TALK – an educational goal in its own right

The project, which has development scope for all teaching staff, is designed to scale up existing understanding of talk, and to further develop high-quality, evaluated practice. Teachers, and teaching assistants will be given supported opportunities to understand, and explore through rewarding professional dialogue, creative practice and reading.
We will build a deeper, shared understanding of a repertoire of skills and behaviours that teachers can choose to use to teach and model talk; the different types of talk we want to cultivate for different purposes and a fuller confidence that talk is an educational goal in its own right. Development will be focussed on identifying and removing barriers to learning.

Talk is one of the Golden Threads which runs throughout the teaching and learning in our school. We value these teaching and learning principles, as they are the key principles that best meet the needs of our specific learners, who disadvantaged or not, face a combination of linguistic, social or economic barriers to learning. 

At Blue Gate Fields Junior School, talk is taught explicitly. We believe that, “talk is the sea upon which all else floats” (James Britton 1970) and Professor Frank Hardman reinforces this when he states that “[Talk is] the most powerful tool of communication in the classroom and it’s fundamentally central to the acts of teaching and learning.” We believe that if a pupil can articulate thinking verbally, then they will be able to expand and develop learning. We know that knowledge is constructed and developed through social interaction, and that spoken language helps us to construct meaning of the world around us, and of abstract ideas and concepts.

Furthermore, we want classroom talk to be preparation for the social, educational and employment settings they may encounter in the future, and is one of the key strategies we use to develop pupils’ critical thinking and reasoning skills. We are teaching children to express themselves, build self-esteem and confidence; we want them to work collaboratively, to be able to communicate with their peers efficiently and to become active citizens with excellent oral communication skills.
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Within a school culture for learning that promotes high levels of trust between teacher and pupil, we want children to be confident that they are heard and listened to; that talk is another aspect of their learning where struggle, setback and failure are part of that learning which can be ‘tricky’ to grapple with.