On the Bright Side, Turning Talk, Talk, Talk, into Thinking

My students, talk, boy do they love to talk. Talk, talk, talk. If there is an opportunity to talk they take it. I even seem to have students who talk in the bathroom, to themselves, just so they can talk some more.

Mondays are especially rough for my students. They only attend school four days a week, so they have three-day weekends. Monday morning is a constant jabber of voices, often all day. The instant I turn them loose on an assignment, or even just turn my back they start talking again. I am often unsure if they talk so much on Mondays because they were just warming up all weekend or, more sadly, if it's because nobody else listened to them all weekend.

Regardless, Mondays are rough. I've tried various strategies, tricks, etc. to rein in the talking, but with limited success. They write in their journals each morning and I write back to them, starting a conversation with writing. They still feel a need to talk aloud, about all sorts of stuff. I've started something new...

I find a piece of odd news, and use one sentence, or even part of a sentence from an article to be their daily journal writing prompt. They have to fill in the rest of the story, giving me details, adding information, and fleshing out a story when they don't even know what really happened. After they write what they think happened, we talk about it. I take a quick survey to have them summarize their version of events. "It's about a guard beating a prisoner" or "The jockey fell off the horse." Then I read the article to them. Then we discuss it, oh man, do we discuss it. They talk about which student had the closest version, why context clues matter, what life lessons could be learned from the article, and speculate on tomorrow's article. All of them talk, a lot, and I encourage it. They love it and I let them see that talking is useful, a way to reason through problems, but that talking does have its place... and its time, not all the time.