Loquacious Learning

I'm an Enneagram Type One. 

For some, that means nothing. For others, it's an indisputable life guide.

According to Compass Points, I'm also a North personality. If the 16 Personalities test is more your jam, I'm an ESTJ, otherwise known as The Executive. In summary, and as my children and husband would confirm, I'm action oriented and always right. Does any of this vital personality information impact my teaching? Of course it does.

The research around personality traits coalesced in the 1990s into some common findings about the big five personality traits. However, there is very little conclusive research currently to determine exactly how a teacher's personality impacts effectiveness. Given the difficulty in creating a clear cause and effect relationship between a teacher's charm and a student's success, why even bring it up? Because there is one trait that becomes common and undeniable among all types of personalities in the classroom.

Teachers talk too much.

John Hattie's research, explained in a 2019 Education Week article, establishes that teachers talk for seventy to eighty percent of class time on average. His synthesis is ten years old and the pandemic has changed some of those habits. However, many current classrooms would also support that teachers talk more than students. Those that are doing the talking in the classroom own the learning. For increased student learning and decreased teacher burnout, we must reverse that trend.

One powerful tool a teacher possesses to swing the talk pendulum toward students is questioning. The book Hacking Questions by Connie Hamilton provides a guide to the art of questioning in the classroom. Two concepts stand out as essential to using questioning as an effective tool. First, teachers can plan more purposefully for questioning throughout their lessons. Hamilton shares strategies for scaffolding students who do not know answers, partnering students for talking over answers, and ways to ask a variety of more complex questions that require increased student deliberation and decreased teacher talk. Julie Stern discusses similar ideas throughout her focus on learning transfer. Stern's list of questions based on conceptual learning ask students to do the heavy lifting with questions that call for comparison and transfer versus recall.

Just as essential as teacher planning for questioning, is planning for answering. The second key concept to master as educators is the art of continuing student thinking when they are the ones asking the questions. Too often, teachers immediately answer a student's question, increasing the time a teacher is talking and decreasing the time a student is talking and thinking. Research by Peter Liljedahl in Building Thinking Classrooms asserts that a typical teacher will answer between 200 to 400 questions in a day. In Liljedahl's chapter on questioning, he describes the three types of questions students ask. In order to increase student thinking and student talk in the classroom, he asks teachers to only answer the third type of question, the keep thinking questions. Teacher talk often shuts down student thinking and student voice in the classroom. With planning and patience, students can do the hard work of learning in the classroom.

In addition to my enneagram type causing a bit of drama at home, it could squash student discussion in my classroom. It's possible I am always right about how to load the dishwasher, but it is absolutely impossible for me to always be right about the myriad of topics in a given classroom. My power as a teacher is not that I know everything, but that I am an expert in how to help others know things. Whether we are introverted or extroverted, action oriented or vision based, disciplined or flexible, we can all master this one skill. 

Stop talking and start teaching.