For
teachers, it's not just what you say, it's how you say it
Credit: Alison Yin for EdSource Today
Denisia Wash, a kindergarten teacher in Berkeley,
didn’t want to use a sugary voice when she talked to her 5-year-old students –
they weren’t babies and that voice wasn’t actually effective, she said. But she
didn’t want to use a sharp-edged voice either, the impatient tone that can come
out when she’s tired or under pressure. “I call that teacher voice my ‘stress
voice,’” she said.
Last year, she conducted an
experiment as part of her evaluation at Berkeley Unified. If she changed her
tone of voice, would her students feel more involved in what they were
learning?
Wash isn’t alone in thinking about how she sounds
when she talks to her students. Principals, parents and departments of
education increasingly are asking teachers to create classrooms where students
feel that it’s O.K. to speak up, even if they’re not sure of their idea, and
where they are given a chance to explain themselves before a misunderstanding
blows up into an office referral. These relationships necessarily involve a
small thing that’s not a small thing – a teacher’s voice – say Wash and other educators,
including Joyce Dorado, director of the Healthy Environments and Response to Trauma
in Schools program at University of California, San Francisco.
“I’ve known teachers who have
been yellers and teachers who have been very, very soft-spoken,” said David
Kretschmer, an education professor at California State University, Northridge.
“Just as with the tone we use with anybody we’re conversing with – or the tone
we use with a pet – it can have a powerful impact.”
Part of Kretschmer’s job is to observe student
teachers in classrooms, where they are practicing their craft in real time, and
he doesn’t hear them yelling or whispering. What he
has heard, he said, is “student teachers who have been very, very flat
in terms of delivery of information.”
“And guess what?” he said. “Kids are pretty bored.”
He offers tips. “I tell them if you put an inflection in there, and vary your
tone and volume, that can have a remarkable impact on students,” he said.
If he had his way, every aspiring teacher would
take a theater class.
“I’ve known teachers who have been yellers and
teachers who have been very, very soft-spoken,” said David Kretschmer, an
education professor at California State University, Northridge.
Gene Kahane, who has been teaching for 24 years in
the Alameda Unified School District in the east Bay Area, agrees. “There’s a
theatricality to a classroom,” he said. He took a class early in his career
about “education through dramatization” and put those skills to use as a
4th-grade teacher presenting a unit on California history.
He’d step out of the classroom, put on a “goofy old
hat and a cowboy vest,” and return to students anew. Recounting the
transformation, he dropped into character. “Hey kids,” he said in a scratchy,
old-timey voice. “It’s Crusty the prospector here. Let’s talk about prospecting
for gold.”
Now Kahane is a high school English and drama
teacher, and he has traded Crusty the prospector for a tone of voice that he
said works almost like magic on students who are disrupting the flow. “What I
discovered was the power of whispering,” he said.
“When you work with teenage kids, and with kids who
come from backgrounds where they have a history of friction with teachers or
adults, if you approach them with a harsh voice, with negativity, they will
push back,” he said. “But if you lower your voice and whisper to them – as much
as they will let you get into their space, and that’s always a difficult part
of whispering – it de-escalates everything. It really does.”
He demonstrated the technique. “I might just lean
up close and say, ‘We talked about this the other day. You need to focus on this,
or I’m going to have to take some steps. I’m going to have to make some phone
calls, and let’s don’t go down that road. Show me you can do this, OK?'”
For Kahane, whispering is a way not to embarrass a
student. He said he doesn’t mind if students are a little scared by his
whispered message, but he doesn’t want to embarrass them. Respect matters,
particularly in high school.
“There’s a theatricality to a
classroom,” said Gene Kahane, an English and drama teacher in Alameda.
“You can exacerbate the situation by being loud, by
forcing that student to try to defend themselves and their own ego and their
own sense of who they are in the classroom, and it can become combative,” he
said. “But if you bring it down to that whisper, you show respect for them.”
Exactly how a teacher’s tone of voice is being
received by students is worth finding out, said Wendy Murawski, executive
director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at California State
University, Northridge. “There are teachers who are seen as far too critical or
negative and they just don’t know it,” she said. Being observed by another
teacher or by an administrator is one way to find out. Another is to survey
students about what’s working well and what could be better, she said.
Like children in the same family, students in the
same classroom may react differently to the way a teacher tells a joke or reads
aloud in a funny voice. Murawski noted that a student with autism may not be
able to decode a teacher’s tone. “What works with most won’t necessarily work
with all,” she said.
Unless it is the voice of Aretha Franklin, James
Brown or, on one memorable bus ride, William DeVaughn, said Laurie Cahn, a San
Francisco Unified School District bus driver who retired last year after 42
years of service. Sometimes students just need to hear someone else’s voice and
sometimes it’s best if that voice is singing rhythm and blues or soul.
“You guys ever heard of Aretha Franklin?” Cahn
asked the students on the bus. She hit play. “Let’s give it a shot.” Aretha
Franklin made everyone on the bus feel good, she said, as did the music of
James Brown. “We can all agree on James Brown,” she said.
On another day, it was raining as they drove
through the industrial part of the city. “I had some pretty rough kids,” Cahn
said. “I picked those kids up and they were always trashing each other. I’d
say, ‘Say something nice, guys — guys, guys.’” She turned on the radio and “Be
Thankful for What You Got,” sung soulfully by DeVaughn, filled the
bus.
Demonstrating what happened, she started to sing:
“Though you may not drive a great big Cadillac….”
“They all starting singing, and moving side to
side, and I started directing them,” she said. The right side of the bus took
the chorus: “Diamonds in the back, sunroof top, diggin’ the scene with a
gangster lean.”
“I thought, this is the greatest job in the entire
world,” she said.
As for Wash in Berkeley, she found her voice,
somewhere in the middle between stern and candy-coated, and the students
started asking more questions, she said. “It’s having that talking voice – not
at their level, but with them – and they have an opening to interact with you
in the learning process.” She added, “If you can show your student the real
you, your real voice, that’s where you make your connections.”
She remembered a moment from last year. “The kids
were fooling around and you just want to say, ‘Boom! Listen right now.’ And
then you stop, breathe, and you hear that they actually are engaged.” The
kindergartners were laughing, but they were laughing about what they were
learning.
“In your voice, you’ve got to pull back, look at
them, see what they’re doing and go with it,” she said. “It is a 100 percent
job to keep that voice every second.”
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