Tell Me Pedagogy
What Is the Tell Me Pedagogy?
Reading Teachers = Reading pupils uses Aidan Chambers’ Tell Me approach to talking about books with children. This encourages children to first share their enthusiasms through exploring their likes and dislikes about a text, and then to share, and solve puzzles, and finally to share patterns or connections between elements in a text such as language, motifs, events, characters, symbols and so on, as well as connections between one text and another text or between a text and the world around them.
The Tell Me approach encourages non-hierarchical booktalk, avoiding the role of teacher as expert and valuing all contributions as valid and ways in to talking about the book as a community of readers. It also tries to avoid asking why, instead prompting children to tell me as it suggests a desire for collaboration, indicating that the teacher really does want to know what the reader thinks and anticipating conversational dialogue rather than an interrogation.
The resources here will help support you in engaging in book talk using this pedagogy and in being a reading teacher.
The videos below model using the Tell Me pedagogy with a group of children aged nine - 12 using The Final Year by Matt Goodfellow.
You can view each section separately using the links below:
