blah blah blah... teacher talk time

I woke up this morning thinking about teacher talk time. Literally. I was actually dreaming about an action research project, and my husband woke me up, and my brain was spinning with ideas about how to get this done. My CLIMBS partner and I are going to be delivering a PD to teachers at our school this summer. It will have some elements of the CLIMBS model in it, but we will need to pick and choose the topics carefully to maximize the PD for the other teachers.

Throughout CLIMBS, I have been trying to convince teachers that it is really important that their ELLs are actually speaking in class. (Honestly, I think it's really important that ALL students are speaking in class. They should be engaging the content by using academic language and the vocabulary of the content orally and in writing.) I often say that I am convinced that there are students in our school who go an entire day without speaking. I should revise that to say that I think that there are students who go an entire day without speaking about academic content.

In a class of 30 students, in a 45 minute period, if each student has the floor with no teacher talk time, that means each student would speak for just 90 seconds in a class period. That's with a bunch of ifs. I've been in classes where teachers did 90% of the talking. That meant that there were only about 5 minutes left for the students to do the talking. 5 minutes. 30 students. You do the math. But my dream about an action research project on this makes me want to put my money where my mouth is.

I've thought of two different approaches. One is to pick a couple of students and follow them for a day. I'd like to just watch them and keep track of how many times in the day they engage in the content orally in class. The other is to go around to each teacher's classroom for one period and keep track of two things. 1) How much of the time in the class the teacher is speaking and how much of the time the students are speaking. 2) How much of the student speaking is actually using the content language.  I'm rambling, though. Because as I write this, I think about the number of challenges to either of these approaches. Perhaps, I should go less formal.

The idea, either way, is to just have some more or less hard data to share with the teachers when we get together this summer. I do want to see if what I suspect is accurate--that most students are not orally engaging with the content regularly in their classes. But I also hope to see if this is impacting not only ELLs but also the other students.

This stems from a structured activity I did in my class on Thursday last week. I actually gave my students a "script" to follow as they engaged one another to get information from each other to fill in their papers. And when students started, they were nervous. They didn't have control of the language. They weren't sure even what they were asking. By the time they spoke to the 15th student in the class, I saw them gaining confidence and academic language that they could use in their classes. The content matter was the States of Matter. But the language that they were practicing was academic information gathering. And late in the day, when I was in conversation with one of my students and the conversation spontaneously produced the question, "Can you spell that for me?" I was thrilled.

But I wondered if having structured activities with structured oral language would have an impact on other classrooms, as well, or if I was seeing things through the narrow lens of my class and my particular students. Too, this is an informal survey I'm planning. I know there is already hard data out there. There are plenty of researchers smarter than me who have done this work before. I'm not really looking to reinvent the wheel. Rather, I want to know if what the research is showing is true in our school, as well. Guess we'll see.