The power of silence...

Today I set my learners the task of creating a shared response to the question, 'What can we do about the litter problem in schools?' We used my twist on the ESOL strategy consensus to help us do this. My learners were asked to draw their shapes then add their own response to the question in the portion directly in front of them. Once this was done they used their very creative ways to decide how they would formulate their shared response as my twist was that they were not allowed to speak to each other. 

I observed ticks appearing to show agreement, a 1/2 mark to show some agreement, question marks to show uncertainty, crosses to show disagreement, circle joined with lines to highlight repetition, hand signals, crossing out, arrows and even signatures to denote agreed and disagreed points. Shared responses were then co-constructed alongside pats on the back, smiles and lots of thumbs up. This was an extremely powerful learning opportunity as it showed first hand why we need to be able to have our Learning Space 2 (LS2) famous learning conversations.

During our sharing time I asked for feedback on the task. One usually quiet participant told me it would have been much easier if they were allowed to use our talking frames because it would have helped him know he was using the right words to show he disagreed with some of the opinions in his group. Another student pointed out that they used the summary strategy to identify the important words, then from there, use those words to write their shared opinion. The feedback was fantastic and showed real connections had been made to why talking about our learning is so important.