One of our Oracy Benchmarks is ‘Values Every Voice’, meaning that the teacher should support all students to participate in and benefit from oracy in the classroom. They should listen meaningfully to students, encouraging them to develop their ideas further and nurturing a culture in which students do the same.

So how can we create a classroom that values every voice? Check out these five top tips and will be sharing one a day to support you in your classroom practice!

Strategies to ensure you’re really listening

One of the most important ways to make sure that every voice in the classroom is valued is to make sure that students and staff are able to listen, and listen in a meaningful way. There are many ways to support individuals with this. One example is to familiarise students with a listening ladder or create one as a class based on the skills that they think are important to be a good listener. This can then be used throughout the day to guide students on their listening journey. 

Another great strategy to encourage active listening is to ask individuals to share back their partner’s ideas following paired or small group work. By having the responsibility of listening to what their peers are saying and feeding it back to a larger audience, they are more likely to actively engage with what is being said, rather than simply share their own ideas and ignore that of their partner!

Strategies to ensure you’re really praising 

Sometimes the thought of speaking in front of others can be a daunting experience, no matter how familiar, or small the audience is.  Thoughts like, ‘What if I get it wrong?’ ‘Nobody really wants to know what I think’ or ‘XXX will say the answer because they always get it right.’ can be intrusive thoughts to even the most confident pupil. 

So, how can we help those students to feel like their opinions, thoughts, and ideas matter? 

One way is to celebrate contributions, no matter how small, to show that their voice is valued. A great way of framing this feedback can be through the lens of the oracy framework, linking to a specific strand.

Thank you for sharing your ideas so clearly, did anyone else agree with xxx…

You sounded like an expert when you said…

Feedback could even be given relating to the listening that individuals are showing. This may help some students to feel that they are part of a discussion, even if they are not yet ready to share their own ideas.

Throughout that discussion, I know you were listening really attentively. I could tell because of your body language and the eye contact you were giving to the speaker

Make sure you value additional languages

When we think about valuing every voice, it’s important to remember that oracy doesn’t have to be conducted in English. Language identity plays a huge role in identity development and all languages should be celebrated and shared. To these ends, it is important to involve parents in helping students to continue developing all their languages. They should be encouraged to talk in the mix of languages that is most natural for them at home and parents should know that oracy homework can and should be conducted in the language that is most natural or strongest in the household.

Why not do some activities in class to celebrate different languages such as everyone sharing some words that they know in a different language? You could even hold your own Languages Day in your classroom!

To learn more about EAL students and oracy, check out this blog.

Ensuring you’re scaffolding app

Often students stay silent in class because they don’t have enough to say on a topic or are not confident that what they do know is relevant. Most teachers use a range of scaffolding to set all children up for success in a writing task, and it’s worth thinking of arming children similarly for oracy tasks! 

1. Consider when in a sequence of learning you are expecting everyone to be using their voice – oracy tasks will be more inclusive once all students have a rich understanding of the topic to hand.
2. Then, during the task itself, having concrete objects, visuals, keywords or even lists of important arguments/points to hand can serve as reminders of this content.
3.  Once you are confident everyone has the needed knowledge available, sentence stems can offer a way in for those who are unsure of how to start. In this way, we can start to ensure that all children have what they need to take part effectively and can benefit from learning to and through talk in the classroom.

Strategies to make sure that talk is visible 

One of the challenges of developing talk is it’s invisible! The abstract nature of conversation can make it difficult for students to ensure all voices are valued equally. Here are a few strategies you can try to make talk visible to help students see every voice. 

1. Track small group or whole-class discussions using a ball of wool. This will encourage quiet students to take part (you could set a goal for at least one contribution) and also demonstrate to more confident students how much they are contributing. At the end of the discussion, reflect on the contributions that were made as a group.  
2. Issuing with students a set number of ‘talk tokens’, such as counters, at the start of a discussion task sets a clear expectation and criteria to measure success against. If every child has three tokens to spend, a quieter child may have a target to spend one this week and two the next. The clink as each token is put in the pot can add to their sense of achievement, while the rationing of turns constrains those who may have dominated – encouraging them to think carefully before they speak! (From Transforming Talk)
3. As part of setting up guidelines and expectations for talk, include a point about inviting others’ into discussions as part of your class Discussion Guidelines. By teaching students to do this, all voices can be heard and valued.

If you use these strategies in your classroom, we’d love to hear how you get on! Follow us on Twitter (@voice21oracy) and let us know how you get on!