Educator's advice to teachers: Shhh!
An official with Saskatoon Public Schools says if teachers want students to get more out of class lessons, they should talk less.
Wendy James, the school board's collegiate renewal and curriculum co-ordinator, recently wrote a blog post about how effectively students retain verbally-relayed information in class.
The answer is: not much — not if a teacher talks for too long without interruption.
"It's pretty easy to have too much talk when you're in high school," James told CBC Radio's Saskatoon Morning earlier this week. "The research says the most a student can handle is slightly over 10 minutes but the reality is less than five before students do some thinking of their own."
That's why, for example, TED Talks don't go over 20 minutes. James said "they know that, after that point, nobody can pay attention."
Breaking talks into chunks
James's advice? Periodically checking in on students to make sure they're on the same wavelength as the teacher.
"A lot of it is about how much talking you do in a row between actually allowing students to do their thinking," said James.
While she said it may be a difficult concept for some to grasp — given the primacy of talking in education — the benefits of her alternate approach were on full display in a high school classroom she visited earlier this week.
"[The teacher] had moved away from that, and [instead] doing little bits of video and a little bit of students figuring something out and then a quick check," said James. "The end result was the teacher was so much more confident that students were understanding."
Lest your attention run out, we'll end this article here.
