Participation
How do you get students to participate? And I mean really
participate, not just give a two word answer to a question you just asked. How
do you get students to develop a deep and thoughtful answer to those questions
that you ask in hopes of sparking a class discussion? Most of my students struggle
with participation in class. I ask a question and I hear is silence, I then rephrase
my questions, and still get nothing. Then when I call on someone and they don’t
know what to answer. The students wait for you to answer the question because
they want to hear the "teacher answer" which they associate with the
"correct answer". The article "Including Student
Participation" emphasizes
teachers to "not give in to the temptation to
answer your own questions, which will condition students to hesitate before
answering to see if you will supply “the answer.”". Students will wait
for you as a teacher to get tired of waiting for them to answer the question
and answer it yourself. By doing so you're the one that’s working harder, as
oppose to your students pulling the weights and making connections in the text,
you're doing it for them and they learn nothing out of that other than you will
give them all of the answers. Which then leads to an even bigger struggle which
is that your students start to get lazy because they know you'll provide the answers for
them most students don’t want to take the time to analyze hard text such
as Hamlet, or anything else for that matter, they don’t want to struggle and do
the work. But in order to fully
understand a piece of writing you must be willing to take the time to analyze
and think about that text. Sometimes you have to read something more than once
in order to start understanding, and most students don’t want to do that. They
read it once and if they don’t understand they give up which then leads to poor
class discussions because they don’t understand what is going on and they are
not able to formulate responses around the text. If they are confused they don’t
participate in class discussions and sometimes the comments that we as teachers
do get are more of a distraction because they have nothing to do with what we
are doing. Then you get those students that do get what's going on and are
willing to participate, but then they end up talking the whole time because no
one wants to add to what they are saying, and no one wants to formulate their
own ideas. In my class we are currently reading Hamlet by William Shakespeare
which is a hard text so I've given my students a variety of ways to try and
analyze and understand the text; such as guided questions, different versions
of the text, I give them specific quotes I want them to re-read, we listen to the
text, and we watch different parts. To increase class participation and to
limit the just one student speaking scenario I've started to use name sticks
with my classes. If I pull out their name then they have to answer. But before I
do that I give them individual time to think about the question then I give
them time to discuss with their tables, this gives them a chance to formulate their
thoughts and hear others thoughts before having to share with the class. This
helps our class discussions quite a bit, they are more inclined to share their
ideas with the classroom after they’ve talked to someone else about it,
sometimes I don’t even need the name sticks.
References
"Increasing
Student Participation." The Teaching Center. Washington University
in St. Louis, 1 Jan. 2009. Web. 26 Feb. 2015. <http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/strategies/Pages/increasing-participation.aspx#.VO60QPnF-UU>.
