 Welcome to ThinkTech Hawaii today on Monday, February 15th. This show is the state of the state of Hawaii, which airs on Alternate Mondays. I'm your host, Stephanie Stowe, Stowe Dalton. This show brings news of events and issues in our state with guests to share their expertise and experience and viewpoints on business, government, economics, law, public health policy, and safety, transportation, and also education. Today's show focuses on education specifically teaching. Hawaii's diverse public school classrooms have for decades welcomed out-of-state teachers, developed skilled local teachers, and partnered with private, state, and federal educational research programs to improve local students' school success. Reports of that work success point to classroom teaching that increases student talk and participation opportunities, especially in schools with needy students and highly diverse student populations. Teacher responsiveness and encouragement is also associated with reports of student success. Such observed changes are often explained as a talk story approach, even when observations occurred on the mainland in various states and in foreign classrooms. In Hawaii, talk story usually means everyone willingly participates in any way they can talk themselves into it and stay in it. How teaching can build use of this compelling approach, especially with needy and diverse students, is now studied widely. Since it appears that local classrooms will soon return to in-person teaching, there is an opportunity for teaching practice to benefit from these findings to assist teachers' enormous task to bring back all students to success in school. Our experts are here to explain more about this kind of talk power approach and also its implementation, how to influence teachers to be skilled this way in the classroom with their students. Our experts are welcome today and we have Dr. Ronald Gallimore, who is a merit from UCLA and formerly a UH Manoa professor. He's studied the Hawaiian culture on the leeward coast years ago and that has been foundational research for developing and implementing teacher practices to serve the needy diverse students of Hawaii. Dr. Bryant is our other expert. He is an associate professor in the Department of Teacher Education at BYU, but he's unfortunately in Provo, Utah, instead of Honolulu or actually Honola. His work focuses on sustaining equitable teaching practices in math teaching in rural Mexico and to enable equitable classroom talk in the low income schools here on Oahu in Hawaii. So welcome to both of you. Thank you for participating in the show. So what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at a fourth grade videotape as soon as I ask each of you two questions, which maybe you can be give us a little over a little what structured not a structured overview, but a little statement about what we're going to be seeing. The teaching that we're going to see is the talks, talk, powerful talk approach and the label of this approach to use it in classroom is now called instructional conversation. Dr. Galamour, Ron has been instrumental in having making this happen here and I wanted to ask him why is it called instructional conversation? It's actually intentional that it sounds contradictory because most people when they think instruction, think of a teacher directed lesson in which teacher talks most of the time and the students are responding. Teacher asks questions as students respond. Conversation implies a two way conversation, a discussion in which there are less focus on a hidden agenda in the mind of the teacher or the one of the speakers as so much as an exchange of ideas. So it is deliberate. Now, it came to be called this back when the commandment of schools was operating a laboratory school and we were looking for ways to improve the reading achievement of native Hawaiian children. What we just saw was the children came from a background where talk story was very common and in talk story everybody gets to jump in, contribute, put together a story, each member of the conversation contributing to it and through a series of explorations we discovered that we could use that to teach reading comprehension if the teacher let the students control the terms. See who got to speak which is like talk story. Nobody in a talk story has to be called on to speak whereas in a typical lesson teachers are calling our students to speak. But the big trick we discovered was if the teacher controlled the topic and used questions and other comments to keep the students on the topic and let the students control the terms, you ended up with a conversation that was instructional. The teacher directing the topic but the students controlling the terms and out of that came a rich supply of ideas and constructions that the students could use in their reading lessons and in their writing. What's interesting, yes, very well described and certainly kind of a paradox, instructional conversation, at least the way we've always thought of it. So I wanted to ask Dr. Jensen Bryant now about the label that he's using for this kind of teaching approach and his label is Equitable Classroom Talker ECT. So, Brian, can you tell us a little bit about what that means and how it's developed this idea forward? Yeah, I would say that we haven't landed on one label. We're sort of exploring labels and we're trying to build on the rich long 50-year history of instructional conversations and other work on dialogic teaching by folks like Courtney Kazdin and Bud Meehan and others. There are two challenges that we're really trying to work on to extend the work of instructional conversations. One is to address issues of equity and by that we mean whose lives are represented in the talk, whose lives are discussed and how are their assets brought to bear in the conversation and the second challenge we're trying to address and this figure speaks to this challenge is how to realize and sustain implementation of this talk across a variety of classrooms and so that's you know I'm working on this with colleagues at UH Manoa and other places like Dr. Lois Yamauchi, our family, my wife and five kids will be there in Oahu July to December and we're working in some of the schools including on the Leeward Coast and in the northern area there in Oahu and we have a hypothesis that if we can create these formative measurement systems as was shown in that figure we can we can sustain the implementation of this type of talk better. One that's grounded in these rich concepts gives teachers information direct from the teaching and provides guidelines for using that information in teams to sustain the implementation over time so that's something we're working on and it's a hypothesis I plan to pursue for the next several decades. It goes on and on so I think that this structure or restructuring of notion of what's happening in these interactions in classrooms it's a very good picture to have in our heads as we watch the taste. How do you feel about your grandmother? Good. What do you mean good? How do you feel about your grandmother? Good good because she's my mother my mother. Okay so I hear you saying that you feel good about her because she seems to assist you with things. Yeah. So any other reason you feel good about your grandmother? She cooks dinner for us. She always spends money on us. So she gives you presents or things? Yeah. She buys a lot of presents. Could you describe your grandmother to me? Curly hair. Oh Curly hair. Black. Black. Um Hawaiian. And she wears a shirt. She wears a shirt. I don't know. You've never seen your grandmother John? Only when I was small. You don't remember anything about her? No. She didn't change. Why might she change no Alani from when he knew when he was a little kid to now? She's old. Ah so your grandmother is old because and over time the grandmother would get older. What shows signs? How do you know when your grandmother's getting old? She gets gray hair. Her face gets wrinkled. And uh the way they talk and they can't hear. You see some physical changes in them like their hair green. Yeah no. Not a So your grandfather's pretty active huh? He doesn't show. He always brings silver dollars. Yeah he likes to call us out man. Yeah take them. So does your grandfather seem old to you? Uh no he's 86 but he's any kind. So why even though he's 86 why don't you think of him as an older man? What do you do to act young? Ah he does lots of things and he's supposed to fight. What might keep an older person healthy and active? Okay and you also said something. What did he say his grandfather does? No about visiting. Where does he go sometimes? He goes to Las Vegas. Why do you think he does that? He's a poker player. He likes to play. So that's kind of like his what? Thank you. Okay great. I uh I think that uh we showed that out of context you know of course that's part of a much much larger lesson um and we just wanted to present uh the situation so that it could be kind of freshly commented upon by um Ron who has worked with this long and hard and um and and then by Brian. So so Ron would you say a few things about what just went on and what we see there that is interesting for our purposes of uh dialogic teaching and how it might be different from traditional directed reading lessons? Well uh first of all you know I've watched a lot of video of lessons and one thing I learned is you miss a lot if you don't look at it a lot of times so I think many of your uh uh people visiting the podcast Stephanie are going to look at that and wonder what the heck was that and what what was the point of it and some people will see one thing and another but uh before I mentioned the context of this one thing about this is this is also a language learning lesson these students are being you'll notice the teacher never criticized the way the students express themselves never she focused entirely on the message or the content of what they're trying to say and then she helped them by asking questions and making other verbal moves to help them express more fully the thought they were trying to express and in that they are learning a way of speaking that is more in the academic sense she spoke in full sentences she used full questions she did follow up she didn't jump from topic to topic she kept focusing in on one thing bringing the students back so when somebody brought up Las Vegas she didn't say no no we're not talking about that today she said she built on it she used it and all this time these students are hearing her speak standard English in full sentences so there's a learning process going on there now the context of this was just say that it's so good you said that because if you look at it I would expect someone not familiar with this and not seeing it multiple times as it looks like a completely social situation and what you're pointing out is yes it is that at one level but there's much more going on here and in fact we have researched this and documented that over the course of a year students having these kind of conversations actually acquire a greater vocabulary a wider vocabulary they begin to use more complex sentence structures if they have these kind of opportunities for a focused conversation where the teacher keeps them on the focus on the topic and keeps pulling out of them a more elaborated version of their idea now the context here is after this lesson they're going to be asked to write a story about their grandparent so she is really helping them generate a whole lot of ideas which they will then write about and then they'll use that writing they did to build vocabulary and to learn more about English and grammar and spelling and all the rest of it so the meaning to them that it's about their grandparents will be used as motivation to learn about things about the English language yes very interesting and of course many other activities will develop out of this and this is one lesson a piece of one lesson within a whole week of a unit okay so Brian Brian what is it that you see there that relates to your emphasis on Bob sir observing teaching yeah I mean there's just a lot of good teaching that happens there right the teacher is letting students talk there's it's very multi-voiced right she's not correcting them she's the students if you listen closely use some of their everyday language like when they're the boy on the upper part of the frame is citing his grandfather he uses some Hawaiian pigeon in there and it's it's really wonderful she's not correcting that and there are points where she restates what the children say while extending and giving new words right so it's just wonderful teaching I think all of those things are really important you would never expect in a three-minute clip to see every feature of classroom discourse that you would want to see it wouldn't be you know feasible right but I think one thing that's important to me is is that the talk is communal meaning that yes it needs to have some direction from the teacher but in that three-minute clip there was only one brief moment where there was peer-to-peer talk the rest of the talk was all peer or was all student-to-teacher and teacher-to-student and so that's really important because there were the the female students weren't as vocal in that three-minute clip and again it's three minutes right who knows what happens before and after as as Dr. Gallimore just explained but for talk to really be equitable for it to enhance opportunities to learn for every student in the classroom there needs to be opportunities for all students to take initiative and for them to identify with one another's well-being and ideas so more peer conversation is is really important but that's a really good point that you make in a certainly a marker of the nature of that that work which is a communal experience of talking and I think that there's some other things going on in there too which which I think most people would notice if they were seeing this for the first time and it relates back to Ron's initial point about controlling turns or controlling topic and there were no hands raised that all of the participation was coming through a natural method even though the teacher may you know do do some physical things to bring people on but I think that it kind of pulls from that initial point that Ron made and that these students are used to this because students take a while to not be they take a while to get out of this hand raising and structured conversational arrangement so maybe what we can do right now is go take a look at the next clip and I know we have a question we'll get to in a minute but if we take a look at the next clip it moves along to kind of a different looking conversation but it has it has a focus more on the text material and the discipline or the content of the work so what we've already seen was mostly an experience-based conversation and a vocabulary development and a participation experience of confidence building and comfort in the role of speaking about learning material so in this one we'll see something that's a little bit different was what brandy can you restate what the problem is the principal didn't allow people playing soccer anymore okay the principal didn't allow anyone to play soccer anymore okay so we said or did you want to add something I think that's the problem okay the principal didn't allow anyone to play soccer anymore anyone to play soccer anymore that is the problem right that we're going to deal with right now now so then what happened what was one of the actions now what could you do did you just have to get it off from your head or where could you okay so you can go back to the text and look what was one of the actions dr all the girls are taking over the field the girls are taking over okay you're talking about what happened during the soccer game or what happened after they couldn't play soccer anymore well they couldn't play soccer anymore right so then what happened what okay do you remember who told the class that the principal took away soccer um Julia um who you didn't think go ahead mr floris and who's mr floris the teacher the teacher okay so mr floris do you remember dantra when the teacher said that they're not going to be able that the principal took away soccer at recess okay now i'm getting it okay so the principal took away soccer and mr floris is telling the class was the class happy about that no no they weren't because a lot of the kids played soccer right right and so what what action did the class take to solve that problem one of them was the we tried to convince the principal and he tried to find he tried to think of ways that people could also get hurt that's the solution that's what he used to get it okay so you would put that further down here what would what was you got it can you think back or you can look again in your text to try to find what was the first thing that they did when they found out that they couldn't play soccer anymore they were um mad and they were thinking a thing is that people could get hurt like the girls jumping rope okay now was that during that was in the class or was that part of when the principal when they were in the principal's office that was in the principal's office wasn't okay so let's think what did they do after they they found out that they can't play soccer anymore so they got upset they got upset and they tried to they went to his office who went to the office who they were and his friends who played soccer okay thank you i mean this is a totally different group of students with different skills and a rather mixed group um and i know it's just a taste of it but just to show other students a little bit older and a little more focused on the content not that the other one wasn't focused on the content because it was eventually gonna lead into that but um tell me what you see going on here um in general and in relation to the idea and the notion in or to each other so um ron would you like to comment on what's happening this this is a more uh uh direct instruction or direct comprehension lesson in which the teacher is using a protocol or a template to break down the story and you would guess maybe these readers are needing to work on their comprehension they're having trouble putting the the details and the facts of the story together um and so i i would call this a more directed lesson it's less conversational and more instructional with the teacher both controlling the topic and the terms so it is a contrast and you know there's no you know at least in our work there was never any contradiction that you had to do one or the other that that's i thought was a fallacy that depending on the students and on the point in the learning trajectory of students you would use different instructional methods well she this teacher was working uh and she was beginning her work in instructional conversation and had you know worked on this to make sure she she moved um more towards a combination so looking at the participation of the students if you see the whole date of course there's much more to see in the way that she supported them and encouraged them and brought brought them around to feel as as engaged in in the work in all of them even though they were at very different levels they were very productive for the for the lesson so brian brian how did that look to you i think one of the things we were trying to do with the notion of equitable classroom talk or we've also called it instructional conversations for equitable participation is to apply principles of equitable talk for content learning that can really transcend classroom setting you know traditionally the instructional conversation was pretty scripted in terms of where the students were like it was all small group center-based and that that made i think implementation onerous for some teachers and so obviously small group is the best to sort of experience all of the features of equitable classroom talk but i think even in a direct more directed lesson like this you can see some features for example we saw peers responding to each other you notice that one student shared a thought and then the female student corrected him and said actually it's this right and and there was a sort of shared ownership of the idea it wasn't like they were competing for you know who's right who's wrong they were building on each other's ideas and there was no sort of vying for teacher's attention and so even though this was a directed uh sort of lesson by the teacher comprehension lesson i would argue that there were features of communal talk there um where there was more peer engagement with ideas in their talk so that's really important for equity well is there anything you'd like to say with regard to your visual Bryant that uh you can see um the front from these two experiences of communal talk um what what does what does your visual help us understand yeah i mean so a lot of this builds on the work that Ron and others have done on teacher learning right so you know we know that teacher learning needs to be peer facilitated we know that teachers you know fail to implement equitable classroom talk not because they don't want to do it or because they resist but because they don't have the support they need to improve implementation over time and that support needs to be well structured settings for teachers to engage with each other using information data from their practice to improve we argue that that data should be not only student data but direct data on teaching through observation systems student surveys teacher surveys and that that data on teaching should inform teachers inquiry in these job-alike teams especially around something as complicated as equitable classroom talk you know uh improving is is a process rather than a destination and teachers need more support to get there and our hypothesis is is that a formative measurement system um as described in that figure is is a is a promising way to get there uh is there yeah an economically efficient way to get that time together to do that i mean um how do we do that with teachers i think um that implementation part of it ron you've you've thought about that and brian you've talked about learning and one of the points i want to make is by asking brian a question all that process you talk about where they get the data they work together and improve who should be driving that the teachers or somebody who's supervising them the teachers peer facilitated and i mean they may need some help right i think the challenge has been with instructional conversations is like um it can rely a lot on external expertise and some of that's helpful but you know the the materials that we give to teachers should be self-sustaining in two ways it should support peer facilitation so that teachers want to do it it doesn't feel something in post they're attentive in their own improvement rather than worrying about being compliant and secondly that teachers really need um information in and from their practice to improve it right it can't just be based on some you know external curriculum they need information like a classroom video like an observation system that they can quickly identify what to improve and how um together okay thank you that's very good uh one we do have a question um i think uh briefly you can probably come up to it from your with your background which is so good but their question is can this talking method be used with mute students with new students mute mute mute students i think not deaf students at first i thought it was deaf students but these would be mute students how would you well i would be using american sign language or some other uh verbal form it would work i i i think there's been some work on that actually to date on but i think somebody actually tried doing it so yeah well that's uh very interesting and thank you both so much for some your insights and your um findings and your thoughtfulness and looking at these interactions which uh what are tremendous efforts by uh practitioners um and teachers are all stars who to go into you know such such an experience with their students and most teachers once into it find that it is the heart of their teaching because they have this intimacy with students that they can't really have just by playground talk so um appreciate your bringing the academic uh structure to it uh and and your your visual is helpful to start thinking about that we're just scraping the surface here so maybe we need to have the more talk about this as we find out that that the interest is there and certainly um this work i did ask that last question about the economic efficiency because of course with coming up our students are so far behind but our budgets are so low so the kind of thing you're talking about brian of teachers working together and being peer assisted and maybe that this kind of staff self development is is possible without an expenditure issue because that has to be taken into consideration too with these budgets so depleted through this pandemic thank you so much um we're we're um at the aloha moment aloha time to wrap up and uh we've uh this this is the show the state of the state of Hawaii and uh we've been talking with doctors uh ronald gallimore and brian jensen about the strengths of classroom teaching that is talk-based and equitable can bring to the um success of our students in our schools i'll see you again in two weeks on the state of the state of hawaii mahalo for your attention everyone thank you