get analyzed, studied, clarified, and confirmed—maybe even edited, revised, and prioritized—in a public way, so that students see what was good, what was better, and possibly what was wrong.
Here, then, are three key “after” activities to make sure that Turn and Talk brings rigor and high standards to your classroom.
Whole-Class Analysis
Teach students that the first idea is not always the best idea, that developing a strong answer often requires going back through your initial thoughts and considering them in light of further criteria or analysis. This might sound like “Let's look at some of the ideas we came up with and see which ones make the most sense,” or “Let's try to use what we know about friction to test a few of our ideas and see if they were accurate.” Or you could try something like “Let's put a couple of these on the board and list the evidence that seems to support (or not support) some of our ideas.”
Whole-Class Discussion
Use Turn and Talk as the starting point for a deeper whole-class discussion that builds on and stretches students' initial thinking. This might sound like “Let's build on the thinking we've started,” possibly with a coda, like “As we talk, feel free to add to what you already wrote down.” Or you might try “Now let's try to put our ideas together to come up with a few ’best’ examples.” Or, finally, you could just acknowledge that the initial Turn and Talk was a warm-up: “Now that we've started to discuss some ideas, let's take a look at the sentence together and see if we can make sense of what it means.”
Whole-Class Note-Taking
Follow up the Turn and Talk by processing those initial thoughts—by having students share, improve, and prioritize the contents of their collective “pair” discussions. The expectation here is that they take what they talked about in their Turn and Talk, develop it by listening and comparing to what others took from the discussion, and track a wide array of thoughts on the topic, not just their own. This might sound like “Add two sentences to the bullets on page three” or “Now let's look at the passage and circle all the evidence we found as a group. Make sure to take notes on your sheet so you've got all of our class's ideas in your notes.”
What Comes First?
Another way to build more Think Ratio into your Turn and Talk is to add an activity before it occurs that boosts ratio.
Letting students write first is the most obvious. We can see the effects of this in BreOnna Tindall's classroom. What students are discussing in pairs is not their spur-of-the-moment reaction but something they've been wrestling into words for several minutes. The Think Ratio is higher. As I discuss in the chapter on writing for ratio, writing first helps any discussion—even a pair conversation. It adds rigor and allows people to listen better.
Think time prior to a Turn and Talk can also help. It’s simple and fast and provides some of the benefit you get from allowing students to write first. That's what Rue Ratray was doing when he posed his question to his students about The Giver—“We do need to break down the phrase ’Rejecting the authority and wisdom of the governing body.’ What does that mean?” As you'll recall he paused for four or five seconds before sending students to a Turn and Talk. Letting them reflect and generate initial ideas. You could easily stretch out this think time and make it more transparent
· T: “We do need to break down the phrase ’Rejecting the authority and wisdom of the governing body.’ What does that mean? Take ten seconds to think about what that phrase means before I let you talk to a partner about it. [Ten seconds elapses] OK. Share your thoughts with your partner. Go!”
Or
· T: “We do need to break down the phrase ’Rejecting the authority and wisdom of the governing body.’ What does that mean? Take fifteen seconds to jot down some ideas. What does that phrase mean? Then I’ll let you talk to a partner about it. [Fifteen seconds elapses] OK. Share your thoughts with your partner. Go!”
In these two examples, you would make the Turn and Talk even better by making sure the question was jotted on the whiteboard or student packet, and thus helping students to remember the question once the conversation actually begins.
Inserting a Turn and Talk when you're stuck can also be a useful tool. Here you're not so much planning a preliminary activity as spotting a place where the Think Ratio is high and some more active thinking would help. That's what Alonte Johnson and Denarius Frazier are doing with their impromptu Turn and Talks. The moment when students are stuck is a great time to let them “think it out” in pairs.
Priming
A final thought on building more rigor into Turn and Talks: In addition to a clear question, a time frame and a cue to begin, your Turn and Talk directions can also prompt students to use or discuss specific key ideas. For example: “Take forty-five seconds to discuss what's happening with your partner. Strive to use the words ’spindle fibers.’ I'll put it up on the board to help you remember. If your partner doesn't use that phrase, ask them to restate using the key term, as we will be using it when we share out after your conversations.”
Crest of the Wave and Precise Time Limits
Two general rules of thumb can help you to manage time (and timing) during Turn and Talks. The first, crest of the wave, relates to the observation that a Turn and Talk is almost always a preliminary activity. It's rarely the capstone to work on a topic, but rather a midpoint where ideas are rehearsed and developed before they are harvested, refined, and developed. If you are transitioning from a Turn and Talk to an activity that allows for better synthesis, you want students to still be actively wrestling with ideas and eager to take them forward, rather than feeling “done” with an idea as the Turn and Talk ends. If it goes on too long and students have talked through all of their ideas, running out of things to say as the clock keeps ticking, this will sap energy and cause students to perceive Turn and Talk as an activity in which there's not much urgency to discuss things because there's likely to be dead time to fill. This perception will likely infect behavior in all Turn and Talks.
If you were to graph the level of energy during a Turn and Talk, it might look like a normal curve with a fat tail at the end. Ideally you would end it at its maximum point, when ideas were bursting and students eager to get to the next steps, before the long slope downward. That's the crest of the wave (see Figure 9.1).
Precise, Clear Time Limits
Another general rule is to be precise with time. Imagine you're a student and are participating in a Turn and Talk, but you don't know how long it's going to last. Forty-five seconds? Two minutes? Fifteen minutes? Not knowing this basic information can make it hard for you to gauge how much to say. Do you need to get the basic idea out and stop so that the other person can broach an idea? Is your conversation about deep analysis? Should you ask your partner a thoughtful question? Informing participants of the time parameters helps them manage their comments and their conversations to make the best use of time. Saying “Turn and Talk to your neighbor for the next thirty seconds” means just share some initial ideas. Be quick and then let the other person talk. Saying “Two-and-a-half minutes to discuss the role of setting. Go!” provides guidance; further, your use of specific and odd increments shows that your time allocation is careful, specific, and intentional. It tells students that time and its careful use matter to you, so they should matter to them. If you use a stopwatch to track those time allocations, it also helps you keep yourself accountable for moving the lesson forward and not losing track of time while checking in with a stuck or highly engaged pair, for example. And, over time, it will help you make smarter and more specific time allocations for Turn and Talks.
Figure 9.1 Crest of the Wave. Time your out-cue so that the Turn and Talk ends at the crest of interest and energy, not as it peters out.
Online Lessons: Remote Turn and Talks
Turn and Talks were critical to engagement during remote teaching. They allowed us to boost the ratio and let often isolated students talk to one another. But online Turn and Talks—breakout rooms in pairs—were also doubly challenging. The video Ben Esser: Shorter Turn and Talk shows how Ben solved many of these challenges. Students have written answers first, so this Turn and Talk is an opportunity to rehearse and explain ideas. Perhaps for that reason the time allocation is short, and Ben emphasizes this fact by telling students it will be short. He wants them to come out ready to talk to the whole group. Being clear about time helps students gauge how long to talk and making sure they have plenty to say helps overcome some potential awkwardness of being in a breakout room without much to say. You can also see that he's managing turns here—the person with the name that comes first in the alphabet goes first. He also addresses the possibility of students being off task by dropping into a few pairs conversations. In fact, Ben Cold Calls Suraya to speak because he dropped into her group and thought she had a strong idea. She most likely knows this and sees the Cold Call as an approval of her thinking.