I used to rush up and hit people,” says Laura, aged 15, “but now I talk to them. All this has made me think about it, how I used to lose my temper, but now I try another way.” She adds: “I’d like to learn more about communicating. It was fun.” Laura has been on the Communication Opportunity Group Scheme (COGS) pilot project in Sir Jonathan North Community College, Leicester. Along with six other Year 9 girls in the spring term of 2000, Laura spent one session a week for 10 weeks working on the first goal in the COGS scheme: presenting a short poem to an audience of family and friends.

Yet only months before, Laura had been at risk of failure and exclusion. Embarking on the 14-goal ladder of COGS has made all the difference. Learning to think out loud gives pupils the ability not only to express themselves in language, spoken and written, but also to control their behaviour, claims COGS research co-ordinator Rosemary Sage. Structuring the learning gives teachers and pupils the confidence to continue.

For 30 years Dr Sage and her team at Leicester University have been researching the importance of spoken communication skills in education and in life generally. Eighty per cent of life’s activities involve spoken skills, she says, against 20 per cent needing reading and writing.

Paradoxically, Dr Sage’s research shows that, with the national curriculum, literacy and numeracy strategies and more frequent testing, teachers spend 86 per cent of class time talking to, not with, their pupils. An ever-increasing number of students simply cannot grasp what is going on.

By tackling communication at the root, COGS frees pupils to learn. It involves a graded programme based on scientific understanding of brain function and the need to integrate right-brain and left-brain function. (The right brain is thought to control visual processing and the left verbal reasoning. Poor integration of the functions may limit language use, sense of humour, ability to follow directions and understanding of cause and effect.) Dr Sage believes teaching communication skills is “the only way really to improve personal and academic performance”.

COGS and Rosemary Sage’s book Class Talk are both immensely practical. Activities to warm up include “Brain Gym”, exercises widely used by actors and public speakers to give positive, active, clear and energetic learning which ranges from using acupressure points to stretches. Poems, songs, stories and role-play develop empathy and explore consequences of actions. Asking children: “What happens next? Why did he act like that? What should she do?” reaps huge benefits; getting them to ask each other marks a quantum leap in whole-class progression.

COGS students meet once a week for at least an hour. Principles of empathy and co-operation help students concentrate on what COGScalls message-oriented communication (not just words, but everything else we use to get a message across). Action through words is the motto, rather than action not words.

Learner-centred activities such as guessing games, puzzles, and making explanations or summaries are aimed at getting pupils to cross “information gaps”; discussing controversial ideas opens up “opinion gaps” allowing for negotiation, and encouraging pupils to share feelings, describe what has happened to them and defend their views. Working in groups of eight to 12 gives everyone a chance to speak. It is more important that the group should gel than that they should be similar in age or ability. The overriding aim is to enable students to command the spontaneous, free use of language to express and develop their thoughts.

The sometimes dramatic results can also be particularly evident with the very able. This spring, 30 girls identified as gifted and talented in Years 7-10 at Sir Jonathan North worked on goal 6, learning to vary the impression they make on others.

The effect has been “stunning”, says Sarah Raynes, SENCO and assistant principal. At the beginning, the girls were hesitant when asked to relate a story or develop an argument; they were tentative in extracting a message from large chunks of talk or text and responding with an explanation or report.

“Chatterboxes” at home, as they cheerfully confessed, these girls could be withdrawn at school, where they were inhibited by the sense that wrong answers were a mark against them. They had no problem communicating informally, but the sort of considered, formal response they knew was required of them in lessons was difficult.

Teachers at Sir Jonathan North found that unless students were given a detailed framework, they found it very difficult to generate and construct ideas while talking.

In some other countries, the education system values spoken language much more highly. In Italy, for instance, students take only one public exam throughout their schooling when, at the age of 19, they choose their four best subjects to “defend” in oral examination. Yet levels of reading and writing are much higher in Italy and other countries where speech and thought are thought of as evolving together, says Rosemary Sage.

“The biggest thing that teachers can do is give students more opportunities for planned talk in class,” she says. In her book Class Talk she explains how “talking is the way we try out, select and sort ideas before stringing them together into coherent, whole notions”. She says: “It is the quickest, easiest, cheapest and most efficient way of transmitting information and without it effective learning is highly unlikely”. Paradoxically, by putting aside the books and conversing, people actually become better at reading and writing. Sir Jonathan North claims striking successes after one term’s work on COGS.

Rosemary Sage questions the efficacy of national initiatives to improve literacy that are based heavily on writing skills. “The reason for facilitating pupil talk is that thinking develops through externalising ideas out loud. It is not until late primary years that children can internalise and think inside their heads. It is no use teachers assuming that students can understand and respond,” she says It is unfashionable to discuss readiness to learn, yet teachers know that academic understanding depends largely on verbal processing abilities which young children have simply not developed. At the same time, society is using more and more visual means to give information, relying on images to trigger emotion and association, rather than words that need analysing. Add television, computers and social trends towards less family conversation, and children may have fewer chances to develop that vital verbal understanding outside school. This changing social landscape contradicts mistaken expectations, built into the curriculum, that students perform in writing well above their speaking and thinking narrative levels. If teachers expect that pupils can write better than they talk, they are mistaken.

COGS offers a structured way forward, says Dr Sage. “It succeeds because thinking and the language structure to express thought are taught in a developmental way, ensuring that students write at the level at which they can speak and think.”

COGS rests on four principles: clarity, content, convention (rules of presentation) and conduct (personal presentation). These principles rely on seven techniques: recording, reciting, referring, replaying, recounting, reporting and relating, which includes creative writing. Within the four principles, each lesson roves around within the seven techniques.

Beginning with simple games to develop memory, such as Kim’s Game (where children have to memorise objects on a tray and then write down a list of them from memory) and to free up relationships, such as throwing bean bags around a circle, the pupils become able to move from simply recording “what we thought” in a brainstorming session to recounting “why we thought that” and on to reporting how “we looked at these ideas because we had been thinking about x” and finally relating, making a complete narrative about the ideas. Throughout, communication between pupils and teachers flows both ways, engaging them in a sparky dialogue.

Creative writing, one of the goals of COGS, fits into the English curriculum, though English is by no means the only subject to benefit from the programme. Sarah Raynes says: “One humanities teacher at Sir Jonathan North asked me towards the end of the first term, ‘What’s happening to so- and-so? She used to sit and cry and write two lines. Now she’s written a whole side and handed it in with a smile.’” Melanie Wild, assistant researcher to Dr Sage at Leicester University, says: “COGS should translate into every area of the curriculum, because it improves thinking skills.”

In the past English and English teaching used always to sit at the core of the curriculum because of just such benefits. But Sarah Raynes agrees with Rosemary Sage that too much emphasis on a written curriculum, on pressing on with literacy goals without using enough conversation to check on understanding, undermines pupils who find it hard to structure or voice their thoughts. Yet after one term of COGS, Laura and Michelle, who used to be in remedial sets for everything, are achieving well in middle sets.

The high achievers, previously tongue-tied with shyness, are, according to English teacher Rita Hindocha, “transformed. They all want to have jobs where they do public speaking: they are confident and thoughtful young women. And they’ve got top grades at English GCSE”.

THE FOUR PRINCIPLES

Clarity is making ideas clear and interesting; content is the subject-matter of the ideas; convention is the rules governing the exchange of ideas; conduct is the impression ideas make on others.

* Clarity: a lesson plan in goal one might suggest learning a short poem to master clarity. The speaker works on finding the right pitch, pace, pause and level of intensity to get over the idea in the poem. Confident presentation is part and parcel of clarity.

* Content is the trigger for exploring a number of ideas about a topic, for instance, brainstorming in a group about the issues it raises. This could lead to techniques such as mind-mapping, to see how content interconnects.

* Convention adds the social dimension and helps pupils to grasp that expressing ideas is only half the journey: you have to make sure your audience has understood. Perhaps the speaker might ask someone in the audience to give their views on the performance of the poem and help analyse its presentation, looking at such aspects as body language and eye contact as well as the voice.

* Conduct turns the whole exchange round and asks the listener to participate and reciprocate: what did the poem mean to them? The speaker chooses members of the audience to ask questions and learns to respond, finding out how to be in control of their side of the conversation.

SESSION STRUCTURE

* Contact games: forming the group dynamic. Enjoyment, relaxation and experimentation help dispel self-consciousness and stimulate interest and motivation.

* Communication activities: practising tasks for the goals. Students work at different levels within the groups andor divide into sub-groups.

* Closing period: reviewing the session and preparing students for the next meeting.

SESSION DOS AND DON’TS

* Don’t force a student to join in, but let them observe and help.

* Don’t persist with a dud game, but do encourage the group to come up with an alternative.

* Do stop while the students still enjoy it.

* Do allow a decent interval before re-introducing a popular game * Do keep the same teams over time to build group spirit

RESOURCES

* Leicester University now offers a certificate in COGS and has published a video and manual of the scheme as well as a research report. Contact: Dr Sage, School of Education, 21 University Road, Leicester LE1 7RF. Tel: 0116 252 3656. E-mail: rs70@leicester.ac. uk Class Talk by Rosemary Sage, pound;15.95, is published by Network Educational Press, PO Box 635, Stafford ST16 1BF. Tel: 01785 225515.

E-mail:enquiries@networkpress.co.uk