The Ubiquity of Talk in Teaching and Learning
What teaching and learning happens without dialogue?
I’d like to take a moment here to zoom out on what I mean by “learning discourse” within this blog. As an English language arts teacher at the high school level, sure, I’ve felt that the core four of reading, writing, speaking and listening were especially in my purview. After a shift into staff development and professional learning, I’ve grown to understand the continuing power of language in the context of adult learning, and more broadly in the context of organizational management, organizational psychology, and change management.
In the context of the K-12 classroom, talk is typically viewed through one of two lenses: (1) the classroom discussion, or (2) the turn-and-talk. Teachers may share out to collaborative colleagues that they’re “having a discussion on Wednesday,” or that students have to “prepare for the Socratic seminar on Friday.” It always struck me as a bit odd to think about discussion in these binary terms—or in the sense of either today we’re having a “discussion” or today we aren’t.
Just take a moment to think about when the last thing you’d call a “discussion” occurred in your out-of-schooling life. Maybe it was a discussion with your spouse last night about the characters in Ted Lasso; maybe it was a discussion with your friends about how the New Orleans Saints did on their last Thursday game (don’t ask). Now consider that discussion a little more in depth—were there established norms or working agreements? Was there a protocol for shares? Was there a rubric or a checklist by which you operated in order to meet the amount of required utterances, responses, bits of evidence, or otherwise? Of course not.
Discussion in reality, or I’d rather use the term “dialogue” here, is much less formulaic, formal, and structured that we’ve just outlined. It would be outrageous, tedious, and stupefying to demand your Fantasy Football League cohort sit together to develop working agreements for the draft (it strikes me now that someone, somewhere, probably has done this—but I’m confident in assuming this isn’t the norm), developing a checklist or sentence frames for how people ought to express their claims, justify them with evidence, and share their reasoning, or even keep track of how many utterances whomever made in the discourse in order to “check all the boxes.”
There is so much lost when one views “discussion” as this formulaic, Socratic seminar, fishbowl model with an associated set of norms and an evaluation rubric. In reality, talk is the granular, ever-present, ubiquitous stuff of teaching and learning (and other human endeavor, to be quite honest). There is no moment where we are not in discourse or dialogue with another; even if we’re stranded Into-the-Wild-style in the Alaskan wilderness, we are by our very nature in relation to other human beings—our parents, our communities (from which we may have isolated ourselves), our ancestors, and our community’s offspring.
This is the same within a school. I’ve often made the remark, much to my own vainglory, that being an English language arts teacher puts me at the core of all teaching and learning across content areas. Cognitive learning science and curricular research seems to back this understanding that we’re always, by necessity, exercising our literacy skills on some bit of content—that we can’t “find the main idea” unless there’s a text at hand with a main idea (like sharks are fish!); we can’t “determine a theme” unless there’s a text at hand with content that suggests or develops a theme. In other words, we’re always reading, writing, speaking and/or listening about something.
Discussion and dialogue are similar in their ubiquity in schools. Who thinks that teachers only hold discussions within the auspices of their established, structured collaborative meetings, PLCs, one-to-one debriefs, or pre- and post-observation conferences? Teacher collaborative discourse is not only occurring in these established times—beginning at 9:05 am on Wednesday and concluding at 9:45 am after the steps of the protocol are completed. Talk about teaching and learning is always occurring—in fact, lots of times its occurring at its most critical quality right around the margins of these structured times. That is, before or after the “meeting,” between the steps of the “protocol,” or before the “Socratic seminar” starts at the behest of the teacher.
While our formal meetings thirst for the finality of next steps, follow through with clear timelines, or the almost dialectic quality of a resolution or an established argument or claim, the actual discourse of teaching and learning within and without our institutions of schooling is dialogic. Dialogic in the sense that it is unfinalizable—it does not have a clear conclusion or end; dialogic in the sense that it is unrepeatable—it always is subject to the social, historical, and personal circumstances or variables of the dialogic situation; dialogic in the sense that our utterances must answer for the “address” or specific space-time locale from which we voice that contribution.
This ubiquity of language is the core of my interest with dialogue, dialectic, and discourse in teaching and learning. While much of what is promoted in schools has to do with the structures—protocols, systems of meetings, organization of steps, etc.—the actual work of teaching and learning occurs on the dialogic margins of these systems and structures. Even within the confines of these structures, dialogue and its unpredictable quality rears its head. The awareness of educational leaders of this unfinished quality of dialogue, and the utterances made within and without formal contexts at schooling institutions, can be a powerful lever for change.
Have you wondered why your protocol doesn’t seem to work? Have you wondered why your “Socratic dialogue” didn’t seem to catch on? Take a moment to consider the dialogue that’s happening at the margins of these structures, or in the infinitesimal “between-the-lines” of the formal discourse itself. My work is about availing leaders an understanding of this ubiquity of language, and its workings at the conversation and utterance level, so that leaders and organizations may harness this dialogue in service of reform.