Quiet voice
I have a lovely Year 9 GCSE History class — but boy are they chatty. They fire lots and lots of questions at me. Sometimes it can feel like a barrage of them. One or two like to throw in ‘distractor’ questions to the point that it’s almost become a running joke in the lesson (there’s always a regular question about ‘when are we going to learn about the war, sir?’ even though I’ve answered that question approximately 234,562 times this year already). Given that three of my five periods a fortnight are last period of the day (including today, a Friday) it can mean that sometimes we don’t get quite as much done as I’d like to.
I am also notorious for having a loud voice. Indeed one of my former colleagues (and a dear friend) christened me ‘Captain Boom Boom’. Not great. Teaching with open doors due to COVID has probably not been well received by my classroom neighbours, it’s fair to say! In the context of a noisy class it can all get a much between me and them.
So today I decided to pursue a different tack. I decided I would use my quiet voice. The lesson was relatively straightforward — we were looking at Joseph Lister’s development of antiseptics in surgery during the nineteenth century. We’d already looked at the problems of early nineteenth century surgery via reading some gory extracts from Lindsey Fitzharris’ magnificent The Butchering Art. We’d also considered the role of James Simpson in developing anaesthetics (as one student quipped, “he basically had a sesh, sir!”)
We were going to read through some information on Lister’s research and then answer some questions. Some students still had a few bits to catch up that they’d not sorted from the previous lesson as well. But when reading I decided to go quiet, and slow with my delivery. I’ve noticed before that some classes tend to go quiet if you, as the teacher, go quiet, and I was going to make a concerted effort to try this today. Sometimes I’ve found that I’ve been trying to talk over the class and it’s made things louder and louder — even when I’ve got them back to silence, it’s escalated again. I don’t think me going louder was proving particularly useful.
I read through the key text with the students, reading at a deliberately lower volume, and also going a little bit slower through the text. I tried to make my pauses just a little longer than normal, and my emphases of certain words a little bit more pronounced, just to instil the sense that this room, today, is going to be a quieter room — a space where some solid work is going to get done.
The students listened well and answered my questions efficiently as we went through the text. When we moved on to the written questions — I made a concerted effort to deal with distractor questions swiftly and move on. I also remained rooted in Pastore’s Perch at the corner of the classroom, so I could keep an eye on whether all students were working (with a healthy dose of Be Seen Looking to catch the ones at the back of the class). I continued to use my quiet, deliberate voice to answer any questions, while ensuring I stayed on or close to Pastore’s Perch so as not to give the rest of the students the opportunity to go ‘off task’ by taking my eye off them.
It’s fair to say that we made much greater progress than we have done for a few lessons, and overall I was satisfied with the outcome of the lesson. It’s fascinating to me how lowering the volume leads to better listening and much better focus all round. It’s also a reminder to me that sometimes less is more when it comes to spoken communication, and that I just need to rein it back from time to time in terms of giving too much information and overloading the students.
So if you’ve got this far, and you’ve got that nice but noisy class in a graveyard afternoon slot, perhaps consider whether going quieter rather than louder might be the way forward to get more from them, and to make sure that being kinder to yourself.
