Ep 55 : Student Participation was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best audio automated transcription service in 2021. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.
Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast, I'm Rachael your host. I hope you're having a great day wherever you are tuning in today. Before we dive into today's topic, I want to ask you to consider this statement. 'Relationships first. Everything else is second.' Would you agree? So often teachers focus on teaching the content, but we often forget a very important core element of teaching...relationships. Students learn best from teachers that they have genuine relationships with. If we fail to set that foundation, we're passing up incredible opportunities for learning and growth in our classroom. Now, I am the first to admit that I often had that 'power through' mentality where I was just focused on getting the content out to my students, making sure that I covered that unit, did that test and taught that topic. I was so focused, sometimes, on making sure that I checked off my curriculum list, that I didn't stop to think about how I was cultivating the relationships in my classroom. There's so much pressure on teachers these days to make sure that they teach their students all the things. I get it, it's hard to fit it all in. When we're presented with the opportunity to, choice one, teach something new that we know our curriculum requires and a choice two, do some sort of classroom community building activity, oftentimes we're going to choose that curriculum option because we know that that's what's required of us.
Imagine this. What if you could do both at the same time? What if you could teach new information to your students while you were building a stronger classroom community at the same time? How do you do this? You find ways to increase student participation so that all students feel like a part of the class. By doing so, they're going to feel invested and engaged. They're going to be building those relationships with you and their classmates. Imagine this. You're working on a new concept with your students. Instead of having the same three students engaging in your classroom discussions, you have nearly the entire class interacting with one another. When you increase student participation, you increase learning and you build a stronger classroom community. You can have learning and relationship building happening at the same time, the common denominator is student participation. Let me share several strategies with you for increasing student participation so that you can reap the benefits that it will provide for your classroom.
All right. The first strategy is called Paper Airplane. You can use this strategy any time you want to turn a boring worksheet into an active and engaging activity in a moment's notice. Here's how it's done. You give out a worksheet that covers the skills you're working on. You were already planning on doing this in your lesson plan anyway. Students put their name on the sheet and only answer the first question on the sheet then they create a paper airplane. I promise there's a reason for this! They toss their paper to someone else, they just toss it anywhere in the room. Each student will grab somebody else's paper airplane to answer the next problem. You're going to continue doing this until all problems are completed and when all problems are done. If you have ten problems on the worksheet, you're going to have students refold the paper into an airplane ten times and continue tossing it. Then when all problems are complete, students will retrieve their original paper. Here's the bonus outcome. You can have your students check the work on their paper for the questions that they didn't answer on their paper before they handed in. They've got the practice of answering the questions themselves, but then they also get to practice the skill of checking somebody else's work. You're going to be the coolest teacher ever because you actually allow students to make paper airplanes in your class. The students are going to have such a great time tossing and catching airplanes around the room. It's a win-win all around. Just think of the fun and the laughter that will come out of this activity. As a result, you're building stronger community and you are also increasing student participation.
The second activity is equally as fun. It's called Strike-A-Pose. You can use this with a worksheet or you can just use it as a way to quickly assess your students at the end of a lesson. This is how it works. Let's say you want to ask your students a series of questions that have a multiple choice. Answer A, B, C or D, or you have a worksheet that has a set of questions with a multiple choice answer format. Instead of having your students answer A, B, C or D, when you ask a question, they're going to strike a pose to represent their answer instead. This is something that you're going to have to set up ahead of time because students will need to know what pose they need to strike when they want to answer A, what they want to pose for answer B, C and so on. You can come up with three, four or five different poses, depending on how many multiple choice answers they have to choose from. Make sure your students know what they are ahead of time. When you ask a question, instead of them responding with answer A, answer B, answer C, they're going to strike a pose. Again, this is going to invite full participation from your students. It's going to be something fun for them to do so they're going to want to participate. By participating, you're going to be building that classroom community right along with it.
All right, here's your next student participation booster strategy. We all have those students who are reluctant to answer a question because they never feel like they know the answer. You can easily keep students accountable and encourage them to participate by using a strategy called 'But What I Do Know Is' and here's how it works. Instead of accepting an "I don't know", response from a student, encourage them to tell you what they do know about a topic. This helps the students to understand that even though they might not know the answer to your question, they still have something to offer to the discussion. You might ask the question, "Who can tell me what the Battle of Lexington and Concord was all about?" If you call on a student, they could say, "I don't know but what I do know is that tension between the colonists and the English was growing." It may not be the answer you were looking for, but they are thinking about what they do know about the American Revolution and that time period. That's better than saying nothing at all.
To piggyback off that strategy, there's another very similar strategy called Echo and Answer. This strategy also helps to eliminate students from using the, "I don't know", response to get out of participating. Here's how it works. You're going to ask a student any question related to your discussion and they can choose to answer the question if they know it or echo the correct answer if they don't know it once it's been answered by another student. They still are going to be hearing it and repeating the answer, which is so much better than them just saying, "I don't know", and then shutting back down again.
Okay, I have one more simple strategy to help encourage 100% participation from your students so that everybody feels like they are a member of your class. This one is called All Hands Raised. Here's how this one works. After asking a questions, students have three options on how to respond and sitting like a lump on a log is not one of them. If the students know the answer to your question, they're going to raise their hand completely straight in the air. If the student is unsure or has a question related to what you've asked, they're simply going to raise their arm at a right angle. If the student does not know the answer at all, he or she will bend their arm and touch their thumb to their forehead. This makes it easy for you to take a quick assessment to see where all students are around understanding the topic or the question that you're discussing and it requires full participation. Now, several episodes back in Episode 33, I talked about four things to stop doing in your classroom and what to do instead. One of those things that I recommended to stop doing in your classroom was using the raising hand strategy to invite participation in your classroom. In that particular scenario, I was referring to having students just raise their hand if they know the answer. We don't want to do that because it lets the students who don't know the answer or are worried that they don't know the answer off the hook and then they don't participate. This strategy puts a spin on the raising hand strategy because all students have to do something. They either have to put their hands straight in the air if they understand it. They have to put their hand at a right angle if they're unsure or if they have something that they need clarified. Or they put their hand up and put their thumb to their head if they don't know the answer at all. In this strategy, all students are participating and doing a self reflection and self assessment on what they think they understand about the topic. You get a quick assessment about where students think they are. I just wanted to make that distinction between what I told you not to do a few episodes ago and what I'm telling you to do now. I don't think that you should just have your students raise their hand if they think they know the answer but I do think you should use this All Hands Raised strategy because everybody has to think about their own understanding and show you through their arm movement what they understand.
One last thing to note here is that all of these strategies are going to take some practice and they're all going to take some instruction on you to tell the students exactly how these strategies work. The first time you do the Paper Airplane participation strategy, you're going to have to be very clear about the routines, the procedures, and the expectations behind that particular strategy. Same thing with the Strike-A-Pose and the Echo and Answer and so on. You're going to have to go over this strategy so that students know what they're expected to do and how to fully participate in this.
Okay, let's wrap this up. I truly believe that creating a space in your classroom where all students want to participate and feel encouraged to participate only has positive impacts on your classroom community and how students feel when they are in your classroom. The more positive experiences students have when they participate in the class, the stronger your classroom community is going to be. These strategies that I've shared with you today are hopefully going to be positive participating experiences for your students. They're fun, they're interactive, they're engaging, and students are going to feel less intimidated to participate because each of these strategies puts a greater importance on being a part of the conversation, being a part of the class, rather than having the right answer. I think that the main reason that students don't want to participate in class is because they're afraid they're not going to answer correctly. We eliminate that fear and we just want them to participate. We give them fun and engaging opportunities to do so. It's going to be a win-win situation.
All right, before you sign off for today, I want you to pick at least one of the strategies that we discussed and start using it in your classroom. All right. I hope you have a great rest of your day and a good start to your week. I will be back again next week with another episode. Bye for now.
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