A fellow teacher went to the dentist and was asked what her job was. She replied: “It’s a job which relies heavily on my mouth - that’s why I’m here!”
William Evans and Jonathan Savage agree, arguing that teachers who harness their vocal abilities ultimately improve their pedagogy. Yet, just as each teacher’s pedagogy is unique, so also are our voices - and the ways in which we can use them to enhance our teaching practice. This was a refreshing read with an unusual and easily-overlooked premise.
tl;dr:
- Readability: ★★★☆☆ It’s viable to finish this book off in one sitting (~1h), but this workbook is really meant to be worked through. The serious reader might spend 30-45 minutes a week on each chapter, doing the vocal exercises and reflection questions as he/she goes along.
- Usefulness for teaching: ★★★★★ Because it’s the only resource I’ve seen which explicitly links pedagogy with the teacher’s voice, I would heartily recommend it to any teacher.
- Applicability to SG: ★★★★☆ The book is applicable to all contexts of teaching which involve the voice. However, pragmatic teachers may find it “commonsense” - though I argue it’s still worthwhile to dwell on “commonsensical” topics once in a while, because they are so easily overlooked!
Voice <–> Pedagogy??
To start off, the book invites readers to define their subjectivities or “the key ways of thinking or knowing that make you the individual that you are” (Peshkin 1988: 17). William and Savage argue that different school subjects have their own cultures of thinking, which have bearing on what should be taught, and how it should be taught and assessed. Our subjectivities frame the way we approach our subjects as teachers, and thus form the foundation for how we use our voices in the classroom.
To give an illustration, Savage talks about his own experience of music (his teaching subject). Because he sees the process of being involved in music as equally valuable to the final products of music-making, he uses his classroom voice sparingly during practical music exercises when students are experimenting with different sounds, and instead chooses to intervene in smaller conversations. When the time for experimentation is over, he draws students’ attention back with his classroom voice, and then gets them to present their pieces and talk about their different musical choices, facilitating discussion rather than merely playing the role of a music critic.
Vocal qualities
“How often does my teaching surprise my students? Does it even surprise me?” Williams and Savage argue that teaching is ultimately a performance which is meant to evoke thought and emotion in students. Teachers should hence pay attention to the following aspects:
- Voice (timbre, intonation, pitch, size, dynamism)
- Stressed words / phrases / sentences
- Eye contact
- Pausing
- Body language (posture and gestures)
- “Owning” the space (teachers’ movement throughout the classroom)
Once we define the ways in which we want to teach, we can define the performance qualities needed. Unfortunately, Williams and Savage share that many trainee teachers they’ve worked with are so focused on the pedagogy that they forget about the importance of the performance. They end up speaking in a high-pitched, monotonous voice, reflecting their levels of stress rather than inviting thought and participation.
To avoid the pitfall of stress and its effects on our voices, Williams and Savage recommend that every teacher define three teaching voices to start off. To me, these three voices relate also to the three types of teacher talk they define:
- “look at me” –> explanation
- “interesting task” –> questioning
- “whole group attention” –> modelling
Practical vocal exercises
To help teachers avoid vocal damage, William and Savage identify three aspects of our vocal “anatomy” (fuel, buzz and amplification), and provide exercises to improve vocal quality.
Fuel (air flow)
Air flow controls the volume and size of our voices. The more the volume of air passing through our voice pipes, and the faster its speed, the bigger and louder our voices will be.
I was surprised to find out that a central tenet of my years of training in speech and drama - “projecting using your diaphragm” - was in fact scientifically inaccurate, as the diaphragm is primarily a muscle of inspiration and plays very little role in exhalation. To improve air flow, Wiliams and Savage offer the following tips instead:
Avoid:
- Audible inspiration / “gasping”
- Shoulders rising or upper chest moving forward on each breath (our stomachs / diaphragms should be moving instead)
- Voice dropping off at the end of a phrase
Instead:
- Keep shoulders and chest relaxed during speech
- Coordinate your breath with your speech - pause at natural phrase boundaries to breathe
- Inhale using your diaphragm (visualize filling the “bottom” of your lungs first, rather than your chest - lying down to do this exercise helps!)
Buzz
To produce sound, the vocal cords in our larynx come together to vibrate and make a “buzz”. Breathing supports the voice, so once you have warmed up and become conscious of your breathing, engage the voice box by ‘humming’ in a single pitch. Breathe in over four counts, and then hum out over four counts, gradually increasing the number of counts with successive practice over weeks.
Amplification
Finally, air passing between the lips, controlled by the tension of the facial muscles, controls the speed of vibration, quality of buzz, and size of the sound. Williams and Savage distinguish between:
- Nasal vs. chest voices
- Narrow vs. wide pipes
- Simply “loud” voices vs. voices that “carry” across distances by resonance
They suggest we should aim for the latter rather than the former, in all three cases. To do so, they recommend practicing saying “eee” (which should resonate in the nose) and “ooo” (which should resonate in the chest) alternately, and varying their pitch. Relaxing the head is key, as tense muscles dampen vibrations and produce tight and strained voices.
Ultimately an important reminder
While focusing mainly on the pedagogical benefits of training our teaching voices, Williams and Savage also offer some sobering statistics: in a study of US teachers (Roy et al 2004), of 1,088 teachers surveyed, 19 per cent had a chronic voice disorder (i.e. tissue injury causing vocal quality to deteriorate and lasting > 4 weeks in duration). An experienced teacher I met in my previous school related her own story of her voice hoarsening and deepening in the decade or so she’s taught in secondary school. I’m glad to have read this book before starting teaching proper, and do heartily recommend it to all teaching colleagues.