Key points
- Great participation rates do not happen by magic; great teachers engineer them.
- Every school needs tight, well-taught systems for securing participation. These are particularly helpful, because without them, we leave great participation to chance.
- Building all-student response systems into lesson planning helps teachers make a habit of promoting participation and checking understanding.
- Examining existing habits of questioning is a helpful part of improving student engagement.
Improving participation
As with all aspects of school improvement, context is king. There is no “correct” set of levers schools can pull to increase participation, because it’s knotty work, impacted by curriculum choices, existing cultures of behaviour, teacher expertise, dynamics of specific cohorts, and so on.
In this post, I present a small set of ideas/practices that I think hold value for consideration no matter a school’s starting place or the specifics of setting. (Whether anything here represents a helpful next step for you or your school is an entirely different matter.)
So let’s get stuck in. How can teachers and leaders improve participation in classrooms across a school?
Understand that great rates of participation are engineered
If we want to improve participation rates, we need to first agree that they do not happen by unknowable magic; in classrooms where all children are participating, you’ll find skilled teachers doing skilled things. If we believe that teachers can learn to improve participation rates, then we can set about providing rigorous professional learning supports to improve participation.
This is ultimately the job of school leadership.
Implement all-student systems for participation
If we want all students to participate, we need routines for simultaneously engaging all students in low-stakes ways.
The all-student routines I most commonly help schools with include:
- Mini whiteboards
- Closed ended questions (e.g. multiple choice or true/false) with gesture response
- High quality pair-share
- Everybody writes (fast-paced, constrained writing prompts)
- Copy me (teacher demonstrates a physical skill, and all students mirror the movement)
When they’re running well, the power of all-student response routines can be stunning.
I recently coached Shenie, a Year 7 English teacher at Geelong High School. Having started reading a text with her class, Shenie wanted to do a quick check to see if her students had understood some key text elements: relationships between main characters, details about the setting, some key plot points relating to a theme. Shenie could have thrown questions out to volunteers – “Who can tell me where the story is set?” – engaging 2 or 3 students, but instead she used an all-student response routine.
Shenie moved through her questions, one by one, prompting everyone to record their thinking on a mini whiteboard. In just a few lessons, Shenie saw her student participation rate skyrocket from about 10% to 100% (this included students who required additional support, which Shenie was able to give through proximity and scaffolding). The buzz in the room was brilliant as kids showed their thinking, the sense of success written all over their faces.
Systems help teachers improve their participation rate. If we value equity of voice and opportunity, then we should invest in the powerful systems required to achieve it.
[In a separate article, I’ll explore each of the above practices in more detail.]
Teach students to participate well
For any routine to work, students need to know exactly what to do, and how to do it well. It’s tempting to imagine they will intuit this, but we know that this won’t be the case for everyone. In Shenie’s class, they weren’t using the mini whiteboards well naturally; she had taught them to.
To teach a given routine, we need to:
- Name the routine (We are using mini whiteboards to show our thinking today.)
- Teach the component parts of the routine (Here’s how each step will work.)
- Model the routine as a whole (Watch me while I show you what it looks like.)
- Rehearse it (Let’s all have a try together.)
- Provide feedback on the rate and quality of participation
Being this explicit about how you want students to participate takes a little bit of time but achieves a few things:
- It recognises that for many students (e.g. EAL learners, 11-year-olds, students with learning difficulties, students with low confidence), participating does not always come easy
- It contributes to a sense that the teacher is taking responsibility for great participation, that there is a method to what goes on, that the teacher is serious about ensuring everyone’s thinking is shared
- It implies that everyone is capable of participating
- It situates participatory behaviours alongside academic behaviours in the curriculum, highlighting that anything we expect students to do well will be taught.
In primary schools, it makes sense for teachers to work in level teams (e.g. F-2, 3-6) to specify and teach a core set of all-student response routines, for flexible use across the curriculum.
In secondary schools, it makes sense to specify whole-school routines (useful for everyone), but to also provide faculties with the time to develop routines that suit domain- and sub-domain specifics. (We should embrace the fact that teaching an overarm throw in PE and teaching surds in Mathematics are fundamentally different things, requiring different methods for engineering participation and checking understanding.)
Improve participation by planning for it
It’s one thing to teach a range of instructional routines, but another thing entirely to plan to use them. Visitors to Docklands Primary School (where I work) often comment that our routines are so well taught. I think that’s true, but what might be less evident is that these routines are incorporated into lesson-level planning. Teachers specify in planning what core questions we will ask, but also how we will elicit the evidence of student thinking (e.g. mini whiteboards, true/false questions, matching tasks, etc.) For every chunk of content to be taught, an appropriate response routine has been planned.
Lesson plans of course never capture all that teachers will do or say or ask, but they support everyone with low-variance implementation of curriculum, and help us to make a habit of generating interactivity as a matter of course.
One way to drastically improve participation is to establish response routines, then plan to use them.
Identify invitations for participation (and the impact they can have)
Even with great planning in place, teachers will still ask hundreds of questions a day, on the fly and off the cuff. Given this, we should be attuned to the quality of those questions and the impact they have on engagement.
As described in Part 2 of this series, many teachers (myself included) have made a habit of inviting participation; this poses a significant barrier to high engagement.
When teachers invite participation, they say things like:
Who can tell me the area of the square?
Who knows why Canberra is the capital city, and not Sydney or Melbourne?
Who can tell me what makes this typical of the Pointillist style?
Who can tell me the dependent variable?
I call these kinds of questions who-can-tell-mes. These questions invite participation; at the same time, they invite opting out.
Who-can-tell-me questions are relatively easy to spot because they share a common structure. But there is a more subtle form of inviting participation which is harder to identify. This practice involves teachers establishing a repeated pattern of asking questions and accepting answers from volunteers as the norm.
Here’s what that sounded like in my classroom:
Why might the composer have used cellos here? [Chooses a volunteer to share.]
Good, they sound dark and broody, don’t they? What’s another instrument we can hear that’s contributing to this ominous feeling? [Chooses another volunteer to share.]
Yes, the double bass. So would we say the instrumentation here is thick, or thin? [Chooses another volunteer to share.]
As I worked my way around to students with their hands up, my questions passed many students by like the breeze. As Emma Turner would probably say, some of my students were coming with me for the ride, while others hadn’t even boarded the bus. This happened because I allowed it.
Teachers of course do not mean to promote disengagement. We do not mean to imply that we only want to hear from students who know, or who are confident to share their thoughts. But in effect, this is the message we send when this pattern becomes the norm.
Now more than ever, I think the habit of inviting participation is so automated, so baked in, so part of the fabric of how teachers speak, so extensively practised across the field, that we have barely a clue there may be a problem with it.
Teachers who can identify invitations for participation are well placed to build awareness of their impact on engagement. In my experience, once you see the effects of inviting participation, you cannot unsee them.
Replace the habit of inviting participation
It’s one thing to identify a suboptimal practice, and something else altogether to replace it. I successfully dropped this habit a long time ago now, but I continue to think about it because I spend a lot of time working with teachers on increasing participation. One strategy I have found helpful in shifting away from inviting participation is to instead prompt students to think.
Here’s the difference between an invitation to participate and a prompt to think.
Invitation to participate
Who can tell me why breath control is important for singing through phrases?
Prompt to think
I want everyone to think about why breath control is important for singing through phrases. Hands down, everyone thinking.
Invitation to participate
Who can tell me which of these notes has the longest duration?
Prompt to think
Everyone, look here. I want you to identify the note that has the longest duration. In your mind, find the note with the longest duration.
Replacing invitations to participate with prompts to think achieves a few things:
- It gives us something to say that is better than who-can-tell-me
- It makes explicit that we expect thinking from everyone (this is a cultural shift we have to make)
- It forces us to provide sufficient thinking time for the questions we intend to ask
- It primes students for an all-student response routine (like share with a partner, or write an answer down)
If you recognise that you invite participation and you’d like to change that, I regret to inform you that there is no nationally-funded helpline to call. (Yet more evidence of societal decline.) It’s a bit painful, but replacing your invitations to participate with prompts to think might get you on your way to upping the expectation for participation in the classes you teach. Add in some all-student response systems and you might turn things around sooner than you think.
Put participation rates on the radar
If we accept that students will not participate in some (or many) of the classes they attend – if we think that’s just how it goes around here – then we must accept the huge number of negative run-on consequences coming down the line. These impact everyone in the school community, not least teachers, who deserve to do rewarding, high impact work that they can see paying off before their eyes.
Generating great student thinking and activity in classrooms is bloody hard. We could leave it to teachers to plough away at it out on their own, but this would be to presume that it’s easy to get students involved, or that the skills required for promoting participation are well taught in teacher preparation programs, or that teachers work in a vacuum, unaffected by broader school culture.
Once participation becomes a visible priority across a school, it opens the door to improvement and professional curiosity. What we notice, we can influence. If you’ve been working hard to increase engagement in your school, and you’d like to be in touch to talk about what’s working, I’d love to hear from you.
Staffroom reflections
- Do we share an understanding that participation is engineered – that it relies on high levels of expertise – or have we been leaving it up to individual teachers to plough away at it on their own?
- To what extent does our curriculum documentation (unit and lesson level) support teachers to promote great participation?
- Have we established clear means for participation, and provided our teachers with models of practice excellence in these techniques?
- Do we have a sense of how different learning areas and faculties are supporting and sustaining high engagement? Are there ways we could learn from and with one another in mutually beneficial ways?
- Do we invite participation as the norm? Could identifying invitations to participate support us to better monitor the impact of these question types?
- What’s a good next step we could take to better understand participation rates in our school? What do we need to know next in order to plan for incremental improvement?
