TAC Winter Workshop Series - Workshop 1: Student Participation

The first workshop of the TA Consultant's Winter Workshop Series was on student participation. If the whole workshop could be summed up into one sentence it would be;

There are many forms of student participation that include, but are not limited to, discussion.

As a group, members of this workshop defined and described student participation as:

• Being Active, Awake, Aware
• Learning something new
• Having value --> Contribute/take away information/ideas
• Being Physical and/or Mental engaged
• Experiential learning
• Cooperation/Communication
• Meeting class requirements
• Enjoyment
• Personal responsibility

What helps students to have open, honest participation though, is to have a safe, inclusive, and supportive environment. To illustrate this point of safe, inclusive environment promoting students to think, interact, and speak we ran an experiment early in the workshop. The two female facilitators of the workshop, Sarah Augusto and I, each choose separate sides of the room to focus on. We only called on and engaged with those halves. After 20 minutes of this, Richard asked the members who they felt more engaged and connected with. For the most part those that I engaged with picked me, and those Sarah engaged with picked her.

Some ways to create a safe environment included:

• Letting your expectations on participation be known early and clearly
• Use icebreakers to help your students familiarize themselves to each other and you and you to them.
• Look at and respond to all students.
• Value wrong answers as a teaching opportunity by exploring why it’s an incorrect answer or why students may believe it’s a correct answer.
• Explore a variety of answers before revealing a correct answer, even if the question has only one right answer.
• Ask more open questions that don’t have a right answer.
• More ways to create a safe environment will be discussed in following workshops, including the next workshop!

There is a tendency for us as instructors to gravitate towards discussion as participation (this will be further discussed in workshop 3). One of the activities we had in our workshop was for everyone write about a time they felt engaged and empowered in a class. What made them feel ownership? And, on the flip-side, what made them feel unengaged?

This writing activity is also known as a free-write. It’s a great tool because it gives everyone an equal chance to contribute to an idea, concept, or discussion question. And for discussion it gives those more quite or those students that take a bit longer to think of a response time to develop an answer. You can then read these responses privately, ask students to share with the whole class, or break up into groups to share thoughts.

Some myths of participation that came out during discussion were;

1) Quite students are not participating because they aren't interested
Fact - Some students are quiet because:
They are thinking/reflecting
Cultural differences may be in works
Shyness
Peer Thought Pressure

2) Lots of talking is good participation
Fact -
Quantity vs Quality should be taken into account
Who's talking - dominate speakers?
Goal of participation - increase student learning
Talking is just one of the ways of participation

For more discussion participation tools come to workshop 3

3) Discussion is the only form/best form of participation
Fact - Discussion is just one of the ways of participation or being engaged.
Others include:
Quick or free-write
Blog
Think-pair-share
Surveys
Quiet reflection

4) Prolonged silences are bad

Prolonged silence can be good because it can take the pressure off
you and put it on the students, which makes them respond.

It also gives reflective students time to process all their thoughts

It's often a good idea to inject pauses during talks or discussion so people can process their thoughts

5) All students should be expected to participate equally
Many think fairness is treating everyone equally
But if that's true you probably aren't reaching everyone
Because:
Cultural differences
Background
Socialization of the different genders
Affects how students interpret and/or react
(Treat people the way you want to be treated)

6) It’s the TAs responsibility to create a good discussion

No. its not only your responsibility. Its every person's responsibility. This can be achieved by setting the right tone from the beginning of the quarter.

The TA's goal is to create conditions that enable students of various learning styles and personalities to contribute. To achieve this, you will need to take extra steps to encourage quiet students to speak up and, occasionally, ask the more verbose students to hold back to give others a chance.

7) If the students aren’t responding/answering correctly it’s the students fault
Fact - Sometimes we, instructors, just aren't clear enough.
Can our instructions be interpreted another way?
Was the assignment/question too hard?
Was there a "Wrong Answer"?

If the answer to all these questions is "NO" and you are still mystified, ask the students why they answered the way they did. If you set the tone early, they will answer honestly.

Also try a Mid-Quarter-Interview - MQI - through the CETL with one of us TAC’s

Many participants of our workshop asked for more time to go over difficult situations. Some scenarios include difficult students - students that text, go off topic, are dominate, and/or rude. Because of time limitations we weren’t to discuss all of these situations. But stay tuned for workshop 3 when participants will get another chance to think about, act out, and discuss difficult situations.

Below are the slides and group answers from our workshop.