Talk with purpose

This lecture was all about oracy. This is purposeful talk. It is all about helping children to talk effectively.

Oracy is a mash up of learning to talk and learning through talk and both underpins writing. Children come into the classroom with different experiences - perhaps there is more/less chat in their homes, different languages, etc. It is important to respect different dialogues as it's part of a person's identity. And to remember that standard English is not always the 'correct' way to speak.

We had an example of 'pair share'. We looked at a picture of a statue and thought about what words came to mind when we looked at it. We then wrote down a few words and then talked to a partner about what it meant to you.

R Alexander talks about dialogic teaching. This means lots of 'how do you know?' questions and open questioning.

Before a class can really engage in oracy, it is important to go through with them the rules/expectations around how the talk it going to happen. It's important to create a safe environment for children to feel empowered to talk.

Why is oracy important? It it important even in the playground. It brings equality and social equity and helps to build confidence in the children by allowing them to take a larger role in the classroom and in their own learning.

During the lecture, I voiced concerns around children who struggled to speak up, or were non-verbal. An idea which came up could be to provide them with other strategies, such as a whiteboard, etc or to give them a summarising role in the group. Also to have some sentence 'stems' ready so that they (and all of the children) know how to begin. One of the other's in the group voiced a concern about a chatty class taking it too far potentially. The tutor suggested that if that sort of class are encouraged to speak in the right way, then that could be a great learning opportunity for them.

I went on to read an article on the Voice 21 website: https://voice21.org/supporting-our-quietest-children-to-find-their-voice/ and it recommended that to draw out the quieter children, it is important to consider the groupings, the group roles and to praise the quieter child for their listening skills. Also interesting was to assign the more dominant character a listening role which might give the other children space to come forwards.

We read through The Promise book. Here are some of the activities we did around the book which could be used in lessons:

• We looked at the cover - what do we think this is about?

• We paused at an image - discuss the image and come up with a sentence. Then we could form a class poem with all the sentences.

• What was in the bag? Come up with 5 questions to find out.

• Freeze frame a moment in the book. How does each character feel at that moment?

• Decision alley - why she the character take one action over another? Base a piece of writing over the final decision.

• Opportunity for cross curricular activities?

Remember there are lots of planning ideas on CLPE.

Assessment could be done by a TA who can use post-it notes.

The oracy framework was tricky - I can see how this can be used to think about what the class/individual needs to work on, but in practice I am struggling to see how a teacher can assess each child in addition to everything else which is going on in the class.