Please Participate! (online reflection #2)

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>.