Research School Network: Talking, or Teaching Talking? Making the MOST of high quality talk in Maths

At Great Heights Academy Trust, after engaging with the EEF’s ​‘Improving Mathematics in Key Stages 2 and 3’ Guidance Report we have been thinking carefully about our approach to create talk rich maths classrooms where all pupils can participate. The report indicates that high-quality talk can play an important role in supporting learning. Recommendation 5 from the Guidance Report highlights that discussion and dialogue can be useful tools for developing metacognition, but pupils need to be taught how to engage in discussion. Furthermore, Howe et al. (2019), highlight the significance of encouraging pupils to query and elaborate upon each other’s ideas, as well as supporting all pupils to engage in classroom dialogue.

Our work started with some discussion between Subject Leaders but we recognised the importance of engaging all staff within the department. We decided to create time for departmental and cross school discussion and after having completed a deep dive into the evidence base we were united in a shared understanding of the importance of developing talk. Having reflected on existing provision with a sharpened understanding, it was clear that talk was happening in all of our classrooms but we were less confident about quality and consistency and the extent of participation across the range of learners. 

Between us, we had read a range of studies and blogs produced by Research Schools, we also consulted with some of our primary colleagues around the approaches that they found to be most effective. When collaborating across two secondary schools it is always important to consider the fit and feasibility of approaches and we decided to coalesce around core ingredients that would enable us to refine provision whilst having a shared language that would enable us to continue with collaboration. What followed is our framework that aims to answer the question we started with.

How can we make the MOST of high quality talk in Maths? 

This has been a really useful tool to enable us to think about how we explicitly plan for the development of talk rich classrooms in maths. We keep coming back to the core elements and use it to support professional dialogue. We have had staff providing examples of strategies they have used to provide scaffolding, opportunities for scripting and rehearsal to support modelling, refinement of short and medium term planning to identify opportunities for talk, mapping of vocabulary and shared resources to support explicit teaching. We are really looking forward to see how this develops further and the impact that this will have on our pupils.

TOLD: Four evidence-informed principles to promote high-quality talk in maths – EEF


Scaffolding high-quality talk in maths – Kate Henshall


Meaningful moments for mathematical talk – EEF


​‘Talk’ me through TOLD: four key principles for encouraging… | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)