Teacher: Put your hand up if someone in your family comes from somewhere else in the world and has come to live in London. Could you turn to the person next to you and have a discussion about this talking point?

Student: I think Stratford is a better place to live because they’re not against anyone and it’s–

Student: Can I just clarify you? What do you mean by, like, against?

Teacher: Oracy is the keystone to everything that happens in the curriculum. There are such high expectations for talk, and it does really make a difference in the children — how articulate and how confident they are.

Peter: The vision of School 21 is to prepare young people for the world that they’re going to go into in the twenty-first century. I think one of the biggest barriers to the students we serve really getting on in life is lack of good communication skills. We need to elevate speaking to the same level as reading and writing.

Milo: So we have a vote.

What makes me enjoy talking the most is that everybody’s listening to you and you’re like, part of the world, and you feel respected and important.

Alexia: When I’m talking, they’re listening to what I’m saying, and sometimes they give me questions, or then maybe I give them questions.

Beccy: Every child within this school is expected to speak in every lesson, in every opportunity throughout their school day, and try and create lots of different context for young people to hone their skills as speakers.

Amy: So what I want us to do now is have a discussion about different kinds of culture, and I want us to discuss this: some cultures are better than others.

I think every teacher, if you say to them, “Do you talk in your classroom?” of course they’re talking in their classroom. But what’s different here is the deliberateness of it.

Beccy: Every teacher needs to have that toolkit of things that they can draw on to bring effective talk into their practices.

Amy: We’ve done a lot of work introducing sentence stems that children can use for different situations, so for agreeing with somebody, for disagreeing politely with someone, for challenging someone.

And while we’re doing that, I want you to make sure that you’re using some of the sentence stems, so you might say, linking to someone’s points or build on something that somebody has said.

Student: Building on there, I agree, because maybe–

Amy: The thing that’s had the biggest impact on my practice is probably discussion guidelines.

We are going to be discussing why beliefs were important, or why they weren’t important in ancient Greece. Could anybody remind me about any of our discussion guidelines?

Student: One of them is when someone’s not contributing. You have to invite them by asking them a question, or saying their name.

Amy: Excellent, why would you do that, Aram?

Student: Then everyone has an idea.

Amy: Everyone gets to share their idea, don’t they. Well done.

So discussion guidelines were created in conjunction with the children. These are the five of six key things that we think make a really good discussion. I’ve been able to take a step back, and I think that the children take on a larger role within the classroom.

Student: I think it should be Ares and Athena because they’re both the god of war.

Student: Yeah, but to challenge your debate, there are lots of fishermen–

Amy: So another key way of promoting oracy in the classroom is to think carefully about the groupings that you use. So whether you’re getting them to talk in pairs or in trios, or in larger groups.

Beccy: Sometimes it’s best to have students in threes. Sometimes we look at how they can stand in the traverse, opposite each other. Each of those different groupings enables a different type of conversation.

Students: If you see inside them, we’re all human beings and we’re all people.

Beccy: Our oracy program is comprehensive. It has to be seen in maths and science and those subjects that traditionally haven’t had a talk focus.

Kate: There are 24 cookies altogether.

Students: There are 24 cookies altogether.

Kate: There are three children.

Students: There are three children.

Kate: Alright, let’s see if Alexia–

I would say that I’d always encouraged talk in my maths lessons before, but what’s changed is that I really plan very carefully for talk, and also I structure the talk very explicitly.

Okay, so we’re going to go and do our talk task.

The talk task, they get to practice what they’ve done in the new learning, and they’re talking through what they’re doing. So it’s about developing their vocabulary and language of explanation.

Alexia: We were talking about fractions. We’d done four circles, and then we needed to share 24 in each group.

One, two, three, four, fix, six. Your turn.

We were using sentences to help us.

Students: 24 shared equally between four children is equal to six.

Alexia: Let’s do another one.

Peter: There are lots of different reasons why we get students who may not feel it’s almost their place to speak. So for all those reasons, oracy is an issue of equality, of equity, of social mobility.

Teacher: Wow, I heard some pretty amazing discussions going on just now. So let’s get some feedback from some groups.

Beccy: Because of the focus on oracy, we’ve seen our students become much more confident in their ideas. By creating the context and the opportunities for them to speak, they’ve just flown, and become eloquent, engaging speakers.

Teacher: Hayden?

Hayden: We came to a decision and said that we disagree with the text. Everyone is unique, everyone’s the same, but they do their things in different ways.

Schools That Work

School 21