Students Participating in Classes Discussions.

Week 12: 10 Benefits of Getting Students to Participate in Classroom Discussions
Increase Students Interaction with “Think Pair Share” and “Circle Chats”

When students are talking with each other about content, most of us worry, at least a little bit. We have all heard less than impressive exchanges. For example, four students are in a group discussing three open ended questions about two challenging readings. It’s less than five minutes since they started, but they are already on question three. Or, they are working with clickers, supposedly exchanging ideas about a problem, but the group has already decided on one member’s solution. She just happens to be a student who regularly answers in class and is almost always right. Sometimes the ideas to make students participate are not aplied in a correct way, instructions might not be clear, teacher might have to explain twice the information, and other difficulties are some problems that we might present. We have to be careful at that moment, but it is something that we could manage. 

When students are discussing content, teachers tend to feel powerless. If a good, open ended, provocative question or challenging problem does not raise the caliber of the exchange, is there anything that will? We can prowl around the classroom and maybe ask a few pointed questions, but it still feels like the content is up for grabs. But, we should not feel that student interaction is beyond our control. In this case, teacher actions influenced how students talked about the content, and a simple design decision set parameters that reshaped the discussion of answers.

Participation is, indeed the technique to use in the college classroom. Let the students speak. Both you and they will discover what they should know and how much pleasure that discovery will produce.