Are You Watching?

Have you ever taken a moment during a class to watch your students? I mean, really watch them? Kids don’t have great poker faces during school hours, and observing their faces and body language can provide you with plenty of feedback about how well your students are being hooked by your lesson.

It’s one thing to watch students while you are the one doing the talking. Depending on how charismatic an orator you are, you may see a dutiful few who are making eye contact and nodding along with you, a roomful of eager listeners waiting to be filled up with your brilliance, or a bunch of catatonic teens fighting off slumber (and, likely, some who have given up the fight and have succumbed to a nap at their desks). Regardless of how they look, if you’re the one doing the talking in your room, you’re also the one doing most or all of the thinking. That’s not the goal.

In an ideal classroom, we limit teacher talk and shift the cognitive load to our students. Asking students to talk about the content definitely increases student engagement, but it still offers educators plenty of opportunity to look at their students to assess the degree of engagement. Sometimes, students who are supposed to be engaged in partner or small-group classroom conversation actually look like this: 

Staring blankly at the paper in front of them. Slack-jawed. Ignoring one another entirely. Yawning. Expressionless faces. Flat, lifeless conversation.

The mere act of giving students something to talk about doesn’t mean they will eagerly talk about it. I’m guilty—and perhaps you are, too—of providing students something to talk about without giving them a reason to talk about it. Talking about a worksheet doesn’t remove the fact that there’s a worksheet in front of them. Pair-sharing an answer to a dull question only makes it slightly less dull.

When I give students a conversational task, I want to see faces like these:

Smiling. Maybe laughing, Bright-eyed. Animated. Showing visible signs of thinking. Leaning forward. Lively conversation.   

When we give students something provocative, worthwhile, challenging, and intriguing to think about, we pique their curiosity, ignite their interests, and spark their inquiry. If your students don’t appear joyful about their learning, why not? I hope it bothers you and spurs you to think: What can I do to change that?

Here are a few questions to consider if you want to ramp up the engagement level of the student talk in your classroom:

• Am I asking students to talk about something they care about?
• If the topic is not intrinsically interesting, what can I do to build their curiosity?
• Did I tap into their need to express opinions, connect to their experiences, and have fun?
• Does the task have an element of playfulness, or is it a drudgery?
• Did I provide an accessible entry point for students to begin the conversation or learning, or have I provided insufficient scaffolding to allow them to approach the learning without intimidation?
• Is the task clear? Do they know what they are supposed to be doing?
• Is the task complex and open-ended rather than simplistic? In other words, does the activity warrant conversation and exploration, or is it a one-and-done, quickly answerable question?
• Did I do everything I can do sell the learning to my students so they have maximum buy-in?
• If the assignment is not one I designed myself, did I take ownership of the assignment or introduce it as something “they” want my students to do?
• Are you asking your students to talk about concepts at a level that is above their maturity or interest level?
• Are the students going to do something worthwhile and interesting with what they discuss?
• Do my students see the benefit of talking about this topic, believing that they get smarter through interaction with others?  

A good gauge for judging your students’ engagement in your observations is to compare what you observe when your students are interacting socially with friends to what you see when you ask them to talk in your classroom. The difference could look like this:

“Friend talk” is lively, joyful, playful, noisy, animated, casual, comfortable, and pleasurable. Sadly, some “school talk” is silent, dour, filled with pauses, lifeless, drab, uninspired, mechanical, and tedious.

“School talk” with probably never look exactly like “friend talk.” And it probably shouldn’t. It it does, your students probably aren’t really talking about what you’ve asked them to. They’ve abandoned the conversation topic and are now chatting about what they did last weekend. I’m not satisfied, however, with students in academic conversations looking like they are attending a funeral and are struggling to find something to say about the deceased. I want school talk to look more like friend talk than that. I can usually accomplish that by carefully considering what I have my learners talk about and what I ask them to do in their pairs, triads, or quads.

Not coincidentally,  different levels of engagement produce a perceptible noise-level shift, too. Disengaged classroom talk is very quiet. Engaged classroom talk is somewhat louder. Social talk rises to a significantly louder volume level. By simply listening, it’s easy to tell when students are “done” discussing.  

If you haven’t stopped teaching to look—really look—at your students lately, I invite you to quit working so hard, step back, and observe. If you like what you see, keep doing it. If the students’ “school talk” faces look like they’d rather be anywhere else but in your classroom, maybe you can tweak what you’re doing so that your students clamor to talk with one another about the exciting things they’re learning.