The Trouble With Turn and Talk

How a classroom trend that does almost nothing became standard practice.

At my final division meeting of the year, the middle school staff filed in, sat down, and waited for the last few things our dean wanted to share before summer. As far as I was concerned, only one thing needed to be said: you all did great work this year, and I appreciate you. Instead, the first thing out of her mouth was, “Let’s do a little warmup. Turn to the person next to you and tell them one thing you are proud of from this year.”

She had just told a room full of educators who had survived ten months of teaching middle school to do a turn and talk.

The educator beside me and I turned toward each other, sighed, and one of us said, “What are your summer plans?” We talked about July. The dean never knew the difference, because she had no idea what anyone was actually saying.

That is the whole problem with the turn and talk method in one image.

I have been asked on this platform why I dislike this method as much as I do, and going back through my own articles, I noticed I take a shot at it in nearly every one.

“There is always a new ritual to go with the new theory: turn and talk, stop and jot, entrance tickets, exit tickets, gallery walks. None of them are harmful, exactly. The problem is what they are often for.”

“A twelve-year-old is not going to stumble onto dramatic irony during a turn and talk.”

So let me stop taking shots in passing and make the actual case.

A turn and talk, for anyone who needs the definition, is the routine many educators use to get students talking to one another. You teach something, pose a question, ask for some deeper thinking, and instead of having students raise their hands and contribute to a discussion, you say, turn to the person next to you and tell them what you think. You each get a minute, so every pair uses two minutes of class time.

In "When Did Direct Instruction Become a Dirty Word," I argued that education has mistakenly come to equate a busy classroom with a successful one. The more students move, talk, and engage with one another, the more learning is assumed to be happening, or at least that is the illusion many in education prefer. Turn and talk plays directly into that. The room fills with chatter, and from across the hall it looks like learning. Underneath the noise, very little of it is.

Here is what actually happens in those two minutes.

Students rarely tell each other anything of value. Even when a pair makes a genuine attempt at the question, there is a real risk that one of them shares something inaccurate and the other retains it as fact, with no one there to catch it. Plenty of pairs are not discussing the material at all. They are talking about the weekend, their friends, whatever is more interesting than the assignment in front of them.

Turn and talk takes the educator out of the lesson entirely. For those two minutes I have handed the material to the students and stepped back from the job I am actually there to do, which is to teach it. When we regroup and I ask what they came up with, I often get answers like “we both said basically the same thing,” “we agreed,” or “she had a good point but I forget what it was.” That is not a failing on the students’ part. A quick exchange with whoever is sitting next to them rarely produces the kind of thinking a guided discussion would, so they come back with little to show for it.

It is, in practice, a sanctioned two minutes to socialize, and I am in no position to act scandalized about it, since I spent the dean’s turn and talk discussing my summer plans. My students have mastered the same performance of deep discussion: the furrowed brow, the thoughtful lean toward a partner’s desk, the urgent murmur that swells the second I drift within earshot and falls away the moment I move on. If there were an award for looking profoundly engaged while saying nothing of substance, my seventh graders would sweep it every year.

Ask them, and they will sort themselves into thirds: about a third like turn and talk because they get to talk to a friend, about a third resent it because they would rather not be paired with someone who knows less or takes it less seriously, and about a third are shy or anxious and dread being made to talk to someone they are not comfortable with. I relate most to that last third. At twelve I would have been right there in it, gripping the edge of my desk, praying I would not get stuck with the one student who actually wanted to talk about the reading. Not one of those reasons, mine included, has anything to do with learning the material.

Here is the part that bothers me most.

Turn and talk takes no account of whether a given student wants that interaction in the first place. I have students with real social anxiety, and being forced to turn and perform a conversation on cue is something they genuinely dread. The usual defense of the method runs the other way. Pairing students up, the argument goes, gives the nervous ones a low-stakes rehearsal before they have to face the whole room. I have not found that to be true. The pairing is the hard part, not the relief it is meant to be, and being matched with whoever happens to be sitting beside them does nothing to soften it. Other students, the more dominant ones, take the conversation over and leave their partner with nothing to say. With a roomful of pairs all talking at once, I cannot realistically follow any single conversation. I don’t know whether what is being said is accurate, or appropriate, or whether a given pair is even on the topic. So I am putting anxious students through something they hate, letting the loudest students run the rest, and I cannot even hear whether any of it was worth the two minutes.

If I tell my students I care about them, I have to show it. Building a routine that I know causes some of them real anxiety, for a payoff I cannot even verify, is not caring. It is the opposite.

So what do I propose instead? I answer that at length in the article “Engagement Is Not the Same as Entertainment,” so I will not relitigate it here, except to say that the alternative is an educator who stays in the conversation and models, out loud and in real time, what real thinking about a text looks like. I am part of the discussion. I teach through my own questions and reactions, not by stepping out of the conversation for two minutes at a time.

Some of you use turn and talk and love it and will tell me it works beautifully in your room. I will leave the worth of that to your judgment. I am telling you what I have watched happen in my own classroom.

A word to anyone in their first years in the classroom. You are going to be told, more than once, that getting students to talk to one another is the same as getting them to learn. It is not. Two students can talk energetically for the full two minutes, leaning in and going back and forth, and look exactly like the engaged classroom you have been trained to want, while neither of them comes away understanding more than they did when they started. Do not confuse a room that looks busy with a room where learning is happening. What makes a student care about what they are learning is not the classmate beside them.

It is you.

It is a student watching an adult who knows the material, cares about it, understands why it matters, and is willing to show all of that out loud. You do not need a partner activity for that. You need to know your material, find a way to love it, and let your students see that you do. Whatever that looks like for you, it will reach them far more than any routine someone hands you in a training.

I have my students for fifty-five minutes a day. Fifty-five minutes to teach them, to reach them, to pull them into what we are reading. I am not giving any of those minutes away to a routine that performs learning without producing it. My job is to think alongside them, to push them further, and to make them care about the book in front of them. That is not work I can hand to the student in the next seat for two minutes at a time.

None of this means I want students sitting in silence, or that I am against them working together. I am not. My students collaborate, build, argue, share, and have a good time doing it, and some of the work they are proudest of comes from doing it side by side. The difference is that I have spent years building better ways for them to do it, ways that actually sharpen their thinking and stay with them long after the lesson is over, rather than reaching for the one the trainings keep insisting should work. That is the point of all of this. We owe students the methods that do something, not the ones we have been told to admire. I love watching two students work through a problem that matters to them, pushing back on each other and talking it through until they figure it out. What I do not believe, and will not pretend, is that a two-minute exchange about something they learned a moment earlier produces any of that.

Even if one somehow did, it would be lost in a roomful of conversations, and I would never know.

One last thing, on where this came from. Turn and talk is treated as a modern, research-backed innovation, but it is neither modern nor recently invented. It is a faster, stripped-down version of Think-Pair-Share, which Frank Lyman developed at the University of Maryland in 1981. Doug Lemov later included the quick version in his book Teach Like a Champion as a named technique, which is a large part of why so many of us now call it turn and talk. A method that has been handed down and repackaged for more than forty years deserves more scrutiny than the easy, near-universal approval it usually gets.

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If this is the kind of argument you came for, here are a few more in the same spirit:

When Did Direct Instruction Become a Dirty Word? — why teaching from the front of the room is not a crime.

Engagement Is Not the Same as Entertainment — what real engagement looks like, and what it only pretends to be.

It Matters What You Call Us — why I am a teacher, not an educator.

The Seating Arrangement That Actually Works — in defense of rows.