A Close Look at Whole-class Discussion

KEN WATSON Lecturer in Education, University of Sydney

It will, I suspect, come as no surprise to readers of English in Education to learn that the preferred teaching method of secondary English teachers in New South Wales is whole-class discussion. If a similar study to the one that revealed this information were mounted in the United Kingdom or the United States, it seems likely that the same preference would emerge.

But not all of these N.S.W. English teachers see whole-class discussion in quite the same way. The study referred to, which involved the observation of ninety English lessons in Years 7-10 (lst4th Forms) in eight different schools, revealed three distinct varieties of whole-class discussion, each characterised by a different kind of what Michael Stubbs‘ has aptly termed ‘conversational con- trol’.

In the first and most popular of these categories (some 60 per cent of the les- sons observed fell into this category, in whole or in part), closed questions (i.e., those for which only one answer, usually factual, is possible) predominate, and the teacher is generally content with one-word or very brief answers. In the second kind (evident to a greater or lesser degree in about 30 per cent of the lessons observed), the teacher still retains complete conversational control over the topic, over when and how much pupils may speak, but there are more questions that can be categorised as open (i.e., admitting of a range of responses) and the teacher responds to as well as assesses pupils’ replies to the questions. The teacher may also give the pupils some encouragement to engage in explora- tory talk.

In the third type (observed in no more than four or five lessons), the degree of conversational control is much less, and there is no demand that all or even most comments be funnelled through the teacher. The teacher’s questions are fewer, and almost always open, and pupil-initiated sequences more common. One of the best examples observed arose because the teacher made the physical setting more conducive to discussion by having the pupils re-arrange the furniture so that the class sat in a circle, but such an option is probably open to the teacher only when the class has fewer than about twenty-five pupils.

Let us look at an example of each of these three types. In the first excerpt, the teacher of a Year 8 class of boys has just read to them Stephen Spender’s poem ‘My parents kept me from children who were rough’ :

1 . Teacher: Keep your books open in front of you. Now, who can find some ways in which the poet shows us that the boys were rough?

2. Pupils: Sir!Sir! 3. Teacher: Williams? 4. Williams: They wore rags. 5. Teacher: Yes, what else? 6. Pupil 2: They swam in the nude. 7. Pupil 3: They threw mud. 8. Teacher: Yes. How did the poet react when they threw mud? Carter? 9. Carter: ‘I looked the other way, pretending to smile.’

10. Teacher: Good. Can anyone see any similes in the poem?

40 K E N WATSON

11. Pupil 5 : ‘. . . words like stones’. 12. Teacher: Another one? Yes? 13. Pupil 6: ‘. . . their muscles like iron’. 14. Teacher: Good. Now here’s a more difficult question. Can anyone suggest why these

similes are appropriate to the subject matter of the poem? Yes, Williams? 15. Williams: They suggest that the boys are . . . like hard . . . tough. 16. Teacher: Good. What weakness of the poet did the boys copy? 17. Pupil 7: His lisp. 18. Teacher: Yes. What is a lisp? 19. Pupil 8: When you can’t say your letter ‘s’. 20. Pupil: Or ‘r’. 21. Teacher: Yes. What does the last line mean? 22. Pupil: He wants to be friends with them. 23. Teacher: Yes. Any other suggestions? 24. Pupil: He is lonely. 25. Teacher: Yes. He also envies their freedom . . . and their strength. They can do things

that he’s not allowed to do. Yet he fears them too. Good. Now turn to the poem onpage81.

It will be noticed that only in (14) and (21) does the teacher give the pupils scope for demonstrating anything beyond literal comprehension. He steers clear of allowing the boys to explore their own and others’ personal responses to the poem. His approach contrasts sharply with that of another teacher treating the same poem (admittedly with an older g r o u p y e a r 10). The pupils have been discussing reasons for getting involved in fights, the springboard into this having been provided by a passage from Barry Hines’ novel, Kes.

1. Teacher: Let’s suppose that you’re in the position of Stephen Spender’s parents, who writes in his little poem-you saw it on page 173 of Dimensions-‘My parents kept me from children who were rough’. Is there someone who’d like to read us the poem, because it’s very short, and get the right tone in it-get the right tone. Is there someone who’d like to read it to us. Richard?

2. Teacher: Would you try and stop your son from fighting? (Pause) That’s a hard question. Would you try and stop your son from fighting? Would you . . . keep him from children who were rough? How good a philosophy of parenthood is that poem? Let’s hear from someone who hasn’t spoken.

3. Pupil 1 : I think it is part of growing up of a person through . . . fights with his compan- ions, and it’s like communication really, they learn what the world’s about . . . and that’s one of the factors of life which you have to go through and if you prevent them from going through this stage of life, well they might be restricted later on.

4. Teacher: You think they’re a better person for being in fights. 5. Pupil 1 : Yeah, well they’ll learn from their mistakes if they . . . they get into a fight and

they . . . 6. Teacher: They might be bad fighters after they fight, but they’ll be better people. 7. Pupil 1: Yeah. 8. Teacher: All right. That’s an interesting starting point. David. 9. Pupil 2: You can’t let them fight too much because (inaudible) hurt.

10. Teacher: Yes. . . um let me set up a situation for you. You send your son along to school, and he gets picked in a fight but won’t fight because Daddy’s told him not to fight. . . he’s not allowed to fight at school, so he goes away and hides behind the teacher and that’s the end. But from then on the kid is blacklisted, or black- balled, and cast out . . . now, thus . . . therefore I presume occasioning him fairly serious emotional hurt. Whereas, had he been in a fight with a big boy- couple of black eyes, perhaps, broken bones, nothing really-and it’s all over. Urn, what would you think would be worse, the emotional hurt of being teased and poked fun at, or the physical hurt that might result from . . . I’m asking David, because it was his suggestion . . . I’m . . . not trying to say that you’re wrong, I just want to test out what you’ve said, that’s all.

(Pupil reads poem)

A CLOSE LOOK AT WHOLE-CLASS DISCUSSION 41

11. Pupil 2: Yeah, I see your point because the emotional . . . emotional hurt is much more long-term than the broken bones and . . .

12. Teacher: You know how cruel school kids can be. You know . . . I’m not saying you personally, specifically, because I think you aN, and I, know how cruel school boys can be, and not only at primary school age. I think as you achieve increas- ing maturity not only do you achieve less desire to fight perhaps but your verbal capacity becomes such that you Iearn how to hurt, you learn how to hurt and you don’t have any qualms about hurting people whom you wish to hurt. And you know how keenly you can remember some of those insults that people have said about you over the years. It might be an insult that somebody said to you two or three years ago, and yet you can still remember it and it still makes you feel lousy when you think of it. Rob?

13. Pupil 3: Oh, I have a personal experience at my old public school-third class I think- a long time ago . . . but er see these blokes were picking on me and I wouldn’t fight and from then on they were really good friends of mine . . .

14. Teacher: That right? 15. Pupil 3: . . . buddies. 16. Teacher: So you’ve destroyed my case in flames in one hit. But that’s fine, though, I think

that’s important, but I wonder at third class age we’re talking about something different from say a boy in First Form who won’t fight . . . or somebody in Third Form who won’t fight. What happens? Yes, Chris?

17. Pupil 4: I think the thing is that if a child has been told by his parents, ‘You’re not al- lowed to fight’ um the child will do his best to try and avoid being in a situation where he’s going to be drawn into a fight anyway, and therefore he won’t get tang . . . tangled up with people-we won’t mention any names in the Form-who will try to force him into a fight, you know, just to see, to see how strong that boy is and prove the other boy’s superiority. Urn, I think that a child would never get up and say ‘My Daddy told me I don’t want . . . I shouldn’t fight’ I should say and urn thus leave it at that and run behind the teacher. I don’t think a child would ever actually have the guts to say that; I think he’d rather be drawn into a fight and suffer the few physical blows and the emotional blows that are going to come later.

18. Teacher: What do other people think about this? Cliff? 19. Pupil 5: Well, I like Robert said, I think er . . . it’s much easier for a fight to er be for-

gotten in third class because . . . I’ve got a good example, my little brother one day he comes home and says ‘I hate the kids up the street’, and next day he’s playing with them. Best friends again.

20. Teacher: At kids’ level it tends to happen.. . 21. Pupil 5: Well one day you hate a bloke, the next day you don’t. And in the First Form

anger seems to be a lot more . . . drawn out. 22. Teacher: Yes . . . if you have a fight with a bloke very often it takes a long time before

you’re ever . . . close to him again and you’re never as close as you were before. Yes, David.

23. Pupil 6: I think this superiority that Stanford is talking about is sort of the crux of the situation because er you know, you get in with the blokes and in with your mates it’s sort of very important all through your life to sort of prove yourself. . .

24. Teacher: But must it be a physical proving? I mean this is the assumption upon which we’ve been basing all our discussion right from when Kirk first mentioned it at the beginning, this need to prove our prestige by physical means.

25. Pupil: I think perhaps that it is, because ah sort of all through nature the physical rather than . . . the physical seems to be the more obvious proof whereas . . .

26. Teacher: It’s the way that animals use. You see amongst animals the chief buck in a herd of deer is the one who can fight the best, the head of a pride of lions is the one who can fight the best, and so it goes on through the animal kingdom. Now are you in fact saying that men are like that?

Now it is true that the specific aims of the teachers in the last two lessons are somewhat different: the first is focusing on the poem and its language while the second has used the poem as a starting point for an exploration of an aspect of human nature. It is certain, however, that both would see among their larger

42 K E N WATSON

aims that of encouraging the pupils to think critically about the subject of the discussion. We have seen that the first teacher, by his method of questioning, by the sort of conversational control he exerts, gives his pupils little scope for anything beyond literal comprehension. The second teacher, while still clearly in control of the discussion, adopts quite different strategies. He (generally) listens patiently to what his pupils have to say and shows by his replies that he takes their contributions seriously; he encourages them to elaborate (4); if he thinks a response is at too superficial a level he creates a hypothetical situation which forces the pupil to re-examine his position (10-11); he encourages pupils to draw on personal experience to illuminate the problem (13; 19); he allows pupils to develop their ideas at length (17); he tries to show pupils where their argu- ments are leading (26).

The example of the third type of whole-class discussion comes from a Year 10 lesson in which an able class is discussing Seamus Heaney’s poem, The Play Way. Here the teacher’s conversational control is so relaxed that the pupils often feel free to follow the line of thought suggested by one of them rather than that offered by the teacher :

Transcript

(The pupils have read the poem silently.) 1. Teacher: Well, who’s going to say something? 2. Pupils: Enjoyable. . .

It’s nice. I liked it.

23. Teacher: Does this sound like a fairly normal classroom? (pause) Come on- you’ve had a lot of experience of classrooms.

24. Pupil: Yes. 25. Teacher: Well, what is there about it that is

normal? Miriam, you look as if you are very aware of it.

26. Pupil 8: It’s normal in that it’s something that a teacher is trying to give the class an idea . . . which in a subject Iike English is more likely to be . . . different . . . well not different . . , but trying to get the class to express themselves and to (inaudible)

27. Pupil 9: Is this musical English, or . . . 28. Pupil 10: It’s musical appreciation . . . 29. Pupil: No, it’s a stimulus for writing . . . 30. Pupil: We used to do something like that

in primary school.. . 31. Pupil 10: I thought the poem was about

primary school. . . 32. Teacher: You thought it was primary school? 33. Pupil 10: Yes . . . it’s a really co-operative

class . . . 34. Pupil: But what about the jive? 35. Pupil: (inaudible) jumping out of their seats. 36. Teacher: Do you think that . . . the poet

would indicate all the . . . distractions that would occur in the early part of the lesson?

(Responses 3-22 omitted.)

Commentary

(26) to (35) constitutes a remarkable sequence in which conversational control passes to the pupils. The teacher’s one intervention (32) is simply to confirm that she has heard correctly.

Here the teacher reestablishes conversational control, and asks a question which seems to admit of only one answer.

A CLOSE LOOK AT WHOLE-CLASS DISCUSSION 43

37. Pupils: No. 38. Teacher: How does he indicate that there are

some distractions? 39. Pupil: Just by putting that one ‘Can you

jive’ . . .just some.. . 40. Pupil: (inaudible) 41. Teacher: Is it a very prepossessing environment

they’re in? 42. Pupil 8: You get the impression that they are

usually a hard class . . . and that the teacher’s had some sort o f . . . a breakthrough. . . (inaudible) that this is the first time anyone’s got through to them.

43. Pupil: (Inaudible) 44. Teacher: Umm . . . ves . . . ‘Thev have for-

It is significant that Pupil 8 feels free to ignore the teacher’s question and to take up the issue raised in (33-35) instead.

The teacher allows herself to be

45. Pupil: 46. Pupil:

47. Pupil:

48. Pupil:

gotten me.-For once . .-. They trip. To fall into themselves unknowingly.’ Yes.. . (inaudible) When I asked about its being a normal classroom I didn’t expect an answer straight away about what was going on in the classroom. I meant the physical environment. Do you see the way the poem’s constructed? It begins with the physical environment and then moves on to . . . what shall we call it . . . Spiritual? (giggles) I don’t really think it’s a hard class to get through to . . . because it sounds like they’re dependent on h im-or whoever it is-for their ideas.. . type of thing.. . and now they’ve . . . expressed it in their own way just through music. They’re not sort of dependent on him all the time. Yeah, it says ‘They have forgotten me / For once’. They’ve forgotten it’s coming from the teacher.

When it says ‘but now I The big sound has silenced them’ I thought they’d all been objecting to it and talking and being stupid about it and then when he put on the record it really affectedthem.

49. Teacher: ‘the big sound’ . . . the big sound of Beethoven.

50. Pupil 9: I like the two lines ‘each authoritative note I Pumps the classroom up tight as a tyre’. That’s good. It does do that . . . in a classroom . . . because in English especially. . . or in Music or some- thing.. . you start off like we started off today with ‘It’s nice’ or ‘I

deflected from her question while she considers Pupil 8’s point in relation to the evidence in the poem. She then returns to the original point, apparently hoping to develop some discussion of the poem’s construction.

Again a pupil feels free to follow an earlier line of discussion rather than follow the path marked out by the teacher,

The pupil here is very supportive of the previous speaker-a good indication of the climate of collaborative endeavour that has been built up in the classroom. Expressions like ‘I thought’ under- line the tentativeness of the expres- sion of opinion and signal that the speaker is open to correction.

The teacher’s comment here has a supportive function. Is it reading too much into these words to assert that the teacher has temporarily abandoned her directive role? An extraordinarily perceptive comment. The hesitations underline the exploratory nature of the talk.

Here is an example of a rare event in whole-class discussion: a pupil- initiated sequence.

44 K E N WATSON

liked it’ . . . but as you get sort o f . . more into it . . . the whole atmosphere . . . brings everyone closer.

51. Tencher: Why do you, when you’re talking

64. Pupil: 65. Pupil:

66. Pupil:

67. Pupil:

68. Pupil:

The teacher neatly seizes the opportunity to have the pupils reflect on the opening of the lesson. (Response 2)

- . . about poems, say ‘It’s nice’ or *I like it, it’s simple’? (Responses 52-63 omitted) (inaudible) it’s about to explode. There’s nothing else left . . . no room.. . No room for anything but the music. But it’s not just the music . . . that’s pumping. . . it’s what the kids are writing. Everyone’s sort o f . . . You know when you start writing you think ‘oh yeah’ and then you get onto some aspect and you get really involved . . . I think because there’s so many of them . . . a classroom full . . . plus all the music.. . I think the atmosphere’s so (inaudible) . . . nothing more could go into i t . . . not tense.. . but the highest you can get (inaudible) because they’re worked up.

Again conversational control has passed to the pupils.

Readers who have persevered with the admittedly difficult task of reading these transcripts will surely feel that the second and third transcripts are super- ior to the first, though they may also feel that the sort of conversational control exhibited in the third example is likely to be achieved only in exceptional cir- cumstances. Indeed, it must take many months of patient work to create in the classroom an atmosphere in which all contributions, whether by teacher or pupils, are treated with equal respect, and leadership in discussion can pass easily from teacher to pupil and back again to the teacher.

There seems little doubt, then, that in a subject like English the second and third types of whole-class discussion are superior to the first; there seems little doubt, too, that teachers frequently deceive themselves about the nature of their discussion lessons, and about the proportion of pupils actively involved. In follow-up interviews with teachers, it was found that those teachers exerting the sort of conversational control illustrated in the first transcript frequently believed that they were encouraging critical thinking, that they were allowing pupils opportunity to develop their answers, that they were responding to rather than simply assessing pupil responses. Further, they quite commonly believed that a greater proportion of pupils was actively involved than was generally the case. Several commented that they tried to ensure that almost every pupil had a chance to speak, yet the number of pupils actually responding seldom exceeded 50 per cent. The following table of thirty lessons (Table l), spread over six of the eight schools, shows the number of pupils actively involved as compared with the number in the class. Of course, one would hope that at least some of the silent pupils were also involved! Nevertheless, there is a growing number of research studies which indicate that the opportunity to verbalise plays an im- portant part in achieving ~nderstanding.~

How rarely these teachers encouraged pupils to develop ideas and use talk in

TA

BL

E 1

. Num

ber

andp

erce

ntag

es o

f pup

ils in

volv

ed i

n w

hole

-cla

ss d

iscu

ssio

n (3

0 le

sson

s)

Les

son

Pupi

ls in

volv

ed

1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22 2

3 24

25

26

27

28

29

30

20

19

13

11

11

25

14 1

8 17

14

19

17

14

11

5

6 6

10

5 6

23

13 1

4 18

12

13

11

15

24

12

No.

in c

lass

32

40

34

29

31

30

25

34

32

29

27

29

19

21

29

21

30

25 2

1 29

30

26

28

29

26

25 2

8 27

29

31

% of

pup

ils in

volv

ed

62.5

41.

5 38

.2 3

7.9

35.5

83

.3

56 5

2.9

53.1

48.

3 70

.4 5

8.6

73.7

52.

4 17

.2 2

5.6

20.4

40

23.8

20.

7 76

.7

50 5

0 62

.1 4

6.2

52 3

9.3

55.6

82.

8 38

.7

TA

BL

E 2

. Num

ber

of p

upil-

initi

ated

sequ

ence

s an

d pu

pil

expa

nsio

ns, t

oget

her

with

num

ber

and

perc

enta

ge of

open

que

stio

ns

Les

son

1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20 2

1 22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

pupi

l ini

tiate

d se

quen

ces

3 0

3 0

00

0

00

0

11

00

0

0

01

0

02

0

13

0 1

21

40

0

~~

-~

Pupi

l exp

ansio

n 1

5 7

43

63

2

10

4

14

0

00

0

00

10

0

12

0

15

0 7

10

2

10

0

-_

__

~

Ope

n qu

estio

ns

21

52

6

00

22

9

2

12

6

5 8

5

2 0

00

3

06

1

4 5

41

71

3

90

3

32

43

28

20 5

25

18

12 3

2 11

30

33

25

21

9

9 8

7 11

5

17

17

15

15

19

32

19

15 5

3 19

- - - - -

- - - - - - - - -

- -

- - -

- - - - - - - - - - -

E z 0

% of

ope

n qu

estio

ns

6.3

34.9

92

.9

0 0

8 5.

6 75

6.3

9.

1 86

.7

15.2

32

23.

8 22

.2

0 0

0 27

.3

0 35

.3

5.9

26.7

33

.3

21.1

53

.1

68.4

60

0

7.7

46 K E N WATSON

an exploratory manner is shown in Table 2. This gives the number of pupil- initiated sequences and the number of pupil expansions occurring in the same thirty lessons, as well as the number of open questions expressed as a percentage of all questions. (In this piece of research, responses by pupils were classified as pupil expansions if the teacher invited or otherwise encouraged pupils to develop their answers. Such action by the teacher was seen as encouraging those ex- ploratory uses of language which seem to lie at the heart of language as a means of learning.)

While teachers are certainly making greater use of small-group methods, it seems likely that whole-class discussion will remain the preferred teaching method of the majority for some time to come. It does seem important, there- fore, that teachers be aware of the effects of different sorts of conversational control, and particularly of the ease with which they can deceive themselves about the nature of their discussion lessons. It would seem that teachers need to distance themselves at times from the discussions they are leading in order to examine the kind of conversational control they are exerting. They need to listen to themselves, to monitor their own performance; only then will they become sensitive to the ways in which their language and modes of control are inhibiting or encouraging the development in their pupils of ‘the utmost personal com- petence in using the lang~age’.~

Notes 1. Michael Stubbs, Language, Schools and Classrooms. London: Methuen, 1976, p. 83. 2. I am grateful to Douglas Barnes and Geoff Williams for their analyses of this transcript,

analyses which contirmed my interpretation of it. My debt to the work of Douglas Barnes is apparent throughout the article.

3. For example, R. M. Gagne and E. C. Smith, ‘A Study of the Effects of Verbalisation on Problem Solving’, Journal of experimental Psychology, vol. 63, 1962, pp. 12-18.

4. This is the central aim of the English Syllabus currently in force in N.S.W. schools (Years 7-10).

TEACHING SHAKESPEARE IN THE SECONDARY SCHOOL

We regret that one acknowledgement was unintentionally omitted from Brian Rowe’s article in the Summer 1979 issue of this journal. Some material on pages 4849 drew on an article by Dr David Rostron, “Some Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare”, in The Use of English, Spring 1975.