This blog is Part 3 of 3.

Here’s a link to Part 1.

And here’s a link to Part 2.

We began by thinking about the essentials of effective communication.

Then we looked at practical strategies around behaviour management, building rapport and communicating high expectations.

Here, we’ll conclude by focussing on techniques you can use in your teaching, to help you communicate with clarity and impact.

We’ll think first about explaining, then questioning, before, finally, looking at two communication strategies that can have a big effect on achievement.

How do we explain things?

Effective explaining is the hallmark of an excellent teacher.

Many things need to be explained as part of a lesson, including:

• Ideas
• Information
• Concepts
• Connections
• Approaches
• Tasks
• What learners need to do

Three simple rules will help you to enhance the quality of your explanations.

First, rehearse your explanations mentally before verbalising them or putting them into writing.

This helps refine them.

It also diminishes the chance your explanations are misinterpreted by your learners.

Second, supplement verbal or written explanations with other sources of information.

This will likely be visually and will usually come in the form of images, gestures or a demonstration.

Supplementing linguistic explanations with non-linguistic media gives learners a chance to access your message through a different form.

In addition, it allows them to check they have understood your explanation by comparing the information derived from both sources.

Third, where possible, connect your explanation to learners’ prior knowledge and experience.

This is a simple way to situate what you are explaining within the context of what is already known.

Doing this helps learners apply their existing understanding to the decoding of your current explanation.

It also allows them to make links between that which is new and that which is familiar.

Beyond this, it is worth exploring a variety of explanation techniques to see which work for you.

Having a repertoire on which to call means you can adapt your explanations depending on the circumstances in which you find yourself.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of different strategies:

• Analogies
• Images
• Diagrams
• Flow-Charts
• Examples
• Worked Examples
• Non-Examples (this is not right because …)
• Exemplar Work (that could also be annotated)
• Synonyms and Antonyms
• Metaphors
• Demonstrations
• Instructions
• Step-by-Step Guides
• Practical Experience
• Case Studies
• Stories
• Videos
• Audio
• Crib Sheets

In each case, the purpose is the same, namely, to allow someone else access to that which we know.

However, the methods vary and, in so doing, demonstrate(!) the range of options available to us.

When deciding on what explanation strategy you think is best, return to the essentials of communication outlined in Part 1:

Audience. Purpose. Medium. Message.

This helps you to make useful choices quickly and with confidence.

It is also worth noting that using two or three explanation strategies, either simultaneously or consecutively, is a good technique.

By doing this, you give learners access to your message through multiple means.

Re-Explaining

A further technique we can use when seeking to explain things is that of re-explaining.

This is where we give our initial explanation before explaining the information a second and possibly third and fourth time.

The aim is to help those learners who may have struggled to grasp our initial explanation.

To that end, it is generally preferred that the re-explanations become simpler, make use of strategies different to those first employed, or cover a combination of these two points.

Let Learners do the Explaining

The final technique to consider when it comes to effective explanation is getting learners to explain things to each other.

For example, we might explain what we want learners to do in a task.

Then, we ask one or two learners to re-explain this to the rest of the class.

Alternatively, we might explain a new idea, assess which learners have grasped it and then ask them to explain it to those learners who struggled to make sense of our initial explanation.

Here, the benefit comes from the fact that learners listen and talk to each other in a different way to how we listen and talk to them.

Having learners explain things to each other helps facilitate access to information and ideas by providing a different perspective through which these can be understood.

Questioning and Communication

We move now to questioning, an integral part of the teacher’s practice.

Good questioning almost always leads to good outcomes.

Such questioning is effective because the teacher has given thought to how they communicate.

This leads them to ask better questions than would otherwise be the case.

For more on the topic, see my Questioning Knowledge Base.

Here, let me show you five simple techniques you can use to ensure your questioning hits a consistently high standard.

Open vs Closed

Closed questions are often useful, particularly when we want to check knowledge or test recall.

Open questions provide greater scope, however.

They provoke responses that are more discursive and more reliant on reasoning, evidence and example.

As such, they involve more thinking.

You can use open questions as the basis of a lesson, as lesson objectives, to frame activities and for plenaries.

They are also the foundation on which any quality discussion – one-to-one, paired, group or whole-class – rests.

In the early stages of your career, it is worth identifying some thought-provoking open questions as part of your planning rather than leaving their construction to the last minute.

This will help you develop your ability to form and refine high-quality questions of this type.

Might

• What is the answer?
• What might the answer be?

The difference is small but instructive.

In the first case, knowledge is closed down.

The suggestion is that a single answer both exists and is being sought.

In the second case, knowledge is opened up and made provisional.

The implicit message is that many possible answers exist, and the learner should seek to provide one, supporting it through explanation.

Inserting the word ‘might’ into your questions is a powerful way to communicate a qualitatively different expectation regarding the type of answers you want from your learners.

Try it and see.

Justification

Communicating an expectation that all answers must be justified means learners come to understand that assertions are not acceptable as a form of knowledge.

This means that, whenever you ask a question, learners are under no illusions as to what they should be providing in response.

Not just an answer, but an answer predicated on reasoning.

Getting learners into the habit of justifying their answers takes time.

Persistence brings great rewards though.

Far more thinking will take place than would otherwise be the case.

And learners will also spend more time articulating their thought processes.

This means you gain access to useful information about what they know and understand at the same time as they have the chance to refine, edit and reflect on their own thoughts.

Question Stems

These are the procedural parts of questions. The bits that come before the subject.

Simple examples include:

• Who …
• What …
• Where …
• When …
• Why …
• How …

More complex examples include:

• To what extent …
• Do you agree that …
• Is it possible to argue …
• Why might someone think …
• What do you believe …

Familiarising yourself with a range of question stems appropriate for the age group and/or subject you teach means giving yourself a useful box of tools.

Whenever a question is required, you can turn to this box, take out a relevant question stem and use it as the basis for a great question.

Questions at the Door

I mentioned in Part 2 how greeting your learners makes a positive statement.

That it is a good technique through which to communicate enthusiasm and high expectations.

You can develop the idea by asking learners challenging questions as they walk into the room.

Doing this gets learners thinking about the learning and communicates a clear message:

• In this room we are focussed on developing our knowledge and stretching our understanding.

It may not be appropriate to do this at the start of every lesson you teach, but it is certainly worth using as an intermittent or regular practice.

Raising Achievement Strategy 1: Opening Up Success Criteria

Let us now turn to the two communication strategies we can use to help raise achievement.

The first of these is called opening up success criteria.

The second (see below) is modelling.

Success criteria are those things learners need to fulfil if they are to be successful.

Every task has a set of success criteria.

Making these explicit means giving learners a better chance of being successful.

Put simply, if we know what we need to do to succeed then we can focus our efforts effectively.

The flipside is that, if we don’t know what we need to do to succeed – or if this information remains implicit – then it is harder for us to be successful.

You can communicate success criteria in several ways.

Before you do though, it is important you understand what success looks like in a given lesson or task.

This includes identifying what higher and lower levels of success look like, reflecting the fact that not all learners will produce work of the same standard.

In addition, you should make sure your success criteria are suitably challenging yet sufficiently achievable to stimulate good outcomes.

This takes us back to our earlier points about consistently communicating high expectations.

Here are a range of ways in which you can open up success criteria:

• Self- and peer-assessment. By taking part in the process of assessment and looking critically at work (their own or someone else’s) learners gain an insight into what success requires.
• By displaying them on the board or on slips of paper during tasks. Learners can then refer to these while completing the activity.
• By verbally explaining them to learners at the start of the lesson and/or at the start of tasks.
• By providing exemplar work that shows learners how the success criteria can be met. You can annotate such work to provide learners with a clearer insight.
• Through modelling of what success looks like. This modelling can be verbal or visual. It can also include modelling the type of thought processes in which learners need to engage to be successful.
• Through providing checklists to which learners can refer while they are working. Checklists can be in the form of questions or statements. They can be task-specific or more general. In the latter case, for example, we might give learners a checklist for effective non-fiction writing that we ask them to refer to every time they create work of this type, regardless of the topic.

In conclusion, by finding ways to effectively communicate the success criteria against which learners’ work will be judged, you are giving your learners a much greater chance of channelling their efforts in the right direction.

This helps to raise achievement.

Raising Achievement Strategy 2: Modelling

Modelling means showing learners what you want them to do or how they might go about doing something in order to be successful.

It includes:

• Demonstrating how you want learners to engage with a task
• Showing learners how to think about a certain topic
• Showing learners what a successful piece of work might look like
• Demonstrating how to apply a particular thought process, such as problem-solving, to a given situation
• Showing learners what something means

In each case, we are calling on the findings of social learning theory.

This states something with which we are all familiar, but which can be forgotten in the classroom:

• We all learn through observation and imitation.

In fact, this is an extremely powerful way through which we learn.

It is not the only way, granted, but it is an important one.

Outstanding teachers help their learners to access ideas, information and ways of thinking by regularly modelling these during everyday teaching.

This results in effective communication.

The conveyance of information, in all its forms, is enhanced through the provision of models – verbal, written or visual – that learners can copy, imitate, internalise and develop.

If you take this into account when planning, when marking and, most importantly, while you are teaching, then good things will follow.

Not least a high level of achievement from your learners.

Let me now finish with a few questions, and some activities, you can use for further reflection around the topic of effective communication.

Questions

• To what extent do you already pay attention to your communication with learners?
• When you were at school, which teachers were able to build supportive, positive relationships with you and your peers? How did they do this? What techniques did they use? And what can you take away from this and use yourself?
• What would you like to characterise the atmosphere of your classroom? Choose three words that sum up the kind of atmosphere you want. How can you communicate this to your learners?
• Why are some questions better than others? Justify your answer.
• When was the last time you learned something through modelling? Were you aware the process was taking place?

Activities

• Walk around school during break or lunchtime. Observe how teachers are communicating with learners. Think about the messages they are conveying, whether good, bad or indifferent. Use this observation as a basis through which to reflect on the extent of our non-verbal communication, and the influence (perhaps overlooked) that this can have while we are teaching.
• Watch some skilled questioners at work on YouTube. Chat show hosts, journalists, political interviewers and barristers are all good examples to which you can turn. Think about how the questions they ask influence the tenor and content of the responses they receive. Having done this, reflect on how you could apply your findings to your own questioning.
• Select three or four challenging ideas connected to the areas of the curriculum you teach. Work out how you could model these for learners visually, verbally and through writing. In each case, consider what approach would best help learners to access, imitate and use the information you are seeking to convey.