: Leading the conversation The importance of chatty children and the SHREC approach.

Imagine your class as they arrive for the day. It is the spring term; the children are settled into your routines and feel at home in the classroom. You can immediately hear the loudest voices and the confidence with which they speak — and don’t we all know it!

Perhaps naively, we often imagine that the children who sit quietly, follow the rules, and keep their heads down are the most successful. Yet, you may find that during inputs, when these children share their ideas, they always seem to fall slightly below expectations, struggling to articulate their ideas. It poses a vital question: Do these children actually know how to hold a conversation?

The Power of Turn-Taking

At a recent EEF EYFS seminar, we discussed the importance of conversational turn-taking, it was eye-opening, to say the least. With the ongoing focus on the use of oracy in the classroom, the question naturally arises: How do we ensure that all children, at all points in their development, hear and partake in high-quality conversations?

Research indicates that the way we model and converse with children in their earliest years builds the fundamental blocks for their language and academic achievements throughout life. Beyond the academic data, there is the undeniable value of the social skills learned through turn-taking. As educators, relationships are core to teaching practice; little goes well when we lack these fundamental connections. Whilst it can feel natural to model and engage with these principles when interacting with the children, do we necessarily remember the importance of our relationships with other staff? The interactions the children see between the adults in their lives, both at home and school, are the blueprint by which we set the expectations we require of the children. If we do not model conversational turn-taking among ourselves, how on earth can we expect the children to learn this fundamental skill?

Evolution through SHREC

During the seminar, the SHREC approach was discussed, and it immediately piqued my interest. It is a simple model that encapsulates the fundamental steps to successful conversation and provides a clear framework for how to model this to children.

The four steps of the SHREC approach have become an essential means of conducting conversation in my classroom. Adopting the SHREC approach in my own practice has been evolutionary. I have seen immeasurable improvements in:

• Confidence: Children speak more openly, broadly and enthusiastically with both their peers and adults
• Independence: They elaborate on ideas without prompts, identify how they seek to challenge themselves in their own language, for example carefully selecting adjectives and ​‘levelling up’ more basic language.
• Versatility: They hold conversations with peers and adults with equal ease.

The transformation in classroom interactions has been eye-opening. By moving beyond simple ​“inputs” and focusing on the mechanics of the back-and-forth, we allow those quiet children to bridge the gap between ​“following the rules” and truly succeeding. The benefits have also been bountiful for the SEN students in our cohort. They have begun to more confidently share their ideas and are starting to model using full sentences when working with their peers or discussing tasks with trusted adults.

To summarise – ultimately, if we want every child in our care to unlock their full potential, we have to look beyond quiet compliance and explicitly teach them how to chat. By shifting our focus to the deliberate back-and-forth of high-quality talk, we bridge the gap for our quietest learners and empower our SEND students to share their ideas with newfound confidence. Adopting the SHREC approach has been an absolute game-changer in this mission. Far from being just another strategy, it has become a vital hinge point for our daily classroom practice — providing the exact framework needed to turn everyday interactions into evolutionary leaps in our children’s independence, versatility, and voice.