What Does It Mean to Participate?

We spend a lot of time focused on how we can encourage every student to speak during a class discussion. But is speaking the only way that students can engage?

DR. ROBERTA LENGER KANG
Center Director, CPET

In New York City, one of the most challenging areas for teacher evaluation is Danielson 3b: Questioning and Discussion. This domain evaluates a teacher’s ability to facilitate instruction in such a way that allows students to ask and answer higher-order questions, and initiate and maintain peer-to-peer discussions. It also expects that virtually all students are engaged in the discussion.

The use of the word engage is particularly interesting. Most often, we interpret engagement to mean participation and when we think of participation, we most often interpret this to mean talking. As a result, we spend a lot of time focused on how we can encourage every student to speak during a class discussion — and that’s a good thing. But is speaking the only way that students can engage?

While talking is an essential component of the discussion process, so is listening. If everyone is racing to speak, are students actually listening to each other, or are they quietly composing their comments in their mind and waiting for their turn? If their primary focus is on when they can speak, are they truly engaged? Are they learning anything from the dialogue?

Let’s broaden the definition of engagement to include both speaking and listening. Notice how our questions shift: how can we recognize active listening? How can we encourage active listening? How can we communicate our expectations around active listening to our students and the administrators who are completing the evaluations?

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Sparking engagement

• Set norms: Setting norms, and returning to them regularly, is one of the most proactive ways we can establish expectations and help our class hold each other accountable to those expectations. In your norms, include how members of your classroom should be speaking to one another, as well as how they should be listening. Get concrete. What does active listening look like? What does it sound like?

 

• Practice with protocols: Engaging students with simple protocols for active listening can be a great approach to establishing this culture in your classroom. Ask students to repeat what another student has said in their own words, ask a clarifying question, or build on someone else’s idea by restating and reshaping it. These methods ensure that the discussion isn’t just a collection of random comments shared aloud, but rather an activity with focus and purpose.

 

• Embrace paired and small group discussions: The larger the discussion, the less room there is for students to share their ideas. There’s a lot of power in paired discussions and small group conversations, where students have more time to talk and listen to one another. While these conversations are more difficult for the teacher to monitor, they increase the opportunities for students to learn from one another and create a dynamic that makes it easy for “virtually all students” to engage in the discussion.

 

• Add post-discussion reflections: Like silent reading, listening is impossible to evaluate by observing — it’s an internal action. That’s why I love adding a post-discussion reflection to the end of my class discussions. When students are responsible for individually reflecting and sharing their ideas after the discussion, we’re able to learn more about the depth of their engagement. If students are assessed on their reflection after the discussion, rather than their visible or invisible engagement during the discussion, we’ll have a much deeper understanding of what their actually learning looks like.
  
  

We should always be encouraging our students to feel free and comfortable to share their ideas, questions, and opinions in our classes.  But we shouldn’t discount the importance of listening — as it’s a key element of the learning process.