 Think Tech Hawaii on this Monday. This show is the state of the state of Hawaii. And we're on every Monday. And I'm your host, Stephanie Dalton. Every two weeks, this show covers state news, events and issues affecting Hawaii, like business governing, economics, law, executive emergency orders, education, among many other topics. Today's show takes a look at education in the state and an approach to teaching that came from a local speech practice here and became a powerful strategy and live-in-teacher teaching wherever it's used. Our guest is Dr. Ronald Gallimore, emeritus UCLA and formerly UH Manoa professor. Who studied Hawaiian families on the Leeward coast of Oahu in the late 60s. The study found Hawaiian youngsters had home experience and potential to be much more successful in the school for the program developed from the study was therefore devoted to improving school, student school performance. Many approaches were used, eventually including allowing students to use what we call talk story, their own language in lessons. In Hawaii, casual conversation is frequently in the form of talk story. And Hawaii's local talk or talk story actually dates from before Hawaii's statehood, often considered more as a dialect or pigeon or a Hawaiian creole. Our guest, Dr. Gallimore worked with Hawaii's teachers to develop talk story into a useful teaching technique with the effects of improving school performance. And it was labeled the instructional conversation. So welcome back, Dr. Gallimore. Ron, thank you for coming back to talk story about teaching instructional conversation. Thank you, Stephanie. And with this, Dr. Gallimore is pretty formal. Couldn't you remember that you've called me Ron for a decade? I know you continue to professionally develop your colleagues and teachers in the use of instructional conversation. And of course, our endless talks about it, but when you originally went out to the leeward coast, you must have encountered it there. Were you using, did you encounter it there and notice it? And then did you have to use it to work in the community you studied, just as a matter of a little background? Well, I spent two years living on the Wai'anae coast. And much of that time I spent on the Nanakuli homestead with families or in the schools, working with teachers and making observations. But while I noticed there was a characteristic way people conversed, I have to tell you, I was pretty naive when it came to that kind of conversational analysis. And it was Steve Boggs and some of the students that he worked with that actually did the original work on the talk story. And he, Steve actually eventually published the book. And then there were many people at the Kamehameha lab school where we all worked together for many years. Kathy Al, among others, Violet Mays who left a project pretty early. Richard Day, who was a linguist from the University of Hawaii. So the credit for identifying talk story and giving it its academic foundation research-wise really belongs to others. I just benefited from being around some very smart and perceptive people. And so, yes, we did notice it. I did see it, but I didn't really know what to call it until later. But eventually it played a big role in the work we did, all we did together. Well, I think that you had to, with the communication work that you did and you certainly were able to manage it so that it's not like encountering a foreign language. It is understandable. And it is possible to move into conversation with that. And even though not being proficient with that, it can still enjoy it. Would you agree with me on- Absolutely. I mean, the local dialect is a communication tool. And it works very well. I mean, anybody who wants to demean Pigeon, Creole, whatever it's referred to, it's a mistake. It is an effective communication tool, but it's a separate from standard English. And it's important to realize that you can be, you can speak both very well. In fact, some of the most able people in Hawaii then, and I'm sure now, can switch codes. They can switch from standard English back to the local dialect. And in fact, I'm originally from Tucson, Arizona. And believe it or not, there's a local dialect in Tucson, Arizona. And when I go back there, I find myself lapsing back into pronouncing words in a certain way that I grew up with. So it's just that Pigeon and a dialect in Hawaii, Hawaii English sometimes is called. I mean, I bring it up because it is accessible without a lot of proficiency. It's much more enjoyable if you are proficient in it. But for teachers to be expected to hear that and understand it and work with it is not an insurmountable task. So I just kind of wanted to get it at that level of understanding what it is and it doesn't require language learning. There are other things about it that it requires. Although honestly, when I first got to the wine I coasted in Nanakuli, right straight off the airplane from California, it did take me a while to develop the ear. And but you're right, it didn't, I knew what people were trying to tell me but I didn't pick up all the little nuances and the subtleties that took a little while. You have to use it to get good with it. And enjoy it because it's a lot of fun which is another real positive aspect of it because it can really enliven the conversation as we said here. But I did find that I was teaching in high school at about that time here in Hawaii. And I just realized that the state education frameworks where they have the policies of the department about how and what you teach, they actually were about promoting the use of standard English in the classroom. So I don't think that was unusual. I think the state was not unusual in promoting standard English use in the classroom. Perhaps they still do, but it's just that it was a written policy and they encouraged the use of standard. Well, I found when I was living out in the Leeward Coast, this is in the 60s, many of the native Hawaiian families living on the homestead wanted their students or their children to learn standard English. They just didn't, but they didn't want them to stop being able to communicate when they went home in the morning with the dialect. And that's the same thing we find on the mainland, many immigrants from Latin America and Mexico whose children come to school speaking Spanish. We found in our longitudinal studies in Southern California that the family celebrated the fact that their students came home with good grades in standard American English. They wanted them to be fluent in English, but they didn't want them to lose their Spanish. Right, but that is one thing. And this kind of thing is not, it is at the dialect level as it approaches being a language, but I wanted to know what did teaching, what did you first, what was your first impression of this idea of teaching with talk story and actually bringing that into the classroom with students such as the needy students that we have here who might've only had that one code, only had the Hawaiian pigeon code with the talk story in it. And if you're into school, then you're thinking like the state, let's get them on to standard English. But so what were you thinking as a person working in the school where the program was trying like crazy to get these kids to meet their potential, show their potential in the school work? Before we started the Kamehameha Lab School in 1971, what I saw in the public schools was a struggle you know, the teachers were very conscientiously trying to encourage the students to talk in standard English, but the students didn't have much background out in Nana Ikopono school at the time. So it was like a struggle, right? And so I noticed that a lot of time was spent in criticism and correcting. So the instructional time got taken up with some distracting and digressive talk about how to correctly say words. So the new learning kinda got put in the background. And that turned out to be one of the important observations that Steve and his graduate students and eventually when we opened the lab school, the staff there, I don't wanna take any credit for this because they're the ones, Kathy Al, Kathy Jordan, Sharlene Chun at the time her name was and many others were the contributors to this because they were trying things out in the classroom. And I think a little later today, we're gonna show a bit of video. We're gonna talk about that, whatever that means. But I just wanna make sure that we didn't instantly know what to do. It took time to learn and learn and make mistakes and keep trying things. It took quite a while. Well, I think that that's what the video will help us understand what this means. I mean, we're gonna take a look at a video with a very good teacher, good in the sense of practice with this technique and with youngsters that are actually kindergartners, but they aren't speaking pigeon. And what I wanted to do was get ready to show it shortly. But before that, I wanted to ask, you want to just talk about what, when we see the teacher in a talk story or I see with the youngsters, what are the first things we would see? What very clearly is different about what she's... Yeah, what to look for? What should be looking for when you watch this video? Now, let me say first, this video was shot probably in 1980 and it took seven or eight years for us to get to the point where it was being done so smoothly and so capably by the teacher whose name was Ronnie right at the time. I think she's since married and there's a different last name, but she was a fabulous teacher doing this. Okay, so what do we look for? First of all, if you haven't been in a classroom for a while, it's gonna look a little chaotic because the students, these five-year-olds are all talking at the same time. It seems like when you first see it. And what you notice is that the teacher, Ronnie, doesn't get rattled by this. And what she's doing is letting the students control the turn-taking, no raising the hands, the students are just talking, but she very skillfully controls the topic. Okay, so let's say we're not gonna see her raising and we're gonna see her being pulling a smooth stream of repeating what the students say and keeping the steady stream of talk going and getting them to perform the activity and explain how they're doing it. Oh, you're not this tall. I'm gonna sing it with you. I know. What else did I bring? Who been? I didn't know. A jelly. Isn't that better? A jelly. And then I brought some jelly. What kind of jelly did I bring? Suave. Suave a jelly. I like it. I like it. What's that? Air flage. All right, we're gonna make our peanut butter sandwich. What is the first thing I'm going to need? To the bread. I need to get a slice of bread or a slice of bread. I know. What are you gonna do with it? I know how to make this. I'll put this first and put this second. Oh, yeah. Put it? Put it like this first. Okay. No, keep this like that. Put that on the sandwich and then on the sandwich. I put the jelly on top of the sandwich. No, you open it. Then you put it like this. Oh, I need to twist the lid off the jaw. Yeah, I make like that. Put it on your first, you have to do peanut butter. First, I have to do the peanut butter. I have to spread the peanut butter first. Are you sure? Yeah, because I tried it. That's like, that's the way I have to do it. Okay. Everybody's looking. How do I spread it? I'm gonna take my finger and stick it in and rub it all over the bread. No, just stick that in there. You stick the knife into the jar. Okay. Okay, it's there. It's spread. What do I have to do? Just gonna make some more. I have to spread it around on the top of the bread with the knife. Because we saw you guys when we was in there. That was my finger. All right, now I've spread my peanut butter all over my bread. Now what do I do? Put the jelly in. Put the jelly in. Oh, I just pour it like this. No, I wash that and you put the jelly in. Oh, I put the knife into the jelly jar. No, you put it mixed up. Oh, I'm gonna mix it up. So how am I gonna do it? Then I only have one knife. Yeah, good. You gotta wash it off. Ah, I have to wash it off. Can I wash it off with just a napkin or can I wipe it off? Wipe it off with the napkin so that I don't get my peanut butter mixed with mine? Jelly. Jelly. Now what do I do, James K? Put the butter in and spread it. I put the knife in and spread the jelly. Where? Do I spread it on the napkin? I spread it on the bread. Like that. Like the peanut butter. I like eating it. So peanut butter. Okay, now what do I do with it? You eat it. Do it like that. Oh, you mean I just flip it over? Yeah. The whole thing? Yeah. But the peanut butter and jelly's gonna be all full? No, not like that. No, not like that? What am I doing if I do that? You can mix it up. What do you do with clothes? I eat it. What do you do with clothes? Juan, we have a question from the viewer. I think that leads us right into very good comments. So the question is wouldn't encouraging students to speak Pigeon hinder their ability to flourish outside of Hawaii? Even if it's easy to understand to an uneducated people, Pigeon presents itself as informal English rather than its own language. So what can you say comments on that question? Well, our goal in this program, that one of the video came from, was to help the children acquire proficiency in standard English. And I'll give you some examples in that little clip that can be easy to miss. For example, at one point one of the students talks about putting the peanut butter on the bread and he calls it, rub it on the bread. In fact, several of the other children chime in and use rub as the verb. But the teacher uses the word, the verb spread it on the bread. And she repeats it. And if you look really closely into the lesson, one of those children starts to use that verb spread. Now over the course of a year, what we discovered was, as long as the teacher always answered in standard English or asked questions in standard English or repeated in English and never criticized the students for using Pigeon, by the end of the year, these students will have a required a much wider range, not only of standard English vocabulary, spread instead of rub or many other examples. Not only do they do that, but they pick up standard English syntax, the order in which words are put together in the sentence, which is different than Pigeon or Creole. So in other words, in that program, we measured both growth in Pigeon and growth in standard English. And we found both the students got more proficient in both dialects, the standard dialect and the local dialect. In other words, they became bilingual or bi dialect. So the goal is, if they leave Hawaii or they go somewhere in the islands where standard English is the lingua franca, where that's how people speak, they can do it. I'll give you an example, wonderful example. I was once asked to testify before a committee of the state Senate of Hawaii, and the chairman was speaking in standard English and my testimony set off a discussion among the senators on the committee. And after a while, they looked at each other and said, hey guys, let's talk the way we can be more comfortable. And they all switch from perfect standard English to the most comfortable expressive form of local dialect. Just switch back and forth. Just like people who are bilingual in Spanish and English can switch back and forth. So that was our goal, is not to send everybody around the world speaking Pigeon but to help them be very comfortable and proficient in both dialects. That is just very good, Ron, and especially the example, Sonny, there was another one about white, white, instead of some other word, maybe they were using the rub again. But as far as the language is concerned, you can see the language as you point out, and then you can, which is vocabulary development, but what it gives them is a more precise way of being able to speak about the task. And then they're also recognizing that there's a series and she keeps reinforcing that in that there are a series of actions here to make this peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And then they're learning about sequence and that first this and then that and no, not that, but this next and then even finding now there's some social differences in that some wouldn't put the jelly separately. They wouldn't mix the jelly with the peanut butter first. So anyway, there are some of those interesting facts that you learn about the students and can be further topics of exploration that emanate from the activity. So the other thing is that they're moving up the thinking ladder, right? So from just the doing of it and the recognizing of it, but then they're coming up and starting to see sequence and they're starting to get more analytic about how I want it done and how it's gonna do. And then towards the end of it, they can also start making judgments about whether it's a good sandwich or not as the way they made it. But I think that with what Rontz stated and then these other considerations and some that you and the audience may have too, there's a lot going on there. And I wanted to ask Ron what he thought about then, the teacher's view of it from her perch, run in the activity, what's going on with her in that process? Actually, in her head. One thing she has to be listening very carefully and being a very good observer and act listening, listening, listening, looking for the opportunity to offer some instruction that's embedded in a conversation. I mean, the students think they're having a conversation, but the teacher has an instructional agenda. And one of the most prominent ones is, if you'll recall at one point, she says, what do I do next? And a boy says, put the jelly on the bread. She takes the jar of jelly and sits it on the slice of bread. And they all say, no, no, no, no, no. And she says, well, what do you want me to do? And she's deliberately trying to make them be more explicit and use explicit formal standard English forms, which is you take the knife, you put some jelly on the knife and then you spread it on top of the peanut butter on the bread. She's trying to get them to speak in those kinds of formal sentences by acting out a silly thing, jar on the bread. And then you can spend days telling people they need to be more explicit in their language. Here's a way, in a very clever way with five-year-olds, you make them want to be explicit because they don't want you to sit that jar on that bread because they want to get that sandwich made as fast as possible. So what's the best way to do that is explain to the teacher how you've got to get that jelly on top of that peanut butter so you can fold it over and we can eat it. So that's all going on. You know, the teacher's head, yes. I mean, and that's that self-talking and moving herself through the process. But I know, Ron, you've talked about how in the study show, and this isn't recent, recent research, but likely it hasn't changed too much, but that in the classroom, the teachers are speaking 90% of the time or some high percentage of the time. And all of the kids together are speaking very low percentages of the time just because of some of the points that Ron has made that they may be uncomfortable. It's not a familiar language that they can use and they're afraid and so they don't chime in. And when an activity like this with instructional conversation is engaged, you can see that nobody was uncomfortable. I mean, some of them to some degree were more reticent, but without that kind of activity, they would even be uninterested. I mean, reticence a little different from uninterested. So those are the aspects of this technique that give it so much usefulness. And I call it power because it gets you other places with these kids that you can go, that you can't go otherwise. Now just a little, I just wanna offer a sobering conclusion here, which is learning to do this as a teacher is more difficult than it looks. And it would be a mistake to think you can just show teacher one video and say, okay, now you know how to do it. No, it takes work. And in general, what we found in later work when I moved to the mainland was it worked better when small groups of teachers in a grade level or a department in high school could work on a problem of learning to do this and practice and help each other perfect it. Cause it's not easy. Even if you're teaching in college, it's so easy to fall into the teacher talking most of the time. And believe me, I know because I taught university 50 years and I always talk too much. Well, that is interesting. I mean, do you think that, do you think that's one of the hardest things that a teacher has to learn to do is to be able to ask the, we'll come up with the activity that's compelling and that solves some of the problem. But then, and certainly, and then how to ask the questions, Ron, how do you do that? How do you think that through? It's very difficult, learning how to listen carefully, pick up on what students are saying, know which students utterance you wanna pick up and follow. It takes practice and time. Like anything, it takes practice and it's not something you can quickly learn to do well. I certainly appreciate your saying that because all of this work when it's done well looks like the ice skating gold medal award and then you go out and try to do it yourself and you find out what you have to do. Ronnie Wright made it look easy, but it's not and it's worth the effort. If anybody thinks they'd like to try it, it is worth the effort. It was in the long run, it does benefit the students. That's right. So, okay, well, we're running into Aloha time. So we're running out of it is what we're doing and we'll have to wrap up. So thank you, Ron. I'm Stephanie Stoll Dalton. This is the state of the state of Hawaii on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series and we've been talking remotely with Dr. Ronald Gallimore about talk story in instructional conversation. And I'll see you in two weeks on the next state of the state of Hawaii. Mahalo for your attention. Everyone. Thanksgiving everybody.