So Achilles is the greatest warrior, but he is killed by Paris who seems pretty weak? And is he a god or not?”

“In all these stories, the people know what’s going to happen and they do the dangerous things anyway. Why? And why do the gods even care, given they live forever?”

“Why are most of the fighters men although a lot of the gods are women?”

Just some of the questions Year 8 asked me when I was covering their English lessons last term. They were studying Homer’s The Iliad through the modern re-imagining of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.

The questions themselves - almost certainly designed to keep me from setting the work - uncover something important about curriculum and the role of talk within it. The students were searching for ideas to think with: the nature of immortality, fate, gender roles. They knew the story - the facts - of the Trojan war, but needed to locate them in the bigger concepts at play in the study of classics.

This is perhaps a familiar pattern across the curriculum, where so-called big ideas - the access points to the “truths” of subjects - are only fully appreciated through deep thought. The aesthetic in art, the nature of power in history, the dynamics of the ensemble in music, the make-up of materials in science.

This is where oracy comes in. Informed discussion helps to bridge the divide between factual knowledge and conceptual understanding as it demands cognitive stretch, reasoning and reflection. How else could students begin to grasp the complexity of the ideas we are presenting to them?

Robin Alexander, an academic at the University of Cambridge and author of Towards Dialogic Teaching, sees dialogue as the means through which “pupils learn to reason, discuss, argue and explain”.

In our context (a 4-18 school in Stratford, East London), we have found that by practising these skills from the start, children not only become more articulate, but improve their logic. They are better able to mobilise bits of information into coherent thought. This is helping us battle the scourge of essays that regurgitate facts without any line of argument, among other things.

The key has been an emphasis on exploratory talk and the development of an associated toolkit. Neil Mercer, another Cambridge academic, sees three types of talk in classrooms: cumulative, disputational and exploratory.

The final type, he proposes, is the least used but most important. Cumulative talk sees ideas repeated and built on but not challenged, while disputational talk often ends up in slanging matches. Neither extends thinking.

By contrast, exploratory talk is knowledge-informed and interrogating. It is prepared for in advance and reflected upon afterwards. It could contain phrases like “Linking to what [x] said” or “To challenge what you said…”. There may be shared agreement or recognition of difference. It is through this process that children learn to frame and re-frame. They explore the big ideas that they have not quite grasped, making the hard yards as they reach for depth.

So what does this look like in practice? The techniques we use are developing and expanding all the time in the hands of our teachers. The ones we have found useful so far include:

The Harkness method

Borrowed from Phillips Exeter Academy, a long-established American private school, this technique sees children discuss a key academic concept around an oval table.

The teacher is absent from the debate and only monitors the talk. Research takes place in advance and the discussions often lead to written outcomes. The sessions work best when the enquiry questions are clear but expansive, such as: “What were the causes of the Second World War?”

Where more scaffolding is required, we use “talk roles” - instigators, clarifiers, summarisers, probers, builders - each with their own sentence stems.

Concept maps

This is a technique developed by our science department. It involves pictorially presenting a scientific process (natural selection, for example) and asking students to reflect on what’s happening from their initial inferences.

“Generative talk” focuses on establishing the connections at play, independent of scientific terms. The language is fed in later once students have grappled with the logic chain.

This approach draws on the work of the American philosopher Robert Brandom and his conception of inferentionalism. Brandom has it that you can stimulate high-level thinking if you take seriously not just the objects under study but the inferences we draw from them and their relationships to others.

Talking points

These are thought-provoking and sometimes misleading statements that are designed to stimulate discussion in pairs and trios. Pioneered by oracy academic Lyn Dawes, they are not necessarily about reaching consensus but rather airing thinking.

Examples include: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs” (economics), “Brexit marks the return of liberalism” (politics) and “We will never be certain what happened to the Tollund Man” (history).

‘The great conversation of humanity’

But it’s not just the big ideas of subjects that occupy hearts and minds in schools.

Fierce disagreements in the staffroom often touch on the fundamentals: is good behaviour best secured through intrinsic or extrinsic means? Exams are harming wellbeing. Exams are helping wellbeing. The curriculum is a straitjacket. The curriculum is clear.

Students too, particularly older ones, begin to interrogate the world around them as they find their place in it. As personal identities develop, children can disagree about the role of religion and the state, police and young people, the climate, generational divides. Here, again, a dialogic approach can be useful to bridge divides.

Oracy can help us to find way of what social theorist Mikhail Bakhtin referred to as “co-being”. This feels particularly important in the current climate. Polarisation is everywhere and schools can either be a Petri dish for discord or they can fight against it.

Valuing talk and different perspectives, emphasising the process of dialogue over its outcome, might help us rub along a little better. This is not about compromise but genuine respect for voice and celebration of difference. A utopian idea maybe, but a good bulwark against dystopia.

So we use specific tools when we are discussing controversial issues. The goal is not necessarily to find common ground, but to find new ground.

A recent CPD module, Exploring Dialogic Civility, has helped us create practice in this area. “Talk to win” protocols help students explore the extremes of an argument. Students are placed in the “traverse”, facing each other, and are asked to take strong positions.

This is used before we “talk to blend”, when students create a new understanding from their original positions. “Iceberg the disagreement” allows students to get underneath the argument dispassionately, looking for root causes. Once the layers are understood, the disagreements become less sharp.

So oracy helps us think with ideas and sometimes even means we disagree well. But perhaps at its most interesting, a talking school can act as a catalyst for building agency and social change.

The Tes oracy series

Part one: A focus on oracy can transform your school - 19 July issue

Part two: How learning discussion skills can deliver social change - 26 July issue

Part three: How emphasising oracy had a profound impact at one school- 2 August issue

Oli de Botton is head of School 21 in East London

This is the second in a three-part series on oracy. In the 19 July issue, Oli explained how a focus on developing students’ ability to express themselves has transformed his school; on 2 August, he looks at the wider benefits of his choice to highlight discussion over detention

This article originally appeared in the 26 July 2019 issue under the headline “Can ‘talking schools’ create social harmony?”