Have you ever felt like Ben Stein in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Standing awkwardly in front of your silent class and staring at blank faces (or blank Zoom screens)?

How can it be that no one besides you has any idea why the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was so terrible? What is it, national silence day, again?

Fear not, Wentworth, we’re back with a blog post to help you create a culture of class participation in your courses from day one.

Here are our top five strategies for getting students to speak up in class:

1) Wait

2) Write

3) Talk

4) Cold Call

5) Assess Participation

Here’s what we mean…

1) Wait 

Have you ever posed a question to your class, waited a few silent seconds, and then preceded to answer your own question? We’ve all done that! In your experience at the front of the room, those few seconds can feel like a few minutes. I totally get it. But here’s the thing: it’s a classic mistake.

In those pregnant seconds, your students are processing a question they’ve never heard before and are just starting to formulate answers. This takes time! Wait it out. Seriously.

Take a few deep breaths and count to 10. Then, if you need to, reframe your question. But don’t answer it. By creating and holding the space open, you are inviting participation, and I guarantee that someone will eventually speak up.

By answering your own questions, you are training students that they do not need to answer your questions. From their perspective, you already have an answer in mind and will happily provide it if they just wait out your silences.

If students are afraid of being wrong in your class and know that you’ll tell them the answer anyway, they won’t be motivated to speak up. However, if you establish the convention that you won’t answer your own questions, and will instead wait to hear their ideas, your students will be more likely to speak up.

Additionally, I would suggest waiting beyond the initial few hands that fly up to give more students space to formulate their own ideas. That way, the class won’t rely on the usual suspects to answer your questions, and students who prefer to think longer before sharing are invited to participate.

When you wait, I recommend inviting students into your thought process by explicitly telling them that you’re waiting until more hands go up before calling on anyone, and explaining why.

Little by little, by demonstrating that you value all of your students’ ideas enough to wait for them, you will establish a culture of class participation.

2) Write

In the language of Universal Design for Learning, it’s our job as professors to remove unnecessary barriers to entry so that all students can participate fully in the learning experiences that we design. Writing is a fantastic way to invite more students to share their ideas in your class.

This can take many forms. Here are two examples:

A) Pose a question to your class both orally and in writing via a whiteboard, the zoom chat box, a PowerPoint slide, etc. Presenting the prompt in multiple ways benefits all learning styles.

Then ask your students to free write in response to the prompt for 1-2 minutes before taking any comments. You can also ask them to tackle a STEM problem before delving into it as a class.

Giving your students time to formulate ideas in advance will:

• • • promote deeper introspection
    • give students scaffolding time to actively build new neural connections
    • benefit students with diverse learning styles
    • provide more equity of opportunity for engagement in your classroom

B) In addition to taking verbal comments, invite students to simultaneously respond to your questions in writing.

This could be the via zoom chat box, on a shared document (i.e. Google doc, Google slide, etc.), or a collaboration tool like the discussion board on Brightspace.

This enhances student learning because:

• • • students have multiple means of representing their ideas
    • more students will have the opportunity to express their ideas in the same amount of time
    • the group’s thinking is made visible in writing in addition to the verbal discussion that is happening.

3) Talk

Students have a variety of learning styles. Some learners are verbal processors, meaning that they formulate ideas by speaking them out loud. Some learners will engage much more deeply with the material when interacting with their peers than when listening or writing on their own. Some learners require more time to process information and synthesize their ideas than others.

Universal Design for Learning suggests that adding one additional engagement strategy will have a positive impact on broad range of learners. All the students described above would benefit from the opportunity to discuss a question that you’ve posed with their peers before being asked to share their thoughts with the whole class.

Here are two ways to do so:

A) Use a “turn-and-talk” or “think-pair-share” strategy. Give students 2-3 minutes to discuss a prompt that you’ve posed with a partner or a couple of people sitting near them. Keep them on task by moving around the room and listening into snippets of conversations, and by giving them a deliverable.

For deliverables, perhaps every small group is asked to share a key takeaway, a possible solution, or something thought-provoking that their partner said. Maybe each group types a response into a shared document and you ask follow-up questions of groups that had particularly evocative responses. Or perhaps you simply open the floor up to comments after everyone has had a chance to share their initial ideas with each other.

Either way, more of your students will be actively ideating and engaging during this time of small group or pair conversations than if you directly opened up the floor to comments from individual students without giving them time to ideate together.

B) If you’re teaching on Zoom, breakout rooms can serve this purpose. In this case, it’s even more important to be explicit about what you expect the students to discuss and what you are expecting from them when they return to the main group.

I highly recommend writing up the prompt or instructions in advance and pasting it into the Zoom chat before you send students to breakout rooms so that they have something to visually refer to which explains what they are expected to do. You can also visit each breakout room virtually if they are discussing for a longer period of time.

Providing your students with space to bounce their ideas around with each other before sharing them with the whole class is a time-tested method for getting more thoughtful comments from more of your students in full group discussions.

This strategy also enhances learning retention because students are engaging with your content in a more active manner than passively listening. Additionally, students will both learn from each other’s ideas and crystalize their own thinking by verbally expressing their thought processes.

4) Cold Call

Cold calling means directly asking a student who isn’t raising their hand to share their thoughts. Speaking up in class can feel like a bold move, especially when students haven’t volunteered to do so, and it’s your job to make students feel like it’s not a high stakes gambit to offer up their ideas.

I recommend repeatedly telling students that their ideas don’t have to be “right” or even be fully formed, as speaking is a great way to ideate. Try framing this by elaborating on the ways that robust dialogue is essential to the process of discovering connections and creating moments of realization. As IDEO designer Tom Kelley says, “fail often in order to succeed sooner!”

So how can you create a culture of safe intellectual exploration while integrating cold calling? It’s a delicate balance. The secret lies in setting clear expectations from day one and providing framing that feels supportive and empathetic.

Explain to students on the first day of class that you will cold call regularly because you value each and every student voice, and it’s your job to make sure that everyone in the class has the opportunity to share their perspective and succeed in your course. You can even put it in the syllabus—cold calling shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Alleviate student anxiety by giving your students the ability to pass on answering any question if they don’t feel comfortable sharing. Invite them to email you or speak to you at the beginning of class if they’ve had a particularly rough day and would prefer not to be called upon in class that day.

When your students feel that they have some shared control over the situation, they won’t mind the structure of cold calling that you’ve put in place. In fact, they may even appreciate it.

Also, try using the aforementioned strategies (individual writing/drawing/problem-solving; talking with peers) before cold calling to give your students a chance to think through their ideas, either in writing or by speaking to their peers, before being asked to share in front of the whole class.

5) Assess Participation

If you want to indicate that something is important in your course, giving it a grade is a fantastic way to do so. Ideally, your students will be intrinsically motivated because you’ve ignited their passion by proving how your course will enrich their lives. But let’s be honest, a little extrinsic motivation can’t hurt.

So how do you assess class participation? You probably have an idea of what good class participation looks like in your course, but how do your students know exactly what you are looking for?

Try creating a rubric or a checklist that defines the elements of participation that you value. This way, when you assess each student’s participation at the end of the semester, you will have explicit guidelines against which to grade them that students are familiar with from day one.

Also, consider writing a few brief case studies of fictional students to provide narrative examples of what A-level, C-level, and F-level participation looks like in your class. Make them fun and memorable! Read them when you go over the syllabus. By using humor to engage memory, students will better recall what you’re looking for, and will have clear models to follow (and not follow!)

Grading participation is tricky, as when we’re teaching there are so many demands on our attention that it’s very difficult to document exactly how actively each of our students is participating at all times. So in assessing participation, it’s best practice to gather input from multiple perspectives rather than simply relying on our own limited perspectives.

Try creating a thoughtful self-assessment survey that students must complete at the end of the course asking them to reflect upon their own participation and provide specific examples. Give them the self-assessment questions at the beginning of the semester so that know what to expect and can keep this task in the back of their mind as they go through the course, making note of impactful moments of participation that they want to highlight in their self-reflection.

To paint an even fuller picture, consider asking students to assess each other’s participation as a third point in the data triangle in addition to your perspective and their self-perception. You could assign three students per class meeting to keep track of class participation by filling out a short form highlighting whose participation in that class was particularly impactful and why, ideally focusing on quality over quantity.

Involving students in assessment is beneficial because:

• You get additional data from a broad range of sources
• Students feel both empowered and accountable to one another
• You underscore the value of active participation by creating a structure that literally causes students to see its importance

In Conclusion

Try using these teaching tips to create a classroom culture that invites active and engaged participation, and let us know how it goes!

The instructional design team at the Teaching & Learning Collaborative is proud to support Wentworth faculty by providing instructional coaching, observing classes, and offering you strategies to make your teaching even more dynamic. Partner with us to take the next steps on your journey of growth as an educator.

Josh Luckens is an instructional designer with the Teaching & Learning Collaborative (formerly Learning Innovation & Technology) at Wentworth. Josh would be happy to consult with you about creative ways to enhance your teaching practice. Feel free to contact him at luckensj@wit.edu.