When we talk about cutting workload, it’s often focused on cutting down on teachers’ marking and planning. 

Very little attention is paid to how we can increase the efficiency of the students through the fostering of their skills, and even more rarely their talk.

Teaching students to have effective habits of discussion can have a real impact on the clarity and quality of work produced in your class. 

Quick read: 4 ways to remove the fear of lesson observations

Quick listen: Learning through play: what are the benefits?

Want to know more? We’re making it hard to make it look easy

Moreover, efficient student talk can allow you a lot more focus on tasks, yielding a much higher output for the time you put into preparing. 

But how?

Differentiate between types of talk 

We often expect students to switch between discursive talk and presentational talk at the drop of a hat. The pair or group discussion quickly goes from a talk about a topic to the voicing of ideas to the whole class.

Differentiating between these types of talk and giving students the time and guidance on how the two differ can be an effective way to ensure that you get the most out of these moments.

Model good habits

A lot of teenagers don’t have the exposure to talk that we might hope for. Exposing students to the different ways in which they can communicate is really important for their learning. 

Assuming an understanding of social conventions can lead well-planned tasks to come apart.

As part of your practice, simply modelling good communication is a low-workload approach to ensuring that students are able to engage effectively with each other. In the long run, it can save a significant chunk of time (and a lot of blank expressions).

Use scaffolded resources

Providing simple scaffolding for students to support their talk can make  discussions and presentation of responses in class more effective.

As always, low cognitive load and consistency are two important ingredients, but apart from that anything goes. 

It might be phrase starters, questions, turn-taking patterns - anything. The best thing is that you can use the same slide (or resource) over and over again - it’s the skills you’re refining, not the content.

Use Socratic questioning 

Taking it back to the (original) old school, you could consider using some Ancient Greek-style questioning to encourage deeper thinking without creating loads of extra resources.

It’s a real skill to get it right, but Socratic questioning is a surefire way to get your class thinking.

This approach utilises systematic, disciplined and deep questions, normally focused on fundamental concepts, principles, theories, issues or problems to get students to understand connections between things and to vocalise their ideas.

Not only does this encourage deeper thinking, it shows students that vocalising thinking is a way in which they can problem solve really efficiently.

In turn, this can heighten their independence when it comes to overcoming hurdles in their learning.

Student talk isn’t the first thing that you might consider addressing to reduce your workload, but more effective and efficient talk leads to more engagement and this can be a huge factor when reducing the burden of teaching.

Adam Riches is a senior leader for teaching and learning, specialist leader in education and head of English. He tweets @TeachMrRiches