Key points
- Every teacher wants high student engagement — but participation is hard-won.
- Teachers face several challenges in promoting great participation, including off-task behaviour, low student confidence, wide knowledge gaps and the distraction of devices.
- Some schools lack localised systems and structures required to support all teachers to manufacture high levels of interactivity in teaching.
- Teachers’ habits of questioning can also run counter to our aims; often, we invite participation, which leads to students opting-out.
The grind of getting great participation
This is the second post in a three-part series on participation.
In Part 1, I outlined what makes student participation so precious. In this instalment, I explore common challenges teachers face in promoting great participation.
I want to thank the hundreds of teachers I talk to every year for informing this overview; these are insights from the ground.
Off-task behaviours (and the need to manage them)
Teachers I talk to cite “behaviour” as the biggest barrier to securing good participation in the classes they teach. There are many variations on this theme – some teachers describe scenes in which getting students to focus on their instruction subsumes a lot of their time. Other teachers tell me that when they ask students questions, they engage in off-task behaviours (e.g. yelling out unrelated ideas). These scenes derail lessons, and erode teacher confidence.
In my experience, teachers who are worried about managing off-task behaviours often rush to get students into independent tasks – get the kids busy, get everyone going on a task, “everyone working now please, you know what you have to do.” In high schools, this often sounds like, “Laptops out, you have everything you need on Google Classroom.”
When teachers rush to get students into independent work, they tend to reduce explicit modelling, and along with that go the necessary checks for understanding. This makes total sense to me; whenever we ask students to attend to explanations/demonstrations and then to share their thinking with us, we are inviting uncertainty into the learning environment. We never quite know what we are going to get. If we predict that chaos will ensue, it is entirely reasonable for teachers to want to avoid that. There isn’t much incentive for teachers to check student understanding if they do not perceive it to be safe or helpful.
To a large extent, cultures of behaviour impact teachers’ ability to promote lively participation in the classes they teach.
Lack of student confidence to share thinking
Increasingly, teachers tell me that many students opt out of class discussion because they seem to lack the confidence to share their thoughts out loud.
“Students are worried about being wrong.”
“Some of my students just shut down the moment I ask them something.”
“Some kids say ‘I dunno’ to pretty much everything I ask.”
As I have discussed with countless teachers, it is more difficult to engage children who are evidently unmotivated or unwilling or unable to share their thinking; teachers are empathetic, constantly needing to walk the razor-fine line between holding high expectations and managing students’ anxiety (perceived or otherwise).
When students are confident to share – when they’re practised at (or enjoy) saying what they think – promoting participation is dead easy. But when students resist sharing, it can be harder, more skilled work.
Wrangling the range of student knowledge
If we expect teachers to check all students’ understanding, we are tasking them with prompting participation from large groups of children; variance in student knowledge provides a real challenge.
Let’s take Year 4 teacher Miss Crowe, who writes three fractions on the board and asks a question to check understanding.
“Which of these fractions is the largest? Have a think, Year 4. Which is the largest?”
Miss Crowe may be presenting this question as a short retrieval exercise, but this won’t change the fact that Clara, one of Miss Crowe’s students, is still working on counting forwards and backwards to 20 with the support of concrete materials. This question is not a retrieval exercise for Clara. The moment Miss Crowe poses a question about the relative size of fractions, she knows that Clara will be unlikely to be able to think well, to formulate a response, and to answer.
At the same time, in the same classroom, sits Jamal. Jamal can already simplify a range of fractions; he adds and multiplies them at home for fun. Miss Crowe’s prompt to identify the largest of three fractions is inaccessible for Clara, and at the same time lacks any meaningful challenge at all for Jamal.
Despite what we wish were true, teachers cannot pitch questions that sit at just the right level for all students to participate well all the time. Anyone who claims that teachers can do this has not taught a group of children. In the real world, teachers delicately balance trade-offs.
Variance in existing knowledge across a class proves a challenge for teachers on many levels; supporting equitable participation relies on teachers constantly managing gaps and deftly scaffolding to keep as many students tuned in and alive to the learning (at any given time) as possible.
A lack of school-wide systems for participation
There is a lot of work for schools to do to establish structures for promoting equitable participation. This requires school leadership teams to map out a vision for instruction, to themselves develop understanding of how participation can be generated, to have a deep understanding of techniques and practices that better support participation (and to consider how these might be adapted for different age/developmental levels and the specifics of different domains). We also need our school and middle leaders to understand the impact of domain-specifics – to recognise that checking understanding of projection skills in a Year 11 Drama class necessarily looks very different to checking understanding in a Year 1 Social Skills lesson.
In my experience, most schools who are invested in explicit and responsive teaching do not yet have clear models of excellence (at a granular level) for promoting great participation. Without strong school-wide structures and systems for generating interaction and checking understanding, participation is likely to remain patchy across (and between) classrooms, as teachers work in isolation on these important aspects of instruction.
Device distraction
In my home state of Victoria, where we have a ban on mobile phones in schools, laptop use is near-ubiquitous in secondary schools. It is not unusual to walk the halls of a high school, noting that as a teacher is demonstrating or modelling from the front of the room, several students are gripped by screens (playing a game, meandering Google Classroom, etc). Stop for a moment to take a closer look, and you’ll note those two girls in the back corner have AirPods tucked beneath long locks of hair. They seem to be listening to music, the teacher’s voice now rendered background noise.
This is of course not representative of all high schools, but I see it. The vast majority of teachers I work with are not at all oblivious to device distraction and the impact it has on active participation; many seem resigned to the reality of it, having often been left alone to work their way out of what is a school-wide catastrophe of culture.
Securing focus and participation from all learners is a near impossible task for teachers who are losing the battle against the distractions of devices – mobile phones, laptops, the lot.
Teacher questioning that invites participation
Through habit, many teachers invite participation as if it is voluntary. (I did this for the first 5 years of my career, and it took me the best part of a year to unstitch the habit.) Over time, if habituated, this can become a real barrier for equitable participation.
For years, I asked questions like this:
“Who can tell me what this rhythm is?” [One student raises his hand and answers.]
“How many beats do we have in this bar?” [The same student raises his hand and answers.]
“Who can tell me why breath control is so important for singing through long phrases?” [The same student raises his hand and I get annoyed with him.]
“We’ve already already heard from you, Christos. I’d love to hear from someone else?!!!”
Why did I get so frustrated with the one student who was actually participating? What was behind this madness? I was frustrated by the low engagement of my own making.
The big idea here is that when we invite participation, we also invite opting out. When we ask questions, we think we are turning kids on to thinking. I now think that a lot of teacher questioning turns kids off to thinking, prompting them to disconnect from the very thing we’re trying to promote.
Questioning that invites participation is rife, so I think we should think and talk about it more across the profession. (In the next post, I share my thoughts on how we can move forward towards more effective practices.)
Wrapping up
In this post, I have outlined a range of reasons why it’s not easy to secure great participation. In the final instalment on this topic, we’ll turn our attention to a few strategies and structures we can implement to support teachers with the precious work of promoting better participation across the board.
Staffroom reflections
- Why is it hard to generate great participation across a class?
- What are the most common reasons why students opt-out or disengage in lessons at our school?
- What does it look like when students are falling into a pattern of routine non-participation? How do we know when this is happening?
- If some students continually opt out in the classroom, what run-on effects could we predict?
- How might environmental factors (e.g. access to devices) contribute to problems of participation and attention at our school? What are the environmental challenges for teachers?
