“The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.”
There's no evidence to suggest this is true - and plenty of evidence to suggest it is not.
Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash
The first time I was seriously introduced to the concept of “the person doing the talking is the person doing the learning” it was about five years ago. An administrator handed us a blank pie chart with about 40 slices, and suggested that we have someone observe our class, and shade in one slice for every minute of “teacher talk”.
I don’t think anyone actually did this, in no small part because it’s obnoxious. Imagine trying to teach the class with some adult in the corner furiously shading a graphic organizer, all the while knowing that “teacher talk” is considered contemptible and that “student talk” is where the real learning happens. “Lecture” centers the teacher as the expert; the goal of education is for the student to be the expert, and so therefore, it should be the student who is doing most of the talking, because that makes them the expert.
Monty Python fans already know: ducks and wood both float in water, witches are burned using wood, so therefore, if a woman weighs as much as a duck, she must be a witch. Obviously.
Administrators often observe classes outside of their own content knowledge. I recently had an administrator describe to me how good a math lesson was, that she couldn’t follow the math whatsoever, but that students all had roles and were all engaged in “student-to-student discourse”.
Brief side quest: I’m amazed at how many English teachers and former English teachers boast about how they don’t know math. They admit it with so much confidence, that I can’t help but to wonder if they consider innumeracy a badge of honor. I’ve never met a math teacher who puffed out their chest and announced to a large, professional audience, “I can’t read!” And yet…
Back to the main quest: administrators routinely observe classes outside of their own backgrounds, because they don’t really believe the content matters so much. I’m not sure they would admit as much, or that they consciously think as much, but how else do you explain a formal observation by an administrator who doesn’t know the content they are observing? And admits it openly? It must not be the most important thing, right? They believe the whole point of the observation is the pedagogical process, which is to center the student as the expert, and that the way to do that is “student talk”.
We were told this explicitly last school year, multiple times, by teacher evaluators, including a professional development in which we were asked to read and respond to this blog post:
Eleven Beliefs About Student Talk
I have wondered if other districts have taken this position, or if this is more-or-less an Albany thing. From what I could find, Jenn York-Barr (not of Albany) was credited with saying, “The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.” There have been enough articles and blog posts to make me think that this idea is not just in Albany, and that teachers are getting evaluated elsewhere, as they are in Albany, based on the ratio of teacher-to-student-talk in the classroom. Here are some other essays and blog posts on student talk:
Should Your Students Be Talking in Class? (The answer is yes!) (2020)
Children Come First: The One Doing the Talking is the One Doing the Learning (2022)
If the Teacher Does All the Talking, Who’s Doing the Learning? (2023)
Protocols That Get All Students Talking in Class Discussions (2023)
There are many, many more. These are literally just the first nine results from a simple google search. I read them all and they are of varying quality, but they all convey the same idea: if students are talking, then students are learning; if the teacher is dominating the talk, then students are not learning.
This is a hypothesis that is simple to test empirically. Does student talk have a relationship with academic performance? There are many studies that investigate the relationship between personality (the big five) and academic performance - and the results are incredibly consistent.
There are many studies that describe the big five, but I used this one. The “big five” personality dimension most associated with talking is “extraversion”. Extraversion is also associated with poise, gregariousness, positive emotions, self-disclosure, sociability, leadership, assertiveness, activity, and excitement seeking.
The other four dimensions of personality are neuroticism, agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness.
Here are just a few studies analyzing the relationship between dimensions of personality and academic achievement in students ranging from K to college:
Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between the Big Five and Academic Success at University (2007) file:///C:/Users/15182/Downloads/Trapmann_Hell_Hirn_Schuler__MABig5__2007.pdf
Big Five personality predictors of post-secondary academic performance (2007)
A Meta-Analysis of the Five-Factor Model of Personality and Academic Performance, Arthur E. Poropat, (2009)
Relationship between Big-five Personality Domains and Students’ Academic Achievement (2012)
The Big Five and tertiary academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis (2016)
The Big Five Personality Traits And Academic Performance (2020)
Big Five personality traits and academic performance: A meta-analysis (2021)
If it were true that “the person doing the talking is the person doing the learning” then we would expect a strong positive relationship between students scoring high in extraversion and students scoring high on academic measures. If you read the abstracts of these studies, you’ll find that the results are very consistent. There is no - zero - relationship between extraversion and academic achievement. There is consistently a strong, positive relationship with conscientiousness and academic achievement. Here are some traits associated with the personality trait conscientiousness (again, from here) - not to say that all of these lead to academic achievement, but rather, the trait overall is the personality trait consistently most strongly associated with academic achievement:
Purposefulness
Efficiency
Self-discipline
Competence
Organization
Achievement striving
Dutifulness
Deliberation
Orderliness
Perfectionism
Rationality
Cautiousness
For what it’s worth, these are also the qualities of a person most likely to be receptive to lectures from an expert - and are also the ones achieving the most academically.
In terms of personality, there is also sometimes a positive relationship between academic achievement, and agreeableness and openness (openness more so with younger children); however, nothing is as robust as conscientiousness (if you look at the tables, it’s not even close), and extraversion is consistently an insignificant contributor to explaining academic achievement (not even on the radar). Talking has no relationship with academic achievement.
This is not to say that extraversion, or specifically, talking, is a useless quality. It’s just to say, the statement that “The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning” has no empirical basis, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.