The Problem with "Turn and Talk" And How to Breathe Life Back Into It.

The Problem:

"Turn and Talk." "Round Robin." "Turn to your shoulder partner and discuss." "I say TEACH, you say, OKAY!" There are nearly as many names for it as there are teachers, but some version of "turn and talk" shows up in nearly every classroom.  The idea is that the teacher puts forth a question or discussion topic and students turn to a partner or group and discuss the prompt.  Often the teacher will call a few students to share thoughts or answers. 

The goal is for students to be able to process a topic or question more thoroughly because they have a chance to say it in their own words, hear it in someone else's words, and "teach" it to a peer. In a teacher's mind, Turn and Talk sounds like this:

Teacher: "Now that you've seen the film, turn to your partner and discuss: What made the Nile River Delta a good place for early Egyptians to settle?"

Jordan: Well, one thing that made the Nile good was the black soil.

Alex: Can you explain what the black soil is?

Jordan: It was soil that had a lot of nutrients for crops. The Nile made the soil black.

Alex: How did it make the soil black?

Jordan: I don't know. Do you?

Alex: It's something to do with the floods. Like, the Nile floods and then, uh, whatever's in the water, like, gets added to the soil.

Jordan: Oh, okay. What else?

Alex: Um, they could go down the Nile to trade... 

...etc..

Beautiful. I wish I could say that happened for every student every day in my class. All too often some version of the following problems show up, turning Turn and Talk into Turn and Zone Out:

Problem 1. Students answer the question with the first thing they think of.

Jordan: The Nile River. It had, like, fresh water.

Alex: Yeah, the Nile. They could drink the water. And, like, travel in boats.

Jordan: This is boring. 

Problem 2. The faster-talking/ more confident/ more popular student shares something and the other agrees/ignores/doesn't have time to share. 

Yvette: Well. The Nile brought fresh water, allowed people to travel down the river, protected the tribes from invaders, and provided fertile soil for crops. 

Violet: (Absently): Yeah, what you said. 

Problem 3. Students, covered by the sounds of others talking, do not talk about the topic at all.

Adam: Dude, I totally beat Halo 8 yesterday. 

Gemma: Whatever. You are such a dork.

My knee-jerk response to the distraction problems was to shorten the time allowed for discussion, therefore shortening the amount of time that students sat there wishing they could check their phones for something interesting. This of course, backfired, because then the students legitimately did not have the time to discuss even if they were prepared to. Other strategies were required.

Here are some ways to rejuvenate "Turn and Zone Out" so it becomes "Turn and Talk About THE TOPIC"..

Refresher #1: Give silent think time. Before you ask students to turn to each other, make 20-30 silent seconds of personal thought a requirement. Say: "Take 30 seconds of think time to come up with an idea of your own. Put a thumb up on your desk (index finger to your forehead, pencil in the air, foot in your mouth, whatever) when you are thinking of an idea. Get to the point where you don't move to "turn and talk" until all the students are thinking of an answer.

Refresher #2: Stop and Jot, Turn and Talk: A version of the first solution, have students take out scratch paper, notebook, iPad, or a Post-it to write their answer first. Then students share what they wrote before any discussion happens. 

Refresher #3: Create an environment where a thoughtful answer (but not necessarily a correct answer!) is absolutely required. I became so frustrated when students, who CLEARLY had not even attempted to talk about the prompt, were called with random cards and shrugged, "I dunno, we didn't come up with anything."  From the very first day, make sure students know that they MUST give an on-topic response when called on, even if they don't know the answer. That is, the response, "We know that people need food to live, but we're not sure how the Nile provides that," is a perfectly acceptable jumping-off point and is appreciated in the class.

Refresher #4: Ask good questions! If you want students to discuss, make your questions evaluative or ask students to list ideas or debate. If you want them to collect facts or reasons, have them take turns to make a list.

Bad questions: 

How did the Egyptians end up in the Nile Valley? 

How did the Nile make the soil fertile? 

Good questions: 

Which benefit of the Nile River was MOST important for the tribes' survival? Discuss and agree on ONE.

List at least six ways the Nile benefited early settlers. Take turns adding to the list.

Refresher #5: Give a challenge. Students love a challenge. Ask them to work together to summarize the main idea in exactly 21 words, or have their entire conversation silently by writing notes on paper. Short-form challenges for five minutes or less:

-Write an acrostic with a key word: DELTA, NILE, EGYPT

-Write a haiku or tanka about the topic.

-Summarize in exactly ____ words. Add a challenge by making the number smaller: "Turn to the person across from you and summarize in 21 words... Now turn to the person behind you and summarize it in exactly nine words."

-Pyramid: Have students write an answer. Then turn to a partner and combine their answer with their partner's answer. Then turn to another pair and combine the two pair answers into a single answer. So forth and so on. 

Add more ideas in the comments!

Refresher #6: Give sentence stems or discussion cards. Academic Conversations is an excellent book and has a "placemat" with conversational moves on it. These can increase students' options, giving stems like "Could you say more about..." "One example of this is..." etc. I've also had success with creating cards with sentence stems. Students draw cards and discuss using the stems they draw. 

Refresher #7: Online discussions. Discussion threads are an excellent way to get quieter students to share. Although this takes more time and effort, it is well worth it.  Schoology has a great option in their student discussion feature that prevents students from seeing other people's responses until they have made their own first response. This prevents everyone from jumping on the bandwagon with the most popular kid. 

Refresher #8: Digital crowd-sourcing.  Use Socrative (image below) to poll answers from the class. Project the question, and students join your virtual "room" with their phones, tablets, or laptops. Answers spring up in real time as students submit them, and then you can have students discuss what came up or vote on the best answers.