Participation

For many instructors, having a classroom full of eager and active students is a persistent goal and recurring challenge. Are you looking for ways to improve student participation in your classes? Do you want to rethink what active participation can mean beyond speaking up in class discussions? Please join the Teaching and Learning Center for a workshop in which weโ€™ll explore strategies for generating student involvement, including using scaffolded participation, individual participation plans, class participation rubrics, and various forms of group work. Weโ€™ll address the challenges of fostering participation and how we can rethink participation beyond verbal performance. Participants will reflect on their own participation style, as well as issues in their classrooms. Weโ€™ll work together to find ways to create inclusive classroom communities and to help students develop their own voices and perspectives.

The Participation workshop was offered in the Fall 2017 as an in-person workshop at the Graduate Center, CUNY. The workshop and materials were developed by Kaitlin Mondello and Anke Geertsma.

Materials

All materials on this page and in the linked google folder are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International Public License.

This folder contains outreach materials, workshop plans and slides, and a handout about ethical tech lingo used in the workshop.

Materials Folder: Participation Workshop

Workshop Agenda

Goals:

  1. To acknowledge and reflect on the importance and challenges of participation
  • Activity: reflective writing on participation

2. To help participants to develop a set of strategies to improve student participation

  • Activity:ย  scaffolded participation with think/pair/share, discussion & meta-analysis
  • Examples: Individual participation plan, class participation rubric, group work participator roles

3. To rethink what participation means and help participants to incorporate and value other forms of communication through group work and low-stakes writing (including online)

  • Activity: jigsaw group discussion on alternative forms of participation

Part 1. Importance and challenges of Participation (KM) 60 mins. ย 

A. Introductions & Opening Remarks (5-10 mins)

  • Name, Discipline, Teaching? What class?
  • Opening remarks about Participation
    • There are many reasons a class can struggle with participation. Even extroverts who speak a lot can have anxiety about what they have said and/or feel they are dominating the conversation. Think about whether some of your students may feel similarly to you and whether you would be comfortable sharing your own participation issues with your class.

2 ways to address participation issues:

  1. Make participation an explicit focus of the class (like what we will do today in theย  workshop); this may feel like it is taking time away from content, but is an investment going forward
  2. Vary the format of the class to scaffold participation not just assignments through groupwork and low-stakes writing

B. Exercise 1: Scaffolded Participation (40 mins.)

Explain why I am starting with reflective writing rather than a cold open question

Introduce prompt, comment

    • What struggles do you have with participation in your classroom?
    • What factors foster your own best participation?

Scaffolded participation with with Exercise 1

    • Individual reflective writing (10 mins.)
    • Pair work (share reflective writing with one other person and discuss) (10 mins.)
    • Large group discussion (participants are asked to share what they learned from the reflective writing and paired discussion) (15 mins.)
    • Meta-Analysis of Exercise 1 (large group discussion) (5 mins.)
        • Value of reflective writing first?
        • Value of paired work first?

C. Specific Exercises to make reflection an explicit focus on the class (5-10 mins)

  • Ask students to do a reflective writing in class on their own issues with and feelings about participation in your course and then what they can do, what you can do and what their peers can do to help them
  • Have students design an individual participation plan
  • Have the class create a class participation rubric together so that they have a sense of agency in the process
  • What type of participator are you? (6 different roles) (segue to group work)ย 

Part II. Strategy: Group work to increase participation (AG)

Alternatives to Verbal Participation

Activity 2: Jigsaw Group Discussion (15-20 mins):

  • Ideally, we can form 3-4 groups that each discuss and answer a different set of questions (design prompts with questions below). After discussing in their group, one member moves to another group to share their newly-acquired โ€œexpertโ€ knowledge. This mixing of groups is a strategy to have students work on different materials, after which theyโ€™ll share their insights with another group that worked on something else. They learn, then teach.

List of questions to choose from:

  • what are different types of group work (low-stakes impromptu in-class discussions to formal group presentations) and how does that influence how you set up the group work?
  • What are your goals for group work (not just academic but social / communication) and how do you make it clear to students why you choose to do group work for a particular section of your course?
  • How do you select groups and what are the benefits/drawbacks of each?
    • self select?
    • by ability or mixed?
    • ad hoc or same groups for number of classes?
  • What are strategies for starting group work (students get to know each other and share communication / collaboration styles)?
  • How can you structure tasks and include some means of accountability, even for low-stakes in class group work?
  • For longer projects:
    • how to include planning and reflective practice?
    • how to include individual aspects
    • how and when to do regular check-ins

What Ifs:

  • what if students are not picking up their share of responsibility?
  • what if one student dominates?
  • what if students complain / one student doesnโ€™t do work

CUT Activity 1 (15-20 mins):

Model chance card / sayback method: each student in a group picks a card, can be regular playing cards, at the end the instructor asks everyone with, say, hearts to report back to the class. This is a way to keep all students engaged because they donโ€™t know who will have to report back.

Discussion:

  1. Why do (or would) you assign group work? (or, why group work works in theory). possible responses:
    1. develop professional/ job-market and communication skills
    2. peer to peer allows students to tackle more challenging material
    3. increase engagement and improve learning
  2. In real life, though: what are challenges / complaints? possible responses:ย 
    1. not all students participate or one student dominates
    2. students complain not everyone is pulling their weight (for formal assignments this might result in complaints about grading)
    3. in low-stakes in-class group work conversation/ work goes off topic / task