Whenever I visit one of our partner Kunskapsskolan schools in Sweden, you come back impressed by the way young people have the confidence to talk to you about learning and life. Being able to speak so fluently in English is one thing,  but their oral confidence is more impressive.

Why is that? Well yes I do think it has something to do with being Swedish. Young people in Sweden are given a bigger voice and family relationships are different. No Swede would ever think that  “children should be seen and not heard”.  However, you will also find the same adolescence diffidence and unwillingness to communicate that most British families experience in the mid teens. No, I would say most of it is because the teaching methods and approaches in Kunskapsskolan encourage talk and especially talking for learning.

This is not really about developing personal skills, although this is a critical success skill for young people entering the world of work, it is about effective learning. Constructivism is a learning concept that recognises that when we talk to students they build a mental map of their understanding. Often their understanding is partial and in some cases inaccurate. Only by talking constructively with students can you be certain that they have “mapped ” the same ideas and understood the points you were making. Not securing knowledge and understanding puts future complexity at risk.

So the KED (Kunskapsskolan Education) approach being used by LST, has built in lots of time for talk.  No just monologic but dialogic talk. Building time for teacher to support learning in groups and for individuals as opposed to classes is an important structural component of the school day. We call these session workshops.

However, at the end of every unit of work – step or theme course, students have to present their learning to a group of peers and/or  teacher. In addition, important learning is that which can be applied or used in the future or to new situations. Each course has regular opportunities to explore these new situations and ideas and students are asked to prepare for seminar discussions to talk about their ideas and understanding.

But talk is also an important as a first step towards effective language and literacy skills. Consider this research from Hart and Risley(1995)

“While children from different backgrounds typically develop language skills around the same age, the subsequent rate of vocabulary growth is strongly influenced by how much parents talk to their children. Children from professional families (who were found to talk to their children more) gain vocabulary at a quicker rate than their peers in working class and welfare families. By kindergarten, a child from a welfare family could have heard 32 million words fewer than a classmate from a professional family. Children in professional families heard a higher ratio of encouragements to discouragements than their working class and welfare counterparts.”

The Learning School Trust will be launching its “Language for All” strategy from October. It will be built on a number of key principles.

1. Every teacher is a teacher of language. This is the overriding principle.  The teaching of all subject areas should address the language demands of the content area. All teachers have a responsibility for this. 
2. All areas of the curriculum challenge students. The most effective way to raise standards is to increase the skill set of teachers rather than remove the challenge. 
3. Reading is key to a young person’s future. Any writing done by pupils must be informed by reading widely, critically and in depth.   The view is also that speaking and listening inform reading and writing and that the language skills are integrated. 
4. Talk is how learning happens. Effective learning takes place through dialogue.  There should be an emphasis on the value of dialogic talk in the classroom, seeing questions as part of this dialogue; that is, questions that are cumulative, exploratory and to which, in some cases, there are no answers. 
5. All areas of school life develop language. The programme is designed to enable language acquisition to happen in every space of the academy. For this to happen it has to be deliberate and planned; structuring opportunities for every learner to talk using formal, academic language.

So talking will be our starting point, both as a way of really embedding  learning and in building confident and expressive young people. I look forward to the time son when everyone who visits our academies will be impressed by their ability to  engage in dialogue and present their ideas confidently.