Key points
- Participation in classrooms is often patchy – some students participate a lot, while others participate less (or not at all).
- This is a problem, because participation is essential for learning.
- Active student involvement also fuels explicit teaching; without it, teachers are flying blind.
- Student participation isn’t just good for learning, it’s essential for inclusive classroom cultures.
The importance of participation
Every teacher wants great participation from their students. But talk to any teacher, and they will tell you that participation is usually patchy. Some students give a lot to discussion, while others sit passively, contributing less or not at all. Some students respond to all checks for understanding, proactively sharing their thinking, while others sit in silence, seemingly lost or lacking interest in the lesson altogether.
Patchy participation is problematic and does not go unnoticed; it frustrates the hell out of most teachers.
This is Part 1 in a series of three short posts on the topic. In this post, we consider why student participation is so central to the aims of schools.
Participation matters because learning demands it
Student participation rates impact what students will learn. It is students (not teachers) who need to wrestle with the content, concepts and skills of the curriculum. It is students who need to process incoming ideas, routinely verbalise their thinking, explain what they understand, make connections to prior knowledge, and build what Guy Claxton might call “a nose for quality” along the way.
This is all carefully facilitated by teachers, of course, but the point is that teachers cannot learn for their students; as Daniel Willingham famously made clear, it is what students are thinking about that will likely determine the success of any lesson.
Participation makes explicit teaching possible
Explicit teaching relies on teachers being able to “generate the right levels of interactivity in the room” (phrase borrowed from Daisy Christodoulou). When students respond to their teachers’ prompts, questions, cues or checks for understanding, they are making their thinking visible. These exchanges between teacher and student are so critical. They provide evidence of understanding in the room, which in turn informs action; student responses form the basis on which teachers make instructional decisions about what to do next.
When I hear explicit teaching characterised as “chalk and talk”, my instinct is to tear my hair out. But in practice, this is what we get if interactivity is underdone (or if interactions only involve a small handful of students).
Put simply, if you’re implementing any form of explicit teaching, great rates of student participation are not nice-to-have; they are a must-have. The power of explicit teaching will never be realised if participation is patchy, if just a small number of students are responding in every lesson. With such limited evidence of learning, teachers cannot teach responsively because they are flying blind.
(Sidenote: This is why I prefer to talk about responsive teaching in my work with schools. It puts front and centre the hardest part of explicit teaching, which is the need to elicit and respond to lots of quality evidence of learning in real time.)
Participation promotes belonging
Participation is critical for establishing classroom cultures in which children feel they belong. Engaging in the core activity of the classroom generates purpose and momentum for the individual and the collective. Any teacher will tell you that it’s hard to build a great learning culture when some students have checked out, when they’ve disconnected from the purpose of the lesson, when they exist at the fringes of a class conversation they’re not a part of. Equally, it’s hard to nurture a collaborative culture when a few students dominate discussion.
The key here is that the disengagement or dominance of some impacts class connection as a whole. If we’re invested in inclusive education, we must be interested in the rates and spread of participation in every classroom.
Participation provides crucial opportunities for rehearsal
All students need multiple opportunities to encounter, think about, apply and make sense of new concepts/skills over time (e.g. see Rosenshine, 2012). Take the Year 8 French class presented with the learning intention of the day: “To conjugate avoir in the present tense”. Every student is going to need lots of practice doing that – today, tomorrow and a term from now. One, two or three rehearsals of verb conjugation will prove utterly insufficient for most children to build fluency with this critical knowledge in French. It is through sustained participation – minute by minute, lesson after lesson, term by term – that students have a chance to develop accuracy, eventually applying their knowledge in integrated and increasingly sophisticated ways.
If we can increase participation rates day by day, classroom by classroom, more and more students will be taking advantage of crucial rehearsal (and spaced practice) opportunities necessary for learning to stick over time.
Participation opens the door for more
As a profession, we do not talk nearly enough about this: students who participate the most probably get the most from their teachers. Students who participate more probably receive more feedback: error corrections, stretch prompts, probing questions, the list goes on.
When Grace answers her teacher’s question about the class novel, her teacher responds:
“You’re right Gracie. He’s showing us he’s jealous, but what passage in the text tells us he is feeling this way?”
Grace not only benefits from a prompt to provide evidence for a claim, but she’s also likely to reap the rewards of various forms of praise that follow.
“Spot on, Grace!”, the teacher says, beaming. “What a great close read of the text.”
While teachers break a sweat trying to distribute targeted feedback and encouragement to everyone, the reality is that when students do not participate, teachers have little to work with. Every skerrick of student participation gives teachers an opening, a morsel of an idea to build on, an answer to celebrate, a good learning behaviour to nurture. This is the stuff of great student-teacher relationships.
The kicker? Students who probably need the most from their teachers – the most encouragement, the most frequent nods of support, the highest rates of corrective feedback – are often the very students who give (and receive) the least.
Equitable student participation matters because participation opens doors for more.
Wrapping up
In this post, I have outlined a few reasons to care about participation rates in schools.
In coming posts, I explore common barriers to participation and the strategies/structures we can implement to promote better engagement across the board.
Staffroom reflections
- Why is participation so important for student learning?
- What is the relationship between student participation and explicit teaching?
- What are students missing out on if they do not actively participate in some of the lessons they attend?
- What do we know about participation rates at our school? What data do we have on it? What are our hunches?
- When students opt out of learning at our school, what does it look like? What are the main reasons it happens?
- What systems or strategies have we worked on across the school to counter patchy patterns of participation? Do we have a good shared language for common techniques/approaches to engage all students? What does it look like in our school when participation rates are high?
