Does brain development rely on verbal interaction? Silence in English Language

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Dat Bao explores the complex role of silence in language learning, challenging the assumption that verbal interaction is the primary driver of brain development

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Dat Bao explores the complex role of silence in language learning, challenging the assumption that verbal interaction is the primary driver of brain development

Image courtesy of interviewee. October 16, 2024

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This video discusses the concept of social interaction and its significance in healthy brain development. It emphasizes that social interaction includes various forms such as verbal and non-verbal communication, both formal and informal, and can occur in one-on-one or group settings. The speaker highlights that positive interaction—characterized by meaningful engagement—is essential for cognitive development and neuroplasticity.

This video introduces examples illustrating both verbal interaction and productive silence during collaborative tasks. It argues that interaction is ongoing, even in silence, and underscores the value of both speech and silence in learning contexts. The speaker critiques the misconception that more talking equals better learning, suggesting that meaningful silence often benefits cognitive processing.

A specific anecdote illustrates the challenges of enforcing equal participation in classroom discussions, revealing how artificial rules can create discomfort and inhibit genuine learning. The author argues for a balanced approach in education, where both speech and silence are utilized effectively.

Finally, the text addresses the need for teacher education programs to raise awareness of the roles of speech and silence, develop knowledge about their value in learning, and provide practical strategies for implementing a balanced approach to classroom interaction tailored to students' needs. Overall, the importance of recognizing the diverse roles of speech and silence in facilitating effective learning is emphasized throughout the discussion.

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Here are five key points from the video:

1. **Variety in Social Interaction**: Social interaction encompasses a wide range of experiences, including verbal and non-verbal communication, both formal and informal settings, group dynamics, and collaborative tasks. Positive interactions contribute significantly to meaningful learning experiences.

2. **Importance of Quality Interaction**: Good quality interactions, characterized by active listening, mutual feedback, and meaningful discourse, enhance cognitive functioning and promote neuroplasticity. Even silence during collaborative tasks is a form of engagement that supports cognitive processing.

3. **Balance of Speech and Silence in Learning**: Both speech and silence play critical roles in the learning process. Effective teaching should recognize the importance of silence for reflection and cognitive processing, rather than viewing speech as the only beneficial form of interaction.

4. **Challenges in Classroom Participation**: Teachers often inadvertently favor speech over silence, leading to imbalances in classroom participation. Strategies that force equal participation can create stress and stifle genuine engagement, as seen in the anecdote about using participation sticks.

5. **Teacher Development**: Teacher education programs should address the significance of both speech and silence by raising awareness, building knowledge, and providing practical experience in teaching strategies. This helps educators understand when to facilitate discussion and when to allow for silent reflection to enhance student learning outcomes.

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Here are some key quotes from the video:

1. **On Social Interaction:**
- "Social interaction or social experience might include, say, verbal and non-verbal interactions, formal, more and informal interaction."

2. **On Positive Interaction:**
- "In order we need what I would call positive interaction, which refers to good quality experience."

3. **On Verbal Interaction:**
- "Such quality moments will help improve brain functioning."

4. **On Collaborative Tasks:**
- "You need mutual help. You need some sort of collaboration, which again, is a social experience."

5. **On Silence:**
- "We cannot say when you're not talking, when conversation pauses, you're not interacting."

6. **On Misunderstanding Social Interaction:**
- "Many people misunderstand the term social interaction by thinking of it as people talking to each other."

7. **On Learning Modes:**
- "I argue that both speech and silence are valuable tools for learning."

8. **On Student Engagement:**
- "If students cannot learn the way we teach, we must try and teach the way they learn."

9. **On Emotional Stability and Participation:**
- "Although the rule took effect, class discussion became unnatural because... some students with burning ideas to share were forced to be silent."

10. **On Teacher Development:**
- "Teacher development programs need to incorporate at least three components in the program, which I call awareness, knowledge, and practice."

11. **On the Nature of Tasks:**
- "Teachers need to understand what kinds of tasks require more immediate speech."

These quotes encapsulate the core ideas regarding the balance between speech and silence in social interaction, the importance of quality engagement, and the implications for teaching and learning practices.

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If we, think about this concept, social interaction,

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we realize that it includes,

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so many different things here.

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Social interaction

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or social experience might include, say, verbal

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and non-verbal interactions, formal, more

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and informal interaction.

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One-on-one group interaction.

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Sometimes you have interaction with a clear purpose

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or interaction with that one.

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Now, regardless of what types

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of interaction we're talking about, in order

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to benefit the healthy development of brain functioning,

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we need what I would call positive interaction, which refers

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to good quality experience.

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Let me share with you an example to demonstrate that

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what I mean by good quality experience.

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Suppose you're interacting with someone who listen

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to you actively, who is a critical friend, who comprehends

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what you're saying and provides feedback for you,

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and they also get you to provide feedback for them.

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Now, this is positive interaction

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because you both engage in a deep conversation or,

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or shall we say, in meaningful discourse.

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And such quality moments will help improve,

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improve brain functioning.

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Besides when, when your brain adapts to the evolvement

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of a deep conversation, neuroplasticity is likely to improve

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during that experience.

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So this example is about verbal interaction.

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Let me share with you perhaps another scenario

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that invoke silence

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and I'll explain how silence affects the brain.

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Suppose you sit down with someone who solve a problem

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with you together or, or,

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or to perform a collaborative task, which could be, say,

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making a poster, developing a campaign

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to support the environment or,

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or building a framework for a research project.

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This type of work is cognitively demanding.

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It requires gathering some data

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and also requires some mental processing.

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It is a heavy task or, or a challenging task,

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and you can't do it alone.

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You need mutual help.

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You need some sort of collaboration, which again,

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is a social experience.

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Now, you and that person in performing

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that task may not be talking too much.

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You, you can be very quiet,

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but you know exactly what the other person is doing.

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You both engage in a shared task with passion.

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You may talk a little, but there will be more reflection

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time, more alone time, more thinking time.

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We cannot say when you're not talking,

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when conversation pauses, you're not interacting.

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I like to emphasize that interaction is ongoing

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because you know very clearly what each other is doing,

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and most importantly, you know,

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some output is going to come out of such moments.

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Without this meaningful silence, there will be no input.

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So that output is the evidence that social

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collaboration or, or interaction

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or experience is really taking place.

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You notice that your brain in that scenario

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is performing good exercises to the fullest potential thanks

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to being with your peer in positive ways.

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Many people misunderstand the term social interaction

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by thinking of it as people talking to each other,

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but that is not always true.

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If, if talking profusely represent the most productive most

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of learning or development, then that means

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the more you talk, the more you learn.

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The more you speak, the more people will

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respect you and love you.

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In my research, this does not prove to be the case.

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So in the word for the mi to re benefits cognitively

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and emotionally, I think social

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interaction needs to be useful.

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Um, it can be verbally moderate, it can be a lot of talk,

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it can be very little talk but above

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or it's meaningful with a clear purpose.

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Having a clear, reasonable level

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of engagement without such positive engagement talking would

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just be a bombardment of noise, which may cause the brain

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to switch off naturally.

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If you interact with people of influences,

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your brain will become active and receptive.

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But being with those who may be uninspiring,

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those only feeling your time with talk low quality talk,

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then your brain may choose to wander about,

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and I would say there will be little value in that process.

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I would like to talk about the role of, what you say,

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speech in, in silence, in particular in pedagogy,

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I will emphasize productive roles in my recent book,

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silence in English Language Pedagogy

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with Cambridge University Press.

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I argue that both speech

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and silence are a valuable tools for learning.

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Some teachers tend to favor speech over silence.

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I can understand how some someone thinks so

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because when students speak, teaching becomes easy,

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and when student talk, stop talking,

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teaching becomes difficult.

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But Eric can, we might sometimes think, need

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to think a little bit, a little bit more about learning,

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then we think about teaching.

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If students cannot learn the way we teach, we must try

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and teach the way they learn.

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My, my research reviews that each of these modes,

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silent speech serves learning differently.

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There is a time for speech to be useful,

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but there is also a time for silence to be useful,

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being able to see that required skill.

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Um, let me explain when each of these modes is needed,

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and this is one of the findings from my research.

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Speech often provides opportunities for students

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to articulate thoughts, to brainstorm ideas,

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to share opinions,

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while silence provides opportunities for comprehension,

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reflection, internalization of learning content,

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and especially cognitive processing.

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If a student is good at both or

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or practice both active silence

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and active speech, they can develop their learning

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mechanism to the fullest.

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Trouble occurs when a student needs to to speak,

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but is forced to be silent

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or when someone needs to perform some quiet thinking

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but is fought to speak.

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I'd like to share with you an experience

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that helped demonstrate this point,

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and I think this is a fun anecdote.

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Um, in one of the classes I had the opportunity

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to observe at an Australian university, half

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of the students were highly eloquent extroverts,

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while the other half were very silent introverts

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now feeling worried about imbalance participation.

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The lecturers of this class decided to conduct an experiment

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to, to fix the situation.

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They brought in a bun of, sticks, you know,

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the coffee stirs and get three of them to each students

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and said, these are your participation sticks.

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Every time you open your mouth

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and say something, you return one stick

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to us at the end of the lesson.

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If all, all your sticks must go, if, if you still keep them,

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you must stay behind the class and talk to us.

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The aim of this rule was for everyone

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to take an equal number of participation turns.

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Maybe you can guess the outcome.

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Would you like to kind of make a guess?

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How do you think students respond to this, this,

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rule?

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Uh, maybe that did the, did the, did the, introverts

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not give up as many sticks as the extroverts?

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For the first five minutes,

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the extrovert students opened up and,

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and talked first as usual.

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So their sticks went bang, bang, bang.

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They return them all to the teachers.

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Then for the rest of the lesson, they stay there feeling

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distressed and not being allowed to talk anymore.

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In the meantime, like you guess, which I think was right,

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the introvert help held to their, to their sticks,

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for a while, but then they slowly,

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open their mouth and fabricated thing to say, in the end,

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all the sticks were returned to the teachers

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after everyone had participated.

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You see, on the surface,

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the intervention achieved its intended goal of

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balancing the talking turns.

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But deep down, students were emotionally unstable.

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They, they found the lesson process quite stressful,

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you know, because their learning modes will bend

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against everyone's, will.

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Tension occur between classroom rules and student needs

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because although the rule took effect,

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the need was not satisfied.

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Class discussion became unnatural

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because some student with burning idea to share were forced

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to be silent, and others with little to say had

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to fabricate contribution because they still have sticks.

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So participation after all, did not happen by choice,

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but by force.

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People talk not in a timely manner,

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and people kept silent not in a timely manner.

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They perform, a bit like robots.

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It seems that the rule make lecturers happy,

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but it makes students unhappy.

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It was clear that the strategies

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of teaching rather than learning.

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So again, I would argue that both speech

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and silence available tools us for learning,

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but we need to organize them to work according to the need

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of students and according to the timing, they want

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to implement a balanced approach, as you say, or,

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or should we also say an inclusive approach

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for both speech and silence?

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To operate in educational setting,

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I would say is not without challenges

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because I think such pedagogy require teacher knowledge

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about speech and silence.

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It requires knowing students needs

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and their ways of learning.

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It requires a good understanding of task types, such as

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when a task invites verbal responses

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or reflective responses.

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It also, and I think this is perhaps the most important

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thing, requires an open mind which does not see speech

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as always superior to silence.

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I like to talk about pedagogy from a research perspective

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to fight out when silent is good for learning

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and when speech is good for learning.

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I've conducted a series of studies over the years

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in seven different countries, including Australia,

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Japan, China, South Korea,

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and Southeast Asia, including Indonesia,

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Vietnam, and the Philippines.

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In these projects, I gave hundreds of student a set

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of different classroom tasks

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and ask them, in which of these tasks do you use more speech

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in which of them do you use more silence

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in which one do you use both?

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Here is the outcome the majority

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of participants said they tend

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to keep silent intensively when it comes to inductive tasks

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or discovery tasks, such as, looking

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for a pattern from a series of events coming up

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with a theory or rule from a set of evidence.

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These tasks require a great deal of reasoning

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and analysis for those tasks.

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If you force student to discuss immediately without any,

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processing time, there will be lost, the quality

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of performance likely to be poor.

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Another example of such task is,

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a problem solving case.

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Um, I'll give an example, say two.

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Two American ladies are visiting, are visiting Egypt

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for their summer vacation, an Islamic country.

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Um, they are Jane and Alice.

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Now, Jane wants to adapt to the custom

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and is thinking of dressing herself in more conservative

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clothes to show respect to the local culture.

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But Alice wants to wear little

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because the, the weather in Egypt,

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which is usually quite hot, she say, this is my time

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for relaxation and I deserve to wear anything.

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I like this task.

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Um, in a course called communication

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and culture, this task, ask student this question,

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who decision makes more sense to you within that task?

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Um, some, some silent thinking is required and,

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and talking too soon may mean you have not

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thought deeply enough.

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So again, in such discovery tasks,

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some cognitive processing is required

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and student is likely to need, some degree

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of silence on the country.

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Many students feel the need to speak out without waiting,

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without hesitation.

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When the task is cognitively,

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it's not cognitively demanding, but

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but tends to tap into views

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and experience whi which are easy to share.

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Um, example of such tasks are what car do you drive?

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Where were you born?

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You don't need to keep silent and think too much.

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You cannot say, well, I don't remember my car,

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or It's not clear to me where I was born.

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The term for these tasks, which

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I commonly use in language learning is fluency activities.

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So if someone ask me, yeah, what challenges for a teacher

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in implementing a balanced approach?

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I would say the challenge is the ability, the the ability

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to understand the nature of every task

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and what kind of response is expected.

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In reality, some students do not follow the pattern.

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I mentioned sometime a task may require a lot of thinking,

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but some students just hurry to talk quite soon.

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Or sometime a task may require a quick response.

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But stu, some students are found to hesitate.

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Now, when that happens, the teachers simply need to respect

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what student would like to do.

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We are not making the rules.

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We are only observing to see what kind of need emerges,

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and we support students accordingly.

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We can't tell student you must talk all the time,

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and if you're silent, you're wrong.

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Like the fact that you point out yeah, that, that,

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the need to kind of incorporate this into,

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teacher development program.

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Um, we, we notice

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that teachers in many programs are frequently trained in

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what I say, what I call verbal pedagogy.

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We learn to talk, generate talk,

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and receive talk as if talking is the only way

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of teaching and learning.

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And because of such training, we tend

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to either ignore silence or question the value of silence.

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When highly challenging learning content require some

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thinking time to need to pause, they need to reflect

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to process information

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or find a way of responding to the issue they need.

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They need that space, but,

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but many of us teachers do not allow it.

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We want students to talk all the time,

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and as teacher, we feel safe that way.

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So to your question, how should teacher education,

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programs address this issue?

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I would say in my view, teacher development program need

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to incorporate at least three components in the program,

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which I call, awareness, knowledge, and practice.

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I will unpack each of these.

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The first component is raising the awareness

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about the usefulness of both silence and speech.

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We can help teacher consider the fact

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that in every lesson there is a time for speech

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and there is a time for silence.

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Teacher should be organized to discuss what mode is useful

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for what content and why.

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The second component is building knowledge, perhaps

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by reading about the roles of speech

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and the roles of silence.

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Teacher can be given, I would say especially

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research articles to discuss

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and acquire some understanding of how these modes connect

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with learning efficiency instead of assuming that, you know,

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talk equals learning and silent is often a waste of time.

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The third component would be the practice

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of developing tasks.

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To do so, I think teachers will need to understand

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what kinds of tasks require more Im immediate speech.

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And what kinds of tasks allow for delayed speech to do so?

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I think teachers need to discuss classroom activity

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to see when silence needed, when speech should dominate.

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After that teacher can be encouraged

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to create their old task

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and make their old decision on which part

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of each task they develop may allow students to slow down

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and use silent to study.

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Ha, having said that, I don't think we should assume that

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all students will behave in the same way.

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We only anticipate what might happen to a test so

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that we can be well prepared

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to not resist silence when it needs to occur.

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From, from my observation, some student think too fast.

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They don't need silence anymore.

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In that case, the teacher

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of course should welcome verbal participation while,

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while also allow some student to keep thinking and,

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and join later if they like.

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And of course there are moments for silence.

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Uh, there are moments when silence can be painful.

355
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That is a task may require talk, but students don't talk.

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In that case, the teacher need to help improve,

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help those students by scaffolding the learning process so

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that students can slowly build ideas

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and be able to share them in some way.

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Number one, observe student

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because like it's likely that in the class of 20 student

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and there, there there may be 10 students

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who are very quiet, then it's your, responsibility,

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to observe and see how differently their silent means.

365
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You know, likely, 10 people who are silent,

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they have 10 different reasons,

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and so they may be silent out of shyness.

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They may be silent out of, not resistance, you know,

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resisting, toward your, your style of teaching.

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They may be silent because they are short of language,

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so it takes some time.

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But by observ observing and by chatting with students now

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and then even beyond the classroom, you can begin

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to build some knowledge about the diversity

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within silent itself.

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That will be my advice.

Understanding Positive Social Interaction

00:00:00 - If we, think about this concept, social interaction, we realize that it includes, so many different things here. Social interaction or social experience might include, say, verbal and non-verbal interactions, formal, more and informal interaction. One-on-one group interaction. Sometimes you have interaction with a clear purpose or interaction with that one. Now, regardless of what types of interaction we're talking about, in order

00:00:34 - we need what I would call positive interaction, which refers to good quality experience. Let me share with you an example to demonstrate that what I mean by good quality experience. Suppose you're interacting with someone who listen to you actively, who is a critical friend, who comprehends what you're saying and provides feedback for you, and they also get you to provide feedback for them.

00:01:06 - because you both engage in a deep conversation or, or shall we say, in meaningful discourse. And such quality moments will help improve, improve brain functioning. Besides when, when your brain adapts to the evolvement of a deep conversation, neuroplasticity is likely to improve during that experience. So this example is about verbal interaction.

Silent Collaboration: The Power of Non-Verbal Interaction

00:01:37 - that invoke silence and I'll explain how silence affects the brain. Suppose you sit down with someone who solve a problem with you together or, or, or to perform a collaborative task, which could be, say, making a poster, developing a campaign to support the environment or, or building a framework for a research project. This type of work is cognitively demanding.

00:02:08 - and also requires some mental processing. It is a heavy task or, or a challenging task, and you can't do it alone. You need mutual help. You need some sort of collaboration, which again, is a social experience. Now, you and that person in performing that task may not be talking too much. You, you can be very quiet, but you know exactly what the other person is doing.

00:02:41 - You may talk a little, but there will be more reflection time, more alone time, more thinking time. We cannot say when you're not talking, when conversation pauses, you're not interacting. I like to emphasize that interaction is ongoing because you know very clearly what each other is doing, and most importantly, you know, some output is going to come out of such moments.

Redefining Social Interaction: Beyond Mere Conversation

00:03:12 - So that output is the evidence that social collaboration or, or interaction or experience is really taking place. You notice that your brain in that scenario is performing good exercises to the fullest potential thanks to being with your peer in positive ways. Many people misunderstand the term social interaction by thinking of it as people talking to each other,

00:03:43 - If, if talking profusely represent the most productive most of learning or development, then that means the more you talk, the more you learn. The more you speak, the more people will respect you and love you. In my research, this does not prove to be the case. So in the word for the mi to re benefits cognitively and emotionally, I think social interaction needs to be useful. it can be verbally moderate, it can be a lot of talk, it can be very little talk but above

00:04:15 - Having a clear, reasonable level of engagement without such positive engagement talking would just be a bombardment of noise, which may cause the brain to switch off naturally. If you interact with people of influences, your brain will become active and receptive. But being with those who may be uninspiring, those only feeling your time with talk low quality talk, then your brain may choose to wander about, and I would say there will be little value in that process.

Balancing Speech and Silence in Learning

00:04:47 - speech in, in silence, in particular in pedagogy, I will emphasize productive roles in my recent book, silence in English Language Pedagogy with Cambridge University Press. I argue that both speech and silence are a valuable tools for learning. Some teachers tend to favor speech over silence. I can understand how some someone thinks so because when students speak, teaching becomes easy,

00:05:20 - teaching becomes difficult. But Eric can, we might sometimes think, need to think a little bit, a little bit more about learning, then we think about teaching. If students cannot learn the way we teach, we must try and teach the way they learn. My, my research reviews that each of these modes, silent speech serves learning differently. There is a time for speech to be useful, but there is also a time for silence to be useful, being able to see that required skill.

00:05:54 - and this is one of the findings from my research. Speech often provides opportunities for students to articulate thoughts, to brainstorm ideas, to share opinions, while silence provides opportunities for comprehension, reflection, internalization of learning content, and especially cognitive processing. If a student is good at both or or practice both active silence

Balancing Participation in the Classroom

00:06:24 - mechanism to the fullest. Trouble occurs when a student needs to to speak, but is forced to be silent or when someone needs to perform some quiet thinking but is fought to speak. I'd like to share with you an experience that helped demonstrate this point, and I think this is a fun anecdote. in one of the classes I had the opportunity to observe at an Australian university, half of the students were highly eloquent extroverts,

00:06:58 - now feeling worried about imbalance participation. The lecturers of this class decided to conduct an experiment to, to fix the situation. They brought in a bun of, sticks, you know, the coffee stirs and get three of them to each students and said, these are your participation sticks. Every time you open your mouth and say something, you return one stick to us at the end of the lesson.

00:07:30 - you must stay behind the class and talk to us. The aim of this rule was for everyone to take an equal number of participation turns. Maybe you can guess the outcome. Would you like to kind of make a guess? How do you think students respond to this, this, rule? maybe that did the, did the, did the, introverts not give up as many sticks as the extroverts? For the first five minutes,

Balancing Participation: The Impact of Forced Silence in Classrooms

00:07:59 - and talked first as usual. So their sticks went bang, bang, bang. They return them all to the teachers. Then for the rest of the lesson, they stay there feeling distressed and not being allowed to talk anymore. In the meantime, like you guess, which I think was right, the introvert help held to their, to their sticks, for a while, but then they slowly, open their mouth and fabricated thing to say, in the end,

00:08:33 - after everyone had participated. You see, on the surface, the intervention achieved its intended goal of balancing the talking turns. But deep down, students were emotionally unstable. They, they found the lesson process quite stressful, you know, because their learning modes will bend against everyone's, will. Tension occur between classroom rules and student needs because although the rule took effect,

00:09:05 - Class discussion became unnatural because some student with burning idea to share were forced to be silent, and others with little to say had to fabricate contribution because they still have sticks. So participation after all, did not happen by choice, but by force. People talk not in a timely manner, and people kept silent not in a timely manner. They perform, a bit like robots. It seems that the rule make lecturers happy,

Balancing Speech and Silence in Education

00:09:36 - It was clear that the strategies of teaching rather than learning. So again, I would argue that both speech and silence available tools us for learning, but we need to organize them to work according to the need of students and according to the timing, they want to implement a balanced approach, as you say, or, or should we also say an inclusive approach for both speech and silence? To operate in educational setting,

00:10:07 - because I think such pedagogy require teacher knowledge about speech and silence. It requires knowing students needs and their ways of learning. It requires a good understanding of task types, such as when a task invites verbal responses or reflective responses. It also, and I think this is perhaps the most important thing, requires an open mind which does not see speech as always superior to silence.

00:10:41 - to fight out when silent is good for learning and when speech is good for learning. I've conducted a series of studies over the years in seven different countries, including Australia, Japan, China, South Korea, and Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. In these projects, I gave hundreds of student a set of different classroom tasks

The Role of Silence in Inductive Learning

00:11:11 - in which of them do you use more silence in which one do you use both? Here is the outcome the majority of participants said they tend to keep silent intensively when it comes to inductive tasks or discovery tasks, such as, looking for a pattern from a series of events coming up with a theory or rule from a set of evidence.

00:11:40 - and analysis for those tasks. If you force student to discuss immediately without any, processing time, there will be lost, the quality of performance likely to be poor. Another example of such task is, a problem solving case. I'll give an example, say two. Two American ladies are visiting, are visiting Egypt for their summer vacation, an Islamic country.

00:12:12 - Now, Jane wants to adapt to the custom and is thinking of dressing herself in more conservative clothes to show respect to the local culture. But Alice wants to wear little because the, the weather in Egypt, which is usually quite hot, she say, this is my time for relaxation and I deserve to wear anything. I like this task. in a course called communication and culture, this task, ask student this question, who decision makes more sense to you within that task?

Balancing Speech and Silence in Learning Tasks

00:12:49 - and talking too soon may mean you have not thought deeply enough. So again, in such discovery tasks, some cognitive processing is required and student is likely to need, some degree of silence on the country. Many students feel the need to speak out without waiting, without hesitation. When the task is cognitively, it's not cognitively demanding, but

00:13:17 - and experience whi which are easy to share. example of such tasks are what car do you drive? Where were you born? You don't need to keep silent and think too much. You cannot say, well, I don't remember my car, or It's not clear to me where I was born. The term for these tasks, which I commonly use in language learning is fluency activities. So if someone ask me, yeah, what challenges for a teacher

00:13:48 - I would say the challenge is the ability, the the ability to understand the nature of every task and what kind of response is expected. In reality, some students do not follow the pattern. I mentioned sometime a task may require a lot of thinking, but some students just hurry to talk quite soon. Or sometime a task may require a quick response. But stu, some students are found to hesitate. Now, when that happens, the teachers simply need to respect

Balancing Speech and Silence in Teaching

00:14:19 - We are not making the rules. We are only observing to see what kind of need emerges, and we support students accordingly. We can't tell student you must talk all the time, and if you're silent, you're wrong. Like the fact that you point out yeah, that, that, the need to kind of incorporate this into, teacher development program. we, we notice that teachers in many programs are frequently trained in

00:14:51 - We learn to talk, generate talk, and receive talk as if talking is the only way of teaching and learning. And because of such training, we tend to either ignore silence or question the value of silence. When highly challenging learning content require some thinking time to need to pause, they need to reflect to process information or find a way of responding to the issue they need.

00:15:22 - but many of us teachers do not allow it. We want students to talk all the time, and as teacher, we feel safe that way. So to your question, how should teacher education, programs address this issue? I would say in my view, teacher development program need to incorporate at least three components in the program, which I call, awareness, knowledge, and practice.

Balancing Silence and Speech in Education

00:15:53 - The first component is raising the awareness about the usefulness of both silence and speech. We can help teacher consider the fact that in every lesson there is a time for speech and there is a time for silence. Teacher should be organized to discuss what mode is useful for what content and why. The second component is building knowledge, perhaps by reading about the roles of speech and the roles of silence.

00:16:27 - research articles to discuss and acquire some understanding of how these modes connect with learning efficiency instead of assuming that, you know, talk equals learning and silent is often a waste of time. The third component would be the practice of developing tasks. To do so, I think teachers will need to understand what kinds of tasks require more Im immediate speech.

00:16:58 - I think teachers need to discuss classroom activity to see when silence needed, when speech should dominate. After that teacher can be encouraged to create their old task and make their old decision on which part of each task they develop may allow students to slow down and use silent to study. Ha, having said that, I don't think we should assume that all students will behave in the same way.

Embracing Silence in the Classroom

00:17:27 - that we can be well prepared to not resist silence when it needs to occur. From, from my observation, some student think too fast. They don't need silence anymore. In that case, the teacher of course should welcome verbal participation while, while also allow some student to keep thinking and, and join later if they like. And of course there are moments for silence. there are moments when silence can be painful. That is a task may require talk, but students don't talk.

00:18:04 - help those students by scaffolding the learning process so that students can slowly build ideas and be able to share them in some way. Number one, observe student because like it's likely that in the class of 20 student and there, there there may be 10 students who are very quiet, then it's your, responsibility, to observe and see how differently their silent means. You know, likely, 10 people who are silent,

00:19:00 - and so they may be silent out of shyness. They may be silent out of, not resistance, you know, resisting, toward your, your style of teaching. They may be silent because they are short of language, so it takes some time. But by observ observing and by chatting with students now and then even beyond the classroom, you can begin to build some knowledge about the diversity within silent itself. That will be my advice.

Faculti AI can make mistakes

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