- The nature of classroom communication
acknowledged or (sometimes) evaluated. (Mehan, 1979; Richards, 2006). Some of the exchanges could in principle
have happened just as easily without any classmates present.
In general students still had little control over the course of discussion. Kelvin wondered if he was controlling
participation too much—in fact whether the question-and-answer strategy attempted the impossible task of
controlling students’ very thought processes. By asking most of the questions himself and allowing students only
brief responses, was Kelvin trying to insure e that students thought about children’s play in the “right” way, his
way? To give students more influence in discussion, it seemed that Kelvin would have to become less concerned
about precisely what ideas about children’s play he covered.
Classroom discussion
After several more years of teaching, Kelvin quit lectures altogether, even ones interspersed with questions and
answers. He began simply leading general discussions about children’s play. The change again affected his planning
for this topic. Instead of outlining detailed content, he now just made concise notes that listed issues about
children’s play that students needed to consider (some of the notes are shown in Table 23). The shift in
participation structure led to several major changes in communication between teacher and students as well as
among students. Since students spoke more freely than before, it became easier to see whether they cared about the
topic. Now, too, more students seemed motivated to think and learn about children’s play; quite a few selected this
topic, for example, for their term projects. Needless to say, these changes were all to the good.
But there were also changes that limited the effectiveness of classroom communication, even though students
were nominally freer to speak than ever. Kelvin found, for example, that certain students spoke more than their
share of the time—almost too freely, in fact, in effect preventing more hesitant students from speaking. Sometimes,
too, it seemed as if certain students did not listen to others’ comments, but instead just passed the time waiting for
their turn to speak, their hands propped permanently in the air. Meanwhile there were still others who passed the
time apparently hoping not to speak; they were busy doodling or staring out the window. Since the precise focus of
discussion was no longer under Kelvin’s control, furthermore, discussions often did not cover all of the ideas about
children’s play that Kelvin considered important. On one occasion, for example, he meant for students to discuss
whether play is always motivated intrinsically, but instead they ended up talking about whether play can really be
used to teach every possible subject area. In itself the shift in focus was not bad, but it did make Kelvin wonder
whether he was covering the material adequately. In having these misgivings, as it happened, he was supported by
other educators who have studied the effects of class discussions on learning (McKeatchie & Svinciki, 2005).
Group work
By the time he had taught about children’s play for twenty years, Kelvin had developed enough concerns about
discussion as a communication strategy that he shifted approach again. This time he began using a form of
collaborative group work: small teams of students carrying out projects on aspects of children’s play that
interested them, making observations of children at play, reporting on their results to the class, and writing a
common report about their work. (Kelvin’s work guidelines given to the groups are shown in Table 22.) Kelvin
hoped that by giving students a common focus, communication among them would improve. Conversations would
deal with the tasks at hand, students would necessarily listen to each other, and no one could afford either to
dominate talk excessively or to fall silent.