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Guest Author: Peter Munroe

Peter is a Head of Chemistry at a state secondary school in the South East. https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-munroe

“The guys in the cheap seats in the back need to be able to hear you like you’re standing right next to them”. I can still picture the director in my head, they’re sitting on an enormous bean bag, berating us for our poor projection whilst we shiver on the stage of our draughty rehearsal space. It seems like a lifetime ago, but for a few years before becoming a science teacher I travelled around the country in a leaky minibus acting, mostly in schools, churches and youth clubs. Needless to say, I never made it as an actor, but it was an incredible experience, and it taught me a huge amount about my voice.

These days I don’t ‘tread the boards’ but I do still use my voice all the time in the classroom. More than that, I am passionate about students using their voice too, strongly advocating for oracy (where students learn to, through and about talk) whenever I can.

Oracy is not one skill, but many, which are laid out in the Oracy Skills Framework (https://oracycambridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-Oracy-Skills-Framework-and-Glossary.pdf). This framework shows how oracy is made up of 4 strands: physical, linguistic, cognitive and social and emotional. As I reminisce about my days as a small scale thespian, I’ve been reflecting on what my experience taught me, particularly about the physical strand of oracy and how I can apply it in my classroom. 

Firstly, I learnt that almost all talk is performative. Whether it is telling a joke to friends, explaining your day to family members or speaking out loud in a lesson, talk is often a performance. By acknowledging this, and the challenges it brings, we can better understand our students’ concerns about talking in lessons. Imagine how you would feel if you were asked to step onto a stage for a monologue- some of us thrive, many panic. I’ve never been a confident person, but my time acting allowed me to develop as a speaker by stepping out of myself and into a character- I was sometimes nervous, but my character was not.If students can view classroom talk as performative, they may have the same experience.

Secondly, we should acknowledge that just as theatrical performance skills can be taught, so can the skills of performative talk. It took me a long time to really understand how to project my voice to the cheap seats at the back, but with a combination of training, practice and feedback, I got it. Interestingly, much of the best progress I made was through singing lessons, where I learnt to control my breathing properly. As teachers we mustn’t believe that some students are simply better talkers than others, it is a learnt skill, and some have simply had more experience than others. By training our students on how to pause for breath, speak slower and look outwards they will get better. If we don’t know how to teach these skills, talk to the drama department, it’s their bread and butter!

Finally, to make good progress in the physical strand of oracy, students need quality feedback. I use talk for learning a lot in my lessons, and the majority of the feedback is on the content of student talk, but increasingly I’m using the Oracy Framework to guide feedback on the physical strand of their talk. I’ve distilled my feedback into “3 Ps”; pace, pauses and, of course, projection. By regularly using this alliterative framework for feedback, I’ve found that I can quickly give students targeted guidance. For example “Well done, you really projected your words clearly to the whole room, to make it even better, next time try adding pauses when you make your most important points”. Whilst the mechanics of speech are vastly more complex than these “3 Ps”, using the same model for feedback for all students provides an accessible and non-threatening tool for supporting talk.

Building our students into confident speakers is no easy task, and it’s definitely a team effort. Students need to develop their oracy skills in my science lesson and then again in their maths lesson straight after. However, if we remember that talk is performative, that these performance skills can be learnt and that consistent feedback makes a difference, we can start to provide our students with the tools they need to become excellent speakers.