Silent Teacher - Tips for Teachers Top 5s

Listen to the audio on Spotify or Apple podcasts

The five tips are:

Tell your students what you are doing and why
Use gestures
Prompt self-explanation
Allow adequate thinking time
Ask students to write questions after Silent Teacher

Buy the Tips for Teachers book:

Three fun things to do:

Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton, and welcome to this Tips for teachers top five, all about Silent teacher. Now just before we crack on a reminder that this is available as an audio podcast, but also as a video podcast, so you can choose your preferred medium and share it with your colleagues accordingly. And you’ll find links to those either in the podcast show notes, or the video description or on tips for teachers.co.uk.

Right, so silent teacher, what on earth is silent teaching? Well, as you’d imagine, it’s the teacher being silent specifically during the modelling part of a lesson. In maths, this would often be during the worst example. Now, why on earth would a teacher want to be silent during that part? Well, it’s kind of the opposite of what I used to do. While I was doing my work examples, where I’d be writing loads, I’d be chatting loads, and I’d be expecting my students to write and take notes. So I’d be wanting my students to watch, listen and write at the same time, it was just too much for them. So I stripped it right down and said, Okay, the first time I’m going to present this to you, I’m not going to say a word, I want you to watch what I’m doing and think really hard. And it seems to be quite powerful.

So over the last three to four years, or more so actually, I’ve been developing this technique and crucially, I’ve been learning from people who are far better at this than me, and tried to compile together different ways to make it work effectively. Now, in my book tips for teachers available in all good and evil bookstores, I share 14 ideas to improve silent teacher. In this video, I’m going to pick out five of my favourites.

So tip number one is to tell your students what you’re doing and why this is really important with with anything really any new idea, it’s important to get the students on board and to justify why you’re doing it’s a good way to do that. But particularly silent teacher, because sound teachers are really weird thing to do. If you all of a sudden you stop talking while you’re doing your modelling, your kids are thinking you’ve lost your mind. Remember, I had a girl in my class called Rachel in my year eight class lovely girl did silent teacher didn’t tell the kids what I was doing and why Rachel’s mum phoned in, say Rachel’s como she’s saying you’re not talking to them anymore. So you can see it’s important to get the kids on board. One way I found is to say to students, look, I’m not going to talk while I’m doing this, this modelling this time. And that’s to reduce all kinds of distractions. So you can focus all your attention on simply watching what I’m doing, and try and understand that. So whatever it takes to kind of get your students on board by offering some kind of justification for this weird thing you’re going to be doing feels important.

Okay, tip number two gestures. So whenever you remove your voice, it’s really important that you bring something else into play to direct students attention. Because if you just go through a word, for example, in silence, you can’t, it’s quite difficult for you to pinpoint exactly where you want your students watching at any one time, when you can’t say things like, look at that too, or see what happens here, and so on. So gestures worked really well. So this can be something as simple as just pointing pointing to the part of the worked example, and the model that you want students to look at at any one time. But what it can also be is kind of gesturing for when you want your students to do the thinking. So maybe stepping away from the board at the point where you want them to think, what’s he just done, and so on, and so forth. So making use of hands pointing, if you want to do a bit of acting like you know, touch your head when you want them thinking something like that. But gestures are really important as part of silent teaching.

Tip three self explanation. Now there’s a real danger that the silent teaching can be a passive experience for students. If you’re not speaking, and the kids aren’t speaking, they can just sit there daydreaming in their minds wandering off anywhere, nobody’s learning anything. So you want silent teacher to be a really active process for students. So to do that, what we’re going to do is prompt self explanation. Now there’s a whole load of research into the power of self explaining. And what I’m going to try and do in silent teacher is to pick out two key things, two key types of self explaining I want students to do that’s principled, that’s where students try to figure out what’s just happened and predictive, that’s where they tried to predict what’s going to happen next. So what I do whilst solid teachers happening is I say to students, every time I pause, and this is where the gesture comes into play. It could just be you could might just stop or you might put your hand on your head or you might step away from the board. Every time students see you do that. This is what I want them thinking about. What’s he just done? And what do I think he’s going to do next principled? Can you explain what I’ve just done? Predictive? Can you predict what I’m going to do next? And if students can engage in this type of self explaining behaviour, they’re going to be more active in the process. They’re gonna start piecing things together in themselves and so on.

Tip four hole this is a biggie Allah Our adequate thinking time, there’s a real danger that we do this all the time, when we’re doing our modelling, we go too fast because of curse of knowledge, we understand this. So we don’t appreciate just how difficult something might be for students. But particularly when you’re kind of doing things in silence, the silence can feel like it’s lasting forever, when actually, it’s only taken a few seconds. So if you want your students to go through that process, we just talked about what’s he just done? What’s he going to do next, they’re going to need time to do that. And it may only be a few seconds, but every time we write a line, a key line, it’s important that we step away from the board, and give students that time to process what’s he just done? What’s he going to do next, then we return and write the next line and pause again. So they have an opportunity to take that in was what happened, what they expected to happen. And as I say, this only needs to be a few seconds each time. But it’s important, we get into that habit that we don’t just race through line after line with no opportunity for students to reflect. And as I say, that’s why I find stepping away from the board can slow me down and also provide that prompt that it’s time for students to self explain.

Fifth and final tip, ask students to write questions after silent teacher. Now I don’t want students making notes during silent teacher that falls back into the trap I used to do with my work examples where students were writing stuff down, and missing key things that was happening on the board. So no writing down while silent teachers happening are all my students eyes on the board. But after I’ve gone through silent teacher, students may be a bit confused. They may be thinking, how did he do that? Where did that seven come from? What’s going on there? Or they may have a question that they want to ask me at some point. Did you do this, because of this, and so on. So it’s a really good idea at the end of silent teacher just to give students a minute, two minutes, whatever feels appropriate, just to jot down anything that they spotted any questions they have anything they’re confused about. Now, it’s up to you what you do with that my preferred thing after that is to then give students an opportunity to discuss with their partner so put their mini whiteboards between them and compare questions. And what you’ll find there is often students can sort out a lot of the problems themselves, or after that period, you can then invite students to ask you questions from their board, whatever. But I just think giving students an opportunity to in a sense, kind of unburden their working memories, all the things that they’ve taken, injuring Santi, she’s given them an opportunity to get it down on paper, and then you can do something with that afterwards.

So there are five tips to help you improve silent teacher, we just go over those tip number one, tell your students what you’re doing and why. Tip two, make full use of gestures. Tip three prompt self explanation. Tip Four, allow adequate thinking time. And Tip Five, ask students to write questions after silent teacher. If you’ve tried silent teacher already, which of those do you already do. And if you have tried silent teacher are there any of those that you don’t do that you feel are important that you can build into your practice.

As a reminder, there’s loads of extra tips on silent teacher and everything about explaining and modelling plus loads of other aspects of teaching in my tips for teachers book. And if you head to tips for teachers dot code at UK you’ll also find the tips for teachers podcast where I speak to incredible teachers and educationalists who share tips with us. I record each of those conversations as a video as well and chop up those videos into individual tips so you can share those Twilights and CPD sessions. And there’s also the free tips for teachers newsletter where you get a tip sent to your inbox every Monday morning to try out in lessons that come in week. And finally, there’s more tips for teachers online CPD sessions and face to face CPD sessions. Again available tips for teachers dot code at UK thanks so much for watching.