SOLC 3/31: Brave the Silence

It's time to take action according to the month's One Little Word project with Ali Edwards. My action aligns with my intention this month which is to Brave the Silence. My action will be to talk less and listen more. In lesson study I learned that if I stayed quiet and waited long enough someone would say what I was thinking. We can do that in many different ways in our work.  I'm not talking about the kind of silence that the quote, "Silence is the voice of complicity." is talking about.

My goal is to deliberately practice listening to allow my students and my colleagues the oppportunity to keep learning going. Sarah Dessen writes in her young adult novel Just Listen, "This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don't jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.  My action is to practice being the listener this month.

In our classroom I am reminded again and again of Kylene Beer's words about the one who talks the most in the classroom does the most learning.  I have been working on increasing the amount of student talk in my instruction for the past two years. This work became even more important as I work with teachers and have over 40 students in my classes.  It becomes readily apparent which students feel comfortable sharing out whole class. I also like using different strategies because it makes students talk to different people.  We have our comfort zones, but then we talk to new people we are introduced to new perspectives.  In my resolve to brave the silence, I hope to learn more by letting other discovery what they didn't know, they knew.

One books that I like to help teachers design lessons with more student-talk embedded is Daniel's and Steineke's Text and Lessons for Content Area Reading


Here is a list of the top ten strategies I have been using to get students to talk more so I can listen:

1. I Have, You Have
2. Carousel Brainstorming
3. Tabletop Twitter
4. Fold the Line
5. Mile a Minute
6. Quotation Mingle
7. Square, Circle, Triangle
8. Socratic Seminar
9. Find Your Match or Move to the Beat
10. Brown Bag Assessment