Using Your Voice Effectively in the Classroom

William Evans, Jonathan Savage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317232827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Métodos de enseñanza de la educación

As a teacher, you are required to use your voice more than any other professional! Your voice is the most important tool that you have at your disposal to inspire students and help them learn effectively. Using your voice powerfully and effectively is the key to becoming an outstanding teacher. Developing a strong vocal presence in the classroom influences everything else that you do, helping to build your confidence and positive interactions with students. If you neglect your voice as a teacher, you are more likely to end up stressed, have a shorter teaching career and suffer from vocal health issues.

This book explores how you can learn to use your voice effectively in the classroom, linking together basic theory about vocal production and teacher identity with numerous practical tips, tricks and exercises which you can apply to your own teaching. Covering all aspects of the voice and its employment both inside the classroom and its importance to daily life outside, the book tackles topics such as:

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• the philosophy of the voice, how it develops and its role in creating your own identity

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• the mechanical and mental skills required to develop a teaching voice

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• acquiring confidence and an exploration of body language to underpin your vocal production

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• the relationship between the student's voice and the teacher's voice

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• the importance of practice for a teacher

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• the practicality of caring for one's voice.

Using Your Voice Effectively in the Classroom offers a much-needed exploration and thorough examination of the voice in the classroom and will be an indispensable guide for trainee teachers, as well as valuable reading for all practising teachers.

Chapter 1
Finding your voice

Iconic Voice Portraits

Karen Carpenter is popularly rated as one of the best female vocalists of all time. The music of the Carpenters and the continued success of her brother, Richard, in writing and producing others in the music industry, reflects that they had abilities that were far greater than just Karen’s voice. But what was so unique about Karen’s voice?

It is clear when you listen to her sing, and I encourage you to do this now, that her voice has a natural appeal. It draws you in, not only by her story-telling ability but in its pureness of quality and tone. Having spent my lifetime submerged in music I have had her voice cited as one that many wish to copy on their instruments, not just singers. So, without being too technical, what is it about her voice?

Pitch – it is said that she had a large vocal range, something like four octaves. This, even if unverified, is a little unusual. You can certainly hear a good range that she uses in various songs. What is so surprising is that she uses the lower part of her voice far more than the upper register. Certainly, in many of the songs, her singing starts with this very characteristic low sound. Listen to a few songs, just the start of her vocal. Notice how she starts low in pitch, the songs often build in the middle section or the chorus but there was something very distinct about her voice in this range, which allows you to know it’s her within just a few seconds. Her voice is not as recognisable in the upper part of its register. A great example of this is the opening of Yesterday Once More. She certainly uses the chest part of her voice, or the lower sound to give it a distinct characteristic.

Air – without getting too technical, Karen is a master of putting through lots of air in her voice. To get a visualisation of this in your mind imagine that the air from her lungs, supported by her diaphragm, is travelling down a piece of pipe to her vocal chords where the sound is produced. If the pipe had a small diameter, it wouldn’t have much air going to the voice. Karen sings as though this is a wide pipe, with lots of air going to the voice. You can hear this in how ‘big’ but not loud the voice sounds. This isn’t just a trick of the musical engineer or excellent practice in the musical group. She is supporting her voice with lots of air. Thus, it has a depth, size and quality that flows over us like honey tipping slowly from a jar. It is viscous, thick and luxurious in quality. Karen also supports this by pushing the air slowly. She rarely gets too loud. You can further tell that she is pushing the air slowly by her ability to sustain and sing long phrases. She also keeps the lyrics supported. There are few gaps in the lyric line. Even though the words are so very clear, compare that to many modern singers; you can rarely hear a moment where the sound isn’t sustaining.

Her voice is interesting – there are so many things that could be cited as why she is so interesting. The first two points already support this but her ability to tell the story of the song with subtle inflections, the range of timbre she uses and smooth delivery draw us in. You want to listen. I would be surprised if you went to a music streaming site to listen to her voice that you only listened to one song. There’s something about her voice, not just the music, that makes you want to hear more. Listen to how she makes her voice interesting. It is rare that she stays for long at one volume, at one timbre or sound; listen to how she accents different parts of words. Listen to how well the voice is supported by air and how clearly she articulates the words. You could write down the lyrics to every song, easily.

Lastly, she does all of this by developing and embracing her ‘natural sound’. I don’t know what vocal training Karen had or how much she thought about how she sung but it certainly sounds so natural. Of course, the problem with this is that anyone who’s great at something seems natural; it seems easy, but what we should take from this is that we all have a natural sound at this point. We must all embrace this first, to begin to develop.

To help in understanding this voice I would also encourage contrasting it against other female singers. Try to consider how they use pitch, air and how they try to be ‘interesting’.

Suggested listening: Beyonce, Katy Perry or Sia.

Of all the tools for cultural and pedagogical intervention in human development and learning, talk is the most pervasive in its use and powerful in its possibilities.

(Alexander 2008, p. 92)

Let’s start this chapter with a question. Do teachers talk more or less today than they did 40 years ago? And perhaps a follow up question, would it be better if they spoke more or less today?

The answers to these questions are hard to ascertain but they are interesting to consider. Why not ask some of your older friends and relatives about teachers that taught them and the role of ‘talk’ within their pedagogy? Perhaps a common view is that in previous generations teachers did talk more than they do today. Current teaching theory tends to place a lower value on long periods of teacher talk, arguing that it can lead to student disengagement. Rather, proponents might argue, it is important to develop a mixed economy of interactions in the classroom, where individual work, paired or group activities, student feedback, self and peer assessment, all have a part to play alongside the ‘limited’ monologic of extended periods of teacher talk.

However, this view has not always held sway. A broader reading of the educational literature can easily find examples of teachers from previous generations whose teaching style differs immensely from those considered fashionable today but were nonetheless undoubtedly effective at the time. One of the most powerful examples is recounted by Professor Robin Alexander in his book on pedagogy (ibid.) where he recounts the story of his English teacher at the Perse School in Cambridge during the 1950s and 1960s. We would encourage you to read Chapter 7 in this book in its entirety, but here is a paragraph from the opening where Alexander introduces the style of teaching that he experienced and the role of ‘talk’ specifically in the pedagogy of Douglas Brown:

Talk was hugely important to him, and I have met few talkers as fluent or as undemonstratively eloquent, but in today’s classrooms he would be counted somewhat monologic. Yet, not once in my recollection did he take the easy route of recitation teaching, the ritualised default mode of classroom interaction, for he saw learning as enquiry and advocacy rather than simple transmission, and in that spirit his questions were utterly authentic.

(ibid, p. 156)

So, talking per se is obviously not the problem. Talk done well can be inspiring and engaging; talk done solely for the transmission of knowledge (‘recitation’ in Alexander’s words) is a poor substitute for a richer pedagogical approach. He continues:

In any case, he had no need of the safety net that recitation affords for those teachers whose limited knowledge of what they teach confines them to the security of test or recall questions, beyond which they stray at their peril. Instead, his forte was kind of two-layered exposition: telling and explaining, but also and especially showing [his italics]. That is to say, letting the words and music that were his passion themselves do the work, having sensitised us to their power and inducted us in ways that this power might be unlocked.

(ibid.)

This paragraph stresses the importance of your subject knowledge. Having a deep knowledge of your subject or subjects gives you the platform from which deep and meaningful talk can spring. Alexander is rightly critical of teachers whose subject knowledge relies solely on the information needed to help students pass an examination or do well in a class test. For him, and for his English teacher Douglas Brown, ‘telling and explaining’ was only the beginning of authentic teacher talk; ‘showing’, by which he means a much deeper form of communication that blends words with ideas and meaning inextricably linked to the subject at hand, was the most powerful form of classroom discourse.

This subject link is worth pursuing a little further. As well as teaching English, Douglas Brown was an accomplished musician and shared his passion for music with students at the school. This was done with considerable aplomb. Alexander’s reflection on his teacher concludes with the following moving paragraph:

With Douglas, moreover, there was not one teacher but four: language, literature, music and the man through whom the power of these was unlocked. Not for him the self-important strutting of those teachers whose authority resides in position rather than talent, and whose educational vocabulary neither liberates nor ignites but instead fawns on the clichéd eduspeak of the latest government initiative. He knew, and he wanted us to know, that the words and music mattered much more than he, and in this he displayed the humility of genius and the artistry of teaching at their best.

(ibid., pp. 171–172)

Subjects matter. Of course they do. But who we are as teachers matters more. Are we going to be the one who is able to unlock the joy of learning about language, literature, music, chemistry, geography or whatever your subject expertise is, within the lives of our students? Training students to pass an examination is important. But a true education goes wildly further than that and who we are, what we say and how we say it really matters in achieving these loftier goals.

Should teachers talk in classrooms? Yes! They should talk well. Do teachers talk more or less in classrooms today than 40 years ago? Our answer is probably less (due to range of reasons) but there are strong arguments for them to talk more providing that the ‘type’ of talk is one that promotes engaging and meaningful learning through an empowering dialogue with students.

The richness of the narrative around talk in work by educational theorists like Robin Alexander stands in stark contrast to the frameworks that inform the processes by which teachers obtain their qualified teacher status. Documents such as the Teachers’ Standards (DfE 2017) make no mention of the type of quality of teacher talk that might be expected in the work of a qualified teacher. Similarly, the documentation that Ofsted produce in relation to school inspection makes no mention of the requirement for teachers to demonstrate an ability to talk well. This does seem strange given the role that talking plays in human development. It is interesting that we hear a lot about student voice in many educational publications; the teacher voice is (often) strangely absent.

This chapter will help you think about your journey so far and how episodes in your own development will have profoundly affected how they see and hear your own voice. It will tackle the principle that the use of voice is a deeply personal thing linked explicitly to your broader identity. From this, your teaching identity, including your teacher voice, will emerge.

Where does your teaching identity come from?

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

(Palmer 1998, p. 10)

As we have discussed in the opening to this chapter, your voice is one part of what makes your whole teaching identity! Although your voice is the main focus of this book, we felt it was important to start by considering your teaching identity as a whole, before narrowing down the focus onto your voice itself.

The process of learning to teach is an exciting one. It contains challenges of various types – intellectual, practical, physical and emotional. It will be unlike anything else you have ever done. But there will be important things that you have done in your life that you can draw on to help you become a teacher. Whilst this may be true in a practical sense (i.e. you may have been able to establish and maintain good, professional relationships with young people through helping out at a local youth club), it is also true in a psychological sense. The person that you are today has been formed through a mixture of your genetic disposition and your life experiences, relationships and activities. These have shaped your personality, your speech, body language and ways of thinking and acting. Teaching is a new type of mental and physical activity. But ‘you’ are going to do! Every part of you will be challenged by it and, if you are doing it properly, it will be demanding. So, we hope that you are prepared!

Developing your sense of identity as a teacher is the theme for this opening chapter of the book. As authors and academics involved in delivering courses of initial teacher education, this is a deliberate choice. We firmly believe that as you seek to develop a broader understanding of where you have come from as a person, relate and apply this to your new, emerging role as a teacher, and complete the reflective cycle by reflecting on the teaching you are undertaking, then the chances of you becoming a skilful and effective teacher will be increased. The extracts that we have chosen to assist us in this process all identify different areas related to identity, teaching and reflection that will help you begin to get to grips with developing your teacher identity.

Palmer’s article (Palmer 1998) is a useful exposition of this chapter’s key theme. Good teaching is firmly based in the identity of the teacher. But what does that really mean? How can I begin to understand my ‘identity’ and use that knowledge to help ensure that my teaching is really built upon a firm foundation?

Our dictionary gives a range of definitions for the term ‘identity’. These include:

• The collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognisable or known;
• The set of behavioural or personal characteristics by which an individual is recognisable as a member of a group;
• The quality or condition of being the same as something else;
• The distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity; individuality.

There are a number of important, basic points to note here. First, identity is about something being known or recognised. For our discussion, it is what makes you the person you are (physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, etc.). It may also be elements or characteristics that other people can recognise in you.

Second, identity is often linked to a relationship. An object’s identity may be related to or distinct from another object within a particular group. The particular aspects of your identity are best understood when one contextualises them in different ways (e.g. your actions in a particular context could be seen as being representative or demonstrative of a specific element of your identity, which can be perceived by others and, therefore, mark you out as a particular individual). This is particularly important when you seek to develop a new identity for a new type of activity (e.g. teaching). The contextualisation of aspects of your ‘pre-teaching’ identity within the new activity of teaching that you are undertaking will be an important aspect of your reflective practice in the process of your early initial teacher education.

Seeking to understand who we are and how what we are translates into the new role of ...