Promoting thinking out loud through questioning
Written by: Hanna Beech
6 min read
HANNA BEECH, REGIONAL LEAD PRACTITIONER, THE KEMNAL ACADEMIES TRUST, UK
We know that thinking is an internal process. As a result, we cannot be certain that students’ thoughts are directly related to our teaching. We aim to provide the most relevant content in the most explicit and engaging way, and we hope that this leads to relevant thinking.
This is partly why evoking talk becomes so vital. Talk acts as the vehicle in which learning travels from the internal to the external, from implicit to explicit. If we want a window into the thinking mind, we need to generate not only thought, but also thinking out loud.
Raising the profile of thinking out loud in the classroom has long been of interest to dialogic teaching advocate, Robin Alexander, who states that:
‘children construct meaning not only through interaction between what they newly encounter and what they already know, but also from verbal interaction with others’ (2020, p. 13).
The value of oracy is reinfo
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Excellent brief primer – thank you!