Creating a Speaking and Listening Classroom: Integrating Talk for Learning at Key Stage 2

Providing children with opportunities to talk about their learning enables teachers to hear what children are thinking. Talking with one another allows children to question, elaborate, and reflect. Talk is motivating and involving, and helps children to think and learn. And yet it is difficult to organise such talk in a classroom. Children unaware of the importance of talk for learning may think of talk as 'just chat' - and learning falls away as they slip into social talk. This book provides teachers with strategies and resources to enable whole classes to work together through the medium of talk.Creating a Speaking and Listening Classroom provides timely professional development for teachers. A focus on personalised learning makes it even more imperative that teachers have ways to access children's own ideas. Also, teaching, speaking, and listening can ensure that children know how and why to help one another to learn. Based on a theoretical approach underpinned by classroom research, the book offers a classroom-tested strategy for engaging children in their own learning. A consistent approach can bring coherence to discussion and dialogue so that such productive talk can go on in a classroom on an ordinary working day, tapping into the rich resources of children's minds.