Teaching the 4 ‘Voices’ 🗣️

Teaching Kindness and Positive Behaviours 

4 Voices 🗣️🧸💕

Kindness doesn’t sit in isolation. We can’t just expect our children to be kind without modelling the behaviours that allow for kindness to naturally grow. Today I am sharing a previous colleague, Mr T’s ‘4 Voices.’

Mr T reminded me that we don’t always make clear our expectations. We often instinctively model the positive behaviours we want to see, but sharing the what and why is vital to make things stick! I really liked this one Mr T shared with me… ‘4 Voices.’

It started when Mr T was telling me about how he’d repeatedly been asking his class to come in quietly or be quiet in his class to varying levels of failure or success depending on whether your cup is half empty or full! Then it dawned on him… he had a class of 30 different expectations on what quiet sounded and looked like, including his own!

Mr T decided to teach what the voices in his classroom should sound like depending on what the children were doing in his class. He shared his expectations for the sound level and allowed the children time to play about with them. (See the descriptions below.) Most importantly he practised these on a daily basis for a number of weeks until they stuck and when they began to slip a few months down the line, it didn’t take long to remind the children and bring them back to their shared understanding of what ‘quiet’ or the new improved ‘4 voices’ looked and sounded like. Remember anything worth doing usually takes some time, patience and effort. 🧸💕

Maybe your 4 voices are or will be different in your classroom to meet the needs of your pupils. Maybe it isn’t voice level, possibly it is something else you need to work on. 🤷‍♀️ As long as you have and make a shared understanding clear with your class, that is the most important take away from this.

4 Voices

In head voice - say anything/scream anything as it’s the silent voice that always stays in your head!

Partner voice - whisper voice that you use when doing partner work. Practise whispering something to your partner, like you are trying to tell them something you don’t want anyone else to hear. This is the voice you’d mostly use in class for independent or paired work.

Group Voice - a talking voice that is louder than a whisper but only loud enough for the people in your group to hear clearly.

Projecting Voice - the voice when you are speaking to a whole class/room. You want everyone to hear you. Remember only one person in the room gets to use this voice at one time, and when they are using it everyone else is listening. (Try using it all at the same time to help explore why it would be impossible to hear anyone if we all did this at the same time!)

Thanks Mr T for sharing this with me to reflect on and share.

🧸💕