Practical Strategies for Student Participation
By Despina Kakoudaki
One of the biggest fears of new teachers and Instructors is that their students will be silent. This page gives you some basic strategies on how to evaluate your students' silence, and how to create incentives for their participation.
Part 1 describes strategies that you can build into your Day-to-day teaching. Part 2 describes how to create Semester-long Strategies for student participation. Rethinking both your classroom manner and your syllabus design will help you develop an interactive model of teaching.
Part 1: Day-to-day Strategies for Student Participation
� Evaluate reasons for their silence.
� Evaluate your timing: do you allow enough thinking time after every question? Do you give clear intstructions? Do you ask questions that are open-ended (not "yes or no" questions)?
� Be prepared. A good discussion does not just "happen."
� Have specific Lesson Plans. (See Developing a Lesson Plan for suggestions)
� Question and respond to their silence, but without resentment.
� Look at them, in their eyes, all of them, every time.
� Move around, stand, write on the board, sit in the back of the class, ask others to write on the board, disrupt the balance of power, ask them to read aloud, perform.
� Assign "research topics" to silent or shy students (assignment by teacher). They will be more eager to participate if they feel prepared.
� Assign groups for supplying historical background, author's biography, term definitions (students' choice). Group work creates more questions and interaction between students.
� Have list of passages, page numbers, topics so that you can "break" into groups any time.
� Have a list of observations about their papers and skills that you think they need so that you can go into that at any time.
� Ask students to bring paragraph already written about a topic or passage.
� Talk about how you are reading the text. Do a demostration. Let them see how you organize your thinking.
� Bring handouts: individual or group worksheet, questionnaire or response sheet.
� Bring weird or mysterious thing in class and ask for connections with texts (cartoon, film clip, TV or magazine advertisement, book cover, book review or blurbs, posters, illustrations, theoretical quotation, other texts).
- The thing can be simple, the connections have to be complex.
- Do not interfere or edit any response.
- Ask students to synthesize.
- Make efforts for a conclusion or directions into further discussion.� Have a class for each text when you ask very simple questions or you paraphrase the plot, or you question characters' motives and emotions (in order to get this out in the open, and keep everybody in the same place).
� Ask them to think about texts in combination (open, or specific connection).
� Switch the issue to how we can articulate a paper topic based on a particular passage or quotation. Papers and grades matter to students-- they "wake up" when the class gets practical.
Part 2: Semester-long Strategies for Student Participation
� Build in long processes of student input.
� Have one or two sets of mandatory office hours.
� Assign working groups for the whole semester.
� Reward participation in visible ways.
� Set up extra credit assignments (lectures, films, readings, campus events).
� Evaluate your teaching persona throughout the semester: record a class, try responding in different ways, ask people to observe your class, keep a teaching journal.
� Do not follow the same class pattern all the time: experiment with class dynamics.
� Build in ways in which students can start the class (through reports, presentations etc) where they stand on the board and you sit down.
� Switch between modes of knowledge, or modes of writing: having journals for example gives them an outlet that might help get them started, and will keep you informed of what they actually are thinking.