Creative Dialogue

Talk for Thinking in the Classroom

Robert Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134721726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Creative Dialogue is an essential guide to dialogic learning for every trainee and practising teacher. It presents practical ways of teaching children to be more thoughtful and creative, and to learn more effectively through speaking and listening in school and at home.

The book includes:

• practical ways to develop dialogic learning across the curriculum
• a guide to developing talk for thinking in the classroom
• more than 100 activities for stimulating talk with children of all ages and abilities
• advice on using dialogue to support assessment for learning
• ideas for developing listening skills and concentration.

Written by a leading expert in teaching thinking, Creative Dialogue is essential reading for all who wish to understand and develop dialogic learning in education today.

Chapter

1

Listening

Learning to attend

There was an old owl who lived in an oak

The more he heard the less he spoke,

The less he spoke the more he heard

Oh why can’t we be like that wise old bird.

Old nursery rhyme

This chapter is about creating the optimum conditions for good dialogue. Human attention naturally wanders and children often find that concentration is not easily sustained. Listening well is a skill that has to be learned. Active listening engages the mind. To listen well, children need to learn how to focus and attend. The processes of active listening outlined in this chapter include:

1. Stilling the mind
2. Focusing attention
3. Listening well
4. Responding to what you hear
5. Learning to listen, focus and attend in practice.

The better children listen, the more their brains take in, and the more they will learn. Listening is one of the most important skills for effective learning. Children tend to remember the things they hear more easily than the things they read. The first half of this chapter is about helping children to become good listeners. The second half offers practical activities to help children learn to become active listeners.

Any good learning conversation requires a balance of attention and articulation. If in education we simply focus on the articulation of ideas we miss the other vital elements in the interaction of minds – that of listening, focusing and sustained attention. Dialogue requires attentive listening as much as the fluent use of words. However, like all of us, children do not listen at the same intensity all the time; rather they tend to listen in erratic spurts. Listening takes time – it is a slow process, whereas thinking is a very fast process. We think four times faster than anyone can talk and have lots of time to fill our heads with other thoughts, any of which can be distracting.

This can be a particular problem first thing in the morning when children’s heads are full of other things, after the physical and emotional ‘rough-and-tumble’ of playtime, or after protracted periods of passive activity. At such times merely saying, ‘sit down and pay attention’, may not be enough. They need an activity that grabs and holds their attention.

Our attention system has evolved to recognise dramatic changes that signal danger and to ignore steady states of gradual change and subtle differences. Human attention is focused by sudden surprises. In talking with children we need to capture their attention from the very start, just as we would do in any lesson or at the start of any learning activity. As Chris, aged 10, put it: ‘I like to listen when it’s something new.’

What a good dialogue does is to help train children to hold and sustain attention. It also challenges children to focus attention on relevant memories, experience and knowledge and to shift attention to what others are saying. A good dialogue engages the receptive mind and a receptive mind depends on an attending ear.

Being able to direct attention helps children to fight off distraction. Directed attention is needed to help them to process information effectively and to sort the important from the unimportant among the vast quantities of stimuli they encounter on a daily basis. Dialogue can help children sustain attention when their thinking is challenged and where they have a range of possible responses that link to their personal concerns or engage them in ways of looking at the world that are their own. Open-ended dialogue offers them opportunities to share their thinking and attend to the thinking of others. To do this they need to shift and re-focus their attention. It is therefore worth discussing with children their own ability to focus attention and to listen well. Discuss with children what it means to be a good listener. Donna, aged 10, said: ‘To be a good listener you need to think. If you’re not thinking you’re not really listening.’

Ask children to think about and discuss the difference between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’. Does being able to hear automatically mean they are listening? When they listen, the information they hear is processed by the conscious brain and enters short-term memory. The sounds their ears hear are not necessarily processed, since their brains may be engaged on other things. Much of what you can hear is not processed but is ignored by the brain. We can hear it but do not listen to it, so we are not aware of it.

We need to listen to a problem carefully before deciding what method to use to solve it. For example, tell your children this problem about runaway sheep:

A farmer has seventeen sheep in his pen. All but nine of them escape. How many are left?

Ask them to find the answer to this problem. What is the answer?

If a problem ends with ‘how many are left?’ it is common for people to think that the answer is reached by subtraction and therefore 17–9 leaves 8. But on carefully listening to (or reading) the problem it says that ‘all but nine escaped’, so of course nine were left. Subtraction is not the right method; careful listening (or reading) of the problem is.

A common problem about listening is that we often hear what we expect to hear. Listening is influenced by past experience, expectations and beliefs. The brain gets into habits of interpreting sounds in particular ways. If children have heard something before, they will tend to interpret it in the same way. Their past experience will influence what they think they hear. If someone whom they think is boring begins to speak, they will expect what they have to say to be boring and may switch off. If they believe what they are hearing is important, they will tend to listen carefully.

Memory is the daughter of attention. We cannot expect children to focus on or remember what they do unless we help to train their attention. A good idea therefore is to say to children: ‘Listen carefully because I am going to make a mistake in the next x minutes and I want to see if you spot it.’ Then of course you need to make a (deliberate) mistake. Some specific attention-training strategies are included on pp. 24–5. These involve actually hearing what is being said and not listening with one ear as you think about something else. To do this you must first try to eliminate distracting noise and thoughts, and to still the mind.

Stilling the mind

A Zen story tells of a professor who came to the Zen master Nan-in to learn about Zen. Nanin poured the professor a cup of tea, and when the cup was full he kept pouring. The professor protested, ‘Stop! The cup is overfull already.’ Nan-in replied: ‘Your mind is overfull like this cup. To learn about Zen you must first empty your cup.’

The optimum psychological state for engaging in dialogue is one of relaxed attention. Children will not be able to engage fully in dialogue (which involves critical and creative thinking) until they have quietened any distracting thoughts buzzing in their brains and calmed their emotions. Discuss with your children ways of calming down and stilling the mind. Give them the chance to make posters to display their own calming-down strategies and share their ‘cueing’ words (such as the rhyme below). This cue alerts the child to the need to use a calming-down strategy. Older children might devise their own mantra of calming-down words:

Get your body calm and ready.

Get your thinking cap on steady!

It is important that children are encouraged to use their favoured calming techniques each time the need arises. Ideas for calming down include:

• Tell yourself to STOP AND THINK!
• Give yourself thinking time.
• Tell yourself you can handle this!
• Say to yourself: ‘Be calm … be calm … be calm.’
• Walk away from what bothers you.
• Count backwards from 10, 20, or 100.
• Tell someone else how you feel.
• Breathe deeply and slowly – in and out five times.
• Tense and relax your muscles.
• Go for a walk.
• Go into a quiet area to be by yourself.
• Feel your pulse.
• Picture yourself dealing with the situation calmly and strongly.

(With thanks to Kevin Hogston for suggesting many of these strategies which he uses with his children at Latchmere School.)

Do you have other strategies for calming down? Discuss which strategies you think work for you with a partner (see activity on p. 24).

One series of strategies for stilling the mind and focusing attention with a long tradition and gaining ground in schools is meditation, as I found as a new teacher more than thirty years ago when struggling with a tough inner-city class of ten-year-olds. To help them gain more control over their minds and bodies I experimented by starting each session with a period of meditation. I aimed at first for half a minute of absolute stillness and silence, listening to ‘distant sounds’. I wanted the children to develop the ability to still their minds and focus with full concentration whenever they needed or wanted to. In time we established a regular minute’s-worth of absolute stillness and silence, then longer. For many of those children it was the first time they had heard absolute silence. One child described the silence as ‘spooky’. But this small investment of time I found had a marked effect in calming the class and focusing them ready for dialogue and learning.

Many years later I met an ex-pupil from this class, now a successful businessman. I asked what he remembered of his time in my class. After a pause he said: ‘I always remember those times we sat there and did nothing.’ It took me a while to realise that what had stayed in his memory were our experiments in meditation.

Meditation

Man … is a meditative being.

(Martin Heidegger)

Meditation provides a good preparation for creative dialogue. It builds upon the long tradition of meditative practice in spiritual, religious and humanistic settings and is supported by evidence of the practical benefits that meditation can bring. Meditative experience provides useful groundwork for discussing with children body/mind concepts such as consciousness, thinking and imagination, and has been found to be an ideal preparation for philosophical discussion (Haynes 2008). Teachers report benefits in increased levels of concentration, anger management and relaxation in their classrooms (Fisher 2006).

The word ‘meditation’, derived from the Latin meditatio, originally referred to all types of physical or intellectual exercise. Later it came to mean contemplation, as when Christians ‘meditate’ on the sufferings of Christ, or as in Descartes’s Meditations to refer to philosophical thinking about the nature of reality. Meditation can simply be defined as a range of mental states relating to attention, which include states of consciousness, concentratation and contemplation.

By the late nineteenth century the word ‘meditation’ was used to to refer to religious or spiritual practices drawn from various Eastern religions. The word ‘meditation’ was never an exact translation of any single term or concept (such as the Sanskrit dhyana, samadhi or pranayama). Forms of meditative practices are to be found within almost all religions as well as some humanist and secular traditions, such as the martial arts. Many religious traditions see meditation as a way to access the divine ‘life force’ that lies within us, a source of energy that connects the personal to the universal.

Researchers agree that we are at the very beginning of understanding the effects meditation can have on a child’s brain and body. Teachers often find that students who have meditated tend to listen more attentively and deeply and so remember and experience more in a learning situation, but there is a need for more research and experimentation to extend professional knowledge about the effec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Listening: learning to attend
• 2. Questions for Thinking
• 3. Creative Talk for Thinking
• 4. Critical Talk: developing verbal reasoning
• 5. Talking to Learn Across the Curriculum
• 6. Talking Together: talk to think in groups
• 7. Extending Talk for Thinking
• 8. Dialogic Assessment
• 9. The Dialogic Future
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index