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Research conducted by Dr. Carol Dweck has changed the way that we look at intelligence. If students face challenges, and believe that they can learn from them, they are more likely to grow. A fixed mindset will have students shy away from difficult tasks, not creating any new synapses in the brain.

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"Researchers have found that students’ comprehension, engagement, and test scores improve when they get to discuss what they’re learning."

It is time to shift to student-led learning and lessons, which connects to social constructionism. Knowledge is constructed through interaction.

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If you carried a stopwatch into your district's schools and sat quietly in various classrooms for a week, timing how much teachers talk and how much students talk, what would you find?

Are lessons dominated by teachers talking? Do students have a robust role in discussing what they're learning? Or are they mostly answering procedural or factual questions? Are teachers consciously monitoring how much they talk? Should they be?

Research and front-line teacher experience suggest they should be. And some teachers are using new tools like apps on their phones to help them reflect on their classroom talk habits.

Most educators agree that it's important for teachers to get students talking about what they're learning. Doing so can get students more involved and interested in what they're studying and help them understand it better. It can also yield valuable insight into what students need, and improve achievement.

"If you're talking all the time, how can you hear the impact of your teaching?" asked John Hattie, a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia who has analyzed research on "teacher talk." He's concluded that teachers should talk less and think more carefully about when they're talking and the kinds of questions they're asking.

Teachers who have experimented with changing the balance of student and teacher talk in their classrooms, and researchers who study it, say that simply shifting the ratio isn't enough. The real goal is finding ways to spark productive classroom discussions.

'Surface' and 'Deep' Stages

There are many ways to do that. Getting students to talk more about their learning means teachers must carefully plan lessons that include more open-ended questions. But before teachers can consistently do that planning, they must navigate a deeper shift. Educators who have revamped their classroom talk habits say they've had to reinvent their roles as tellers and become askers and listeners.

"It's more than a collection of strategies. It's a mind shift," said Rosie Reid, an English teacher at Northgate High School in Walnut Creek, Calif.

Therese Arahill, an instructional coach in New Zealand, described that mind shift.

"I join their discussion, ... answering their questions," Arahill said via Facebook. "It's an attitude. Moving away from teacher ego, toward student voice, student agency."

Research documents the dominance of teacher voices in classrooms. Hattie's synthesis of studies on the topic, detailed in his 2012 book, Visible Learning for Teachers, found that teachers talk for 70 percent to 80 percent of class time on average. His own research produced an even higher average: 89 percent.

All that talking doesn't necessarily produce good learning. One study tracked middle and high school students and found their engagement flagged the most when their teachers were talking. Others show that most of teachers' questions seek lower-order responses like factual recall.

On the flip side, researchers have found that students' comprehension, engagement, and test scores improve when they get to discuss what they're learning. But research hasn't elucidated many details that could guide teachers, Hattie said, such as the right ratio of monologue to dialogue and how talk patterns might need to shift to suit students' grade level or the topic being taught.

Hattie's own studies, in classroom "labs" at his university, suggest that teachers should talk more as students are acquiring information and shift into a questioning mode as they're deepening their understanding, he said. He encourages teachers to split their lessons into "surface" and "deep" stages and plan distinct strategies for each.

Measuring and Analyzing

Many teachers start with the simplest piece: paying attention to how much they talk. Some are using a new app, TeachFX, on their phones or laptops to measure it. They click it open as class begins, and afterward, the app emails them an analysis of talk patterns, such as how much the teacher talked and whether he asked open-ended questions. Another app, Visible Classroom, designed by Hattie, offers similar tools.

Reid, who is California's 2019 teacher of the year, said TeachFX helped her spot a pattern she needed to change.

"I was talking at them too much at the beginning of class, when my students are at their freshest," she said. "I realized I need to use that time to do engaging warm-ups instead."

Jamie Poskin, a former English and math teacher who developed TeachFX as a Stanford University graduate student, said he's been surprised that teachers find the app so useful by itself, even without professional learning linked to it.

"They're telling us that just seeing the data profoundly affected their perspectives," he said. "They're shocked by how much they talk and how little their kids talk."

Once they see that feedback, Poskin said, they "unlock knowledge they already had" and start using it, such as deliberately including more open-ended questions in their lesson planning and making sure they extend the "wait times" between asked and answered questions.

One strategy Reid uses is to get students to reflect regularly on their own talking. She distributes what she calls "metacognitive cards" that the teenagers keep on their desks during class discussions. They make notes about things like whether they built on classmates' ideas or cited textual evidence and how much they talked. They evaluate their participation and set goals for improvement.

Finding New 'Moves'

An instructional coach from Hampden, Maine, Susan O'Brien, encourages teachers to do what she did with her 5th grade students when she was in the classroom. O'Brien used nine "talk moves" designed by two Massachusetts researchers to promote "academically productive" discussion.

To facilitate conversation, O'Brien rearranged her classroom so students sat in groups at tables. She taught them things to say in discussions to help them speak, listen, and build on one another's ideas, such as, "Let me see if I understand what you're saying" and "Can you say more about that?"

And she had to make another big change: She had to talk less and listen more. She started walking around the tables, eavesdropping on students' discussions.

"What I saw was that students started leading their own learning instead of having me up front doing sit-and-get," O'Brien said. "They were challenging each other and stretching their own thinking."

Cris Tovani, a literacy consultant and instructional coach whose 2017 book with researcher Elizabeth Birr Moje, No More Teaching as Telling, explores ways to reduce teacher talk, said that one of her favorite strategies for promoting good classroom discussion is using a simple chart she developed to record her observations as students discuss what they're reading, in small groups or as a whole class. She calls it "the discussion catcher."

In one section of the chart, teachers can jot down quotes or interactions they see that reflect good discussion, like one classmate helping another understand something, and share them later with students. Teachers can also use the chart for their own planning, noting areas of misunderstanding that could use a follow-up mini-lesson.

Revising the kinds of questions she asked, and waiting longer before providing answers, were important changes Tovani made in her classroom as she tried to get more students talking, she said. When students made comments, she'd "toss the ball back to them" with responses like, "Why do you think that?" or "Tell me more."

"Teachers hate wait time, but kids hate it more," she said. Talking about ideas together, rather than quickly resolving a question with a "right answer," produced more complex, interesting discussions, she said.

A Colorado high school history teacher, Lucas Richardson, came up with six strategies to build meaningful student talk in his class. A big one, he said, is asking questions that aren't designed to get a predetermined answer but instead aim to offer insight into students' thinking.

Whose Voice?

Richardson likes to start class with students' voices, staging 90-second "micro debates" about controversial topics. He restricts himself to no more than 10 minutes of talk at a time in his 70-minute class periods. He also has students do more ungraded writing in class, he said. That allows them time to think about what they want to say and is especially helpful with quieter students, he said.

A 2017 project called "Who's Doing The Work?," inspired by the book of the same name by teachers-turned-consultants Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris, explored a variety of strategies designed to get students talking more and got strong, positive results: After only six weeks of using those strategies, 90 percent of the teachers who participated reported that they talked less and their students were more engaged.

Led by Student Achievement Partners, which provides instructional coaching, several small groups of elementary teachers tried to expand students' own leadership in their learning. Instead of preteaching before children read a text, they'd let them read-or they'd read aloud to them if they were young children-and then ask questions like, "How did you figure that out?" Before correcting wrong answers, they tried using open questions like, "Is that right? How do you know?"

Teachers in the project also worked to downplay their own talk and facilitate discussion among students. They used such prompts as, "What do you think? Agree, disagree, or add on," and "Let's hear from three more people and decide if we agree." Instead of calling only on students who raised their hands, they tried asking everyone to write their responses down before a discussion began.

Responding to the survey after the project, one teacher said that "students are doing more of the thinking" with the new strategies. Another videotaped herself teaching before and after the project, and the second video showed "more students were contributing, thinking, and tracking" what their classmates said.

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How Much Should Teachers Talk in the Classroom? Much Less, Some Say

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Are teachers monitoring how much they talk vs. how much their students do? Research and teacher experience suggest they should be.

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Strategies to Engage and Motivate Students

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Strategies to Engage and Motivate Students

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Praising Effort As Much as Praising Intelligence

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Praising Effort As Much as Praising Intelligence

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How teachers operate has a huge impact on student mindset. It is important to encourage students effort in the classroom just as much as student intelligence. Making the effort to learn, even if you make a mistake is still learning! I motivate my students with tickets that can be exchanged for goodies when they give their best effort in solving problems or attempting to create generalizations of concepts.

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Thomas Edison on Inventing the Lightbulb

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All my students are mathematicians, and they are capable of math. Even the greatest minds make mistakes, and they celebrate each one!

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Students Collaborating, Learning While Having Fun

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Strategy 1 : Create a Social Learning Environment

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Strategy 1 : Create a Social Learning Environment

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-Collaboration and student interactions are a priority.

-Discussions offer more opportunities for students to give more reasoned explanations

-Students learn to listen and reflect to what their classmates are saying.

-They can develop mathematics fluency when analysing the arguments of peers.

-Reduce classroom anxiety.

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David Sousa (2015) says that teacher talk time should be done in 15-20 minute intervals to promote student attention and retention.

Whole class teacher talk time should only cover 20-30% of the class period.

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When the teacher is not talking to the whole class, this creates the opportunity for the teacher to meet with small groups of students with a more catered help. This is a great way to support students with various levels in a meaningful way instead of assuming a "one-size fits all" whole class solution. This also can lead to catered differentiation and scaffolding.

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Differentiation can be as simple giving students choice in their learning. This strategy improves student motivation, student engagement, and keeps students on-task. There is no better classroom management strategy than engaging classwork, which can be chosen by the student.

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In any environment that requires attendance, there's a significant risk of disengagement. Remove choice and you breed passivity or, worse, defiance.

Compulsory, free public education is one of America's greatest innovations-perhaps its most egalitarian principle-and it isn't going anywhere. But in schools and classrooms across the country, there's a powerful argument to provide more student choice across every grade level: to shake up inflexible social and academic schedules, reduce one-way learning, and place more responsibility firmly in the hands of students.

To some extent, the system itself-with its bell schedules, prescribed curriculum, and testing regimens-creates the habits that are hard to break. But purpose and motivation go hand-in-hand with volition, and when there's too much emphasis on control and compliance, notes a report by the Education Trust, it puts students in a position where they must "relinquish all power and decision making" and compels teachers to rely on power "to control bodies and minds instead of using their autonomy to invite learning." Within the realm of literacy alone, the research on choice provides a powerful illustration: According to a 2012 study, young kids who completed mandatory reading logs turned into desultory readers compared with students who logged their progress voluntarily. And another study, this time of eighth graders, revealed that when students shifted from assigned reading to choice reading, there was "increased reading volume, a reduction in students failing the state test, and changes in peer relationships, self-regulation, and conceptions of self."

Offering students choices-making it a regular dynamic in the school day-isn't a recipe for chaos. It goes almost without saying: Rules and boundaries are a necessary element in schools and classrooms, essential in many ways for keeping kids and adults safe and productive throughout the school day. But by centering choice, educators signal openness to negotiating the middle ground and offer students scaffolded opportunities to practice decision-making, explore their academic identity, and connect their learning to interests and passions. It can be a relatively small but consequential mindset shift-rather than assigning students partners, for example, you might let them choose whether to work alone or with a partner-that, ultimately, acknowledges and respects their humanity and recognizes the fundamental importance of agency.

"Want to know how to engage students, enthuse them, and bring out their best effort?" asks middle school teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron in MindShift. "Give them a voice in their decisions. In a society that barely listens to each other, listen to your students. In a system that can be a flood of top down, let your classroom be one that allows voices to trickle up."

Here are eight ways to provide children with choices across the grade levels.

Choice in the Early Grades

Give a say via voting: Even at the preschool level, choice can be a powerful motivator. "At my school, we work to give students choices that hold some responsibility within the classroom," writes preschool teacher Oi Ling Hu, who introduces classroom voting early in the school year.

The process starts small-which book to pick for read-aloud, for example-before Hu moves on to bigger topics like which activities to do at the park or which route to take to walk there. The process imbues kids with "a sense of autonomy and responsibility," she says, which serves them well as they advance into upper grade levels. "We have seen that when children feel that they have a voice in how they learn... they do their best to practice self-control and self-regulation as they want to retain their ability to choose."

Prioritize choice time: In spite of competing curricular demands, kindergarten teacher Jessica Arrow follows the research by prioritizing a 30-minute choice time within her literacy block each morning and a 45-minute choice time to wrap up the day. During choice time, students visit thoughtfully designed centers-a math center, a book nook, a sensory table, for example-to play and learn in unstructured ways that are aligned with the curriculum. It's a favorite time of day for her kindergarten students, who get to exercise some degree of choice and independence in a day that's otherwise dominated by "teacher-directed activities and transitions," Arrow writes.

Build ownership with class jobs: When Justine Bruyère reflected on why her second-grade students felt little ownership over their assigned class jobs, she decided to try handing over some responsibility to them. "To foster autonomy, I could relinquish some control of the job chart-my students could identify needs in the classroom and take on roles of responsibility to address those needs," writes Bruyère. With Bruyère's guidance, the class brainstormed a new list of jobs and prioritized them, and then students applied to their favorites and Bruyère made the final matches. The process was hugely popular, garnered buy-in from kids, and gave them a better understanding of what it takes to run the classroom.

Choice in Middle and High School

Consider flexible seating: Middle school English teacher Laura Bradley was already experimenting with flexible seating when her district decided to invest in additional resources like chairs on wheels and wobble stools. Bradley soon discovered that choice was more crucial than new furniture: Some students worked perfectly well standing at bookshelves; others preferred carpet squares, kneeling or sitting at low tables, or folding into nooks created with bookshelves or tables pulled up to a wall.

What's important, she says-again, sounding a note about the balance between autonomy and authority-is to be clear about expectations with respect to how students set up, work, and clean up when they're done. "I can say that the benefits far outweigh any management issues that arise," Bradley writes. "Students respond positively to the freedom and responsibility they are given, and they work hard to keep those privileges."

Cocreate classroom norms: In Bobby Shaddox's seventh-grade social studies class, shared classroom norms-a set of about 10 attributes, like communicative, focused, and serene-is developed by the group at the beginning of the year to guide their behavior and learning.

"By having children themselves create the norms, you are creating a pathway toward belonging for every single child in that class, and they have a role in this learning community that they had a share in building," says Pamela Cantor, MD, founder and senior science adviser of Turnaround for Children, emphasizing the importance of academic identity. It's both a compelling civics lesson and a practice that can have a big impact on classroom management, says Shaddox: "The classes that go really well are the classes when I start off reflecting on the norms and using those norms to articulate how our class will run well."

Make academic choices meaningful: Education researcher and author Robert J. Marzano suggests narrowing academic choice down to focus on three key areas: choice in the tasks that students perform, choice in assessment, and choice in learning goals. "Choice in the classroom has been linked to increases in student effort, task performance, and subsequent learning," Marzano writes in his blog. "However, to reap these benefits, a teacher should create choices that are robust enough for students to feel that their decision has an impact on their learning."

For example, while an oral or written report is often the assigned format, students might instead have the option to use their mobile device to record video or audio reports. Or consider opening up assessment options to include different types of graded products-building models, drawing diagrams, or creating flowcharts-so that all kids, including those who are spatially gifted, have an opportunity to shine.

Upend assigned reading: After years of teaching a set list of novels with study guides, close readings, and a big test at the end, AP literature teacher Brian Sztabnik polled his students to examine what was working and where to improve. The results were eye-opening. "Many had not read a novel cover to cover in their three years of high school.... Many gave up on reading long ago," Sztabnik writes. "Often, when students have no agency over what they read, they stop enjoying it. And this ultimately kills their motivation." After examining the research, Sztabnik upended his approach and gave his students much more reading choice and responsibility. "My students' scores on standardized tests soared," he writes.

For all students, and students of color in particular, regular access to a rich, diverse selection of reading materials is particularly important, says Kimberly Parker, a former high school English teacher and cofounder of #DisruptTexts. "Often, black youth, especially those regarded as in need of remediation, have the least amount of choice in text selection," Parker writes for ASCD. "They are given regimented reading instruction, an abundance of standardized test preparation, and little, if any, time to read works that resonate with them. We know, however, that choice drives reading engagement, and black youth need to be able to choose what they want to read."

Offer recess, even in high school: Unstructured time for play is crucial at all ages. At Montpelier High School in Vermont, there's a daily 15-minute recess period during which everyone is expected to unplug from the school day and engage in a completely different and renewing activity of their choice. Students and faculty come up with the activities-options might include open gym, chess, free art, music jam, or rock climbing, for example-and everyone gets to pick what they'd like to do. "We really make a point to say, 'You have permission and you need to stop what you're doing and do something totally different, something that's mindful, challenging, something that creates community, something that creates generosity,'" says special educator Bill Laidlaw. "It's very powerful."

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The Importance of Student Choice Across All Grade Levels

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When students get to make decisions about their learning, it can be powerfully motivating.

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1. Content : Give tasks with varying levels of difficulty that have various stages to give students access to their starting level.

2. Process : Keep the same learning outcomes for all students, but allow them to choose their own way of getting there.

3. Product : Not every assignment needs to look the same from each student. Let them pick out how they are going to demonstrate mastery of the concept.

4. Affect : Connect with students meaningfully, in the way that they need to be lead. Each student is different. Foster strong relationships with each student to understand the best way to motivate/support them.

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1. Hint Jar or Hint Cards

1. Students can choose to get a hint when completing work if needed.

2. Choice of Medium for Project

1. Video, Presentation, Website, Performance, Paper, etc...

3. Tri-Mind Strategy

1. Analytical approach, Practical Approach, or Creative Approach to a math situation