There’s a lot of talk about oracy at the moment – which, to me, is a great thing. However, there are two poles to this discourse that, as ever, I find myself walking a line between.

On one hand I get irritated when oracy evangelists manage to make it all sound overly grand, nebulous and unactionable. If there’s too much talk about a culture of oracy and valuing voices relative to the practicalities of running a room – or a school – such that talk is an embedded element of daily life, I find it deeply unhelpful. You can’t just wish this stuff into being and it’s hard enough to get talk happening across a school without feeling your version is always falling short of some grand vision. In the desire to promote oracy as something BIG, some arguments are not only unpersuasive, they are actively off-putting.

On the other hand I get even more irritated by the doom-mongers and nay-sayers who don’t seem to care much if students talk at all or they project a sense that even think-pair-share is just too difficult or they are happy to suggest that if students each answer a question in class that’ll do. Answering one cold call question in 60 minutes – is not ‘talk’ in the sense of exchanging ideas, listening and engaging in dialogue. Very often there’s too much worry about students passing inaccurate information to each other – as if we can police when students talk to each other beyond our class – or that it’s better for their misconceptions to remain unaired in case they contaminate the minds of others.

You get the sense from some commentators that they’re constructing a faux cogsci case or opportunity cost argument to mask their personal discomfort with running a room where every student is talking. This might be true and I’m really happy to explore personal discomfort if we’re being honest that that’s the issue.

Between these poles lies the path!

To me, it’s just a no-brainer that we should all be working to develop routines around pair talk such that every student has the opportunity to express their ideas verbally multiple times in a lesson – whenever the teacher decides, but with a high frequency – alongside cold calling and using show-me boards. There are some details to get right – just like with everything else. You can do this well or badly – just like with everything else. But with some simple routines, it’s really not that hard.

My recommended routines would include:

• Allocate everyone to a pair – just one three if needed.
• Identity each person as A or B so you can decide who talks first each time.
• Give thinking time – in silence – before initiating the talk.
• Provide a stimulus resource to support the question so students are not talking off the top of their heads. There is something concrete to refer to – to talk about.
• Structure the question to support deeper thinking eg
  • ‘three factors with an example of each’,
  • ‘three pros and three cons’
  • Use the stem ‘in my opinion…. because….’ There must be reasons to support opinions.
  • ‘explain the concept step by step in as much detail as possible and be ready to share that with the class’.
  • Avoid creating a sense you are asking for opinions when you are dealing with factual information.
• Create an accountability culture so students know they might be selected to share their discussion with the class. ‘Michael – what were you and Safia discussing?

The human learning argument.

Fundamentally, I think talk is an inherent part of learning and expressing ideas. This includes teacher to student talk and student to student talk. You only need to run a big training day with adults once to get a sense of how strong the ‘need to talk’ force is -with well intentioned, conscientious learners. To talk is to be human. We can of course learn in silence – but then we can’t explore our ideas as well; we can’t hear our own thoughts taking shape and we can’t hear other people’s ideas. Talk includes a notion of exchange – i.e. it means also listening. This means we need to structure talk so that everyone can both talk and listen. The A:B structure support this very easily,

The cognitive argument

There is a good case for talk in terms of supporting schema-building. Talking is a generative activity – you need to pull ideas from your long-term memory and, in doing so, you are engaging in exploring what you know and what you don’t know; it constitutes a form of practice. Practise Explaining is one of my favourite techniques in WalkThrus. In surfacing ideas you can evaluate them – or others can evaluate them with you. You have to take ideas that exist in a complex, nebulous array and organise them into a linear sequence -talk. This requires selecting and organising information – the heart of the generative learning model. The thing is that doing this by taking turns across a whole class – or only asking one student to answer each question – goes nowhere near as far as asking all students to talk about the question at the same time, exchanging answers in pairs.

Of course, where factual accuracy is imperative, students must have the chance to verify what has been understood. This means we need to sample responses, provide verification resources for self-checking and create a culture were we seek out error and misconceptions. Talk is a great way to surface misconceptions. The risk to learning is greater if we suppress or minimise talk. Of course this applies more strongly in some subjects more than others – you probably don’t need as much talk in maths or PE as you do in English, history, RE or science. Yes – science! My subject contains a lot to talk about!

The values argument.

Here I’m talking about the idea that voices matter – what students think and believe matters. This is not a cogsci case or an efficiency argument -it’s a belief. You might not share this belief. The key issue is that if any voices matter, all voices matter. As I’ve recounted many times, the only time I ever got cross at parent’s evening was when one of my daugther’s teachers said ‘D needs to make more effort to participate in class’. I said ‘that’s your job, not hers’. I was right. Why should she have had to compete for air time in a culture of competitive hands up with a few students (mainly boys) dominating all the talk? Every child’s voice matters as much as anyone else’s and we need good pair routines to ensure they all can say things out loud. Cold call selection is imperative to make sure everyone feels included – and it’s never a contest.

Fundamentally, as I said recently on X, a low talk class environment – which relies solely on cold calling – represents a pretty grim vision for an education. Pair talk is, to me, a core structure for running a class and it’s really not that difficult to do – you just need to be committed to it from the point of view laid out in these three arguments. I would also say that , whilst it’s true that pair talk is only the start for going deeper into some more dialogic or social-emotiional elements of oracy, in many schools and classrooms, aiming for pair share to be a strongly embedded routine, day after day, class to class, is a worthwhile and noble goal in itself. Keep working on it – it’s powerful and, in my view, it’s important .