“You don’t really know what you know until you try to put it into words.” That’s what a former mentor said to me back in the early 2000s. I had just asked why Talk suddenly became its own competency with the same academic weight as reading and writing in the English Language Arts curriculum in Quebec. Do you ever have one of those moments in life where something is brought to your attention for the first time, and thereafter you can’t not see it anymore? I’ve been talking my whole life! But this was the moment when I began to understand something about Talk that is so often misunderstood. Putting what we know or think we know into words can be difficult. Will it make sense? Will it be understood? But it’s the rich complexities of that struggle which make it a learning process and a language art.  

When searching for inspirational quotes or folk wisdom which include the word “talk”, it soon becomes clear the messages are really about the value of listening. And for good reason. An inability to listen creates problems. Listening should inform and enlighten us if we do it well. It’s a key ingredient in conflict resolution. Its value is famously implied in the prayer to be an “instrument of peace” attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, “Let me not seek as much to be understood, as to understand.” Listening is what wise people do. 

In contrast, talking is for fools who can’t listen, talk is cheap, it’s for the ignorant, or the opinionated, or shockingly… it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. For our purposes this is awful stuff. Folk wisdom can be very situational and often contradictory. 

So if we agree there’s little downside to doing the listening part well, then we need to be very conscious and very intentional about what it means to do the talking part well. Talking reveals things. It reveals ourselves to others. But it’s fascinating to consider how it also reveals ourselves to ourselves, enabling insight into what we know, what we think we know, and sometimes what we don’t know. It provides opportunities to know what we know more deeply. It creates qualitative leaps from knowing to understanding. If we should “seek first to understand”, couldn’t that include understanding ourselves? Let’s look at a few contexts for evidence of how talk reveals ourselves to ourselves. 

Have you ever been asked to define or explain a word or concept you thought you understood? Something that is a part of your vernacular or your everyday life, only to find you can’t easily put it into words? Like, how does a zipper work? You use them all the time. Come on! Or defining buzzwords like agency or streamline. Researchers have a name for this phenomenon. It’s called the illusion of explanatory depth. The key to revealing it to ourselves only happens when we do the talking. That’s when we realize we haven’t thought about it deeply enough. How do we avoid this? Try explaining concepts out loud and look for gaps in your understanding. 

Whatever we know about how psychological therapy works, the impression we have is that patients sit comfortably and tell the therapist all about their problems. We may think that the sole purpose of doing that is to bring the therapist up to speed so they can suggest helpful shifts in our thinking. But that’s only part of it. Having a chance to be heard and be free of judgment is very therapeutic in and of itself. It’s why we naturally choose to rant about our frustrations with close family and friends. But despite the good relationships we may have, it’s extra helpful to have an objective ear who lets us do most of the talking, and gently guides us as we give voice to our own emerging and potentially life-changing insights. 

In my career as an educator in Quebec I’ve had the privilege of participating, as a learner, in what we call the Math Summer Institute. This professional development is all about how to teach mathematics more effectively. The approach is twofold. The first is about seizing opportunities to teach math conceptually rather than just procedurally. That itself is a huge paradigm I won’t get into here. It’s the second part of the approach that is so expertly modeled by the session leaders. It’s all about getting students to talk about the math. In fact, the students do most of the talking. Here’s how it’s structured.   

There are only three classroom norms for this method of teaching and they are all about how to talk in math class. The first is that you must be able to justify your solutions or share your thinking, however tentative, about a math problem. Explain how it works and why it makes sense to you (or doesn’t). The second norm is that you must be able to make sense of each other’s thinking. That’s where students can rephrase or build on someone else's spoken thoughts. This is sometimes done in order to seek clarification or even challenge the ideas. The final norm is that you must say whenever you don’t understand or don’t agree. If you don’t understand, you must pose specific questions to get clarification. If you don’t agree, you must explain why.     

One of the leaders in these sessions once said, “I never answer a question one of my students can answer for me.” It keeps the students talking with each other. They’re the ones who build and own the knowledge. The teacher is there to course-correct with a slight verbal prompt if necessary. 

When we’re trying to build knowledge and understanding, we need to be able to “try it on”. To do that we need to be the one doing the talking. In the dynamism of the classroom, that “trying on” gets passed around so we have something to respond to. The goal of conversation is not to win an argument, but to make sense of problems and solutions together. 

In ELA, all this processing and learning can and does happen through writing as well. We work to put our thoughts into words. I’m doing it right now. We can also write our way to meaning. It happens informally in journal writing or drafting or responses. Nobody questions the value of writing in school. However, a greater emphasis is placed on the more formal, crafted aspects of writing to produce essays or articles, short stories or poems. 

But there’s a special dynamism in the tentative exploration and the fluency of thinking that informal talk affords. That part can be lost if the focus is on structures and conventions, and the impact on our audience we hope for when we produce something. The spirit of the Talk competency is, as written in the program, that a student “uses language to communicate and to learn”. Learning happens in powerful, self-revelatory ways not just when we listen, but when we actually do the talking. That’s what gets lost in folk wisdom. 

So do not “remain silent” lest speaking reveal a fool. Let’s own our learning, own our voice, and make the purpose clear. We can talk to learn.