As my inquiry began, I wanted to establish a baseline in order to observe the voluntary participation by both specific students and across the class as a whole. The classroom senior assistant teacher, recorded a running tally of the number of times each student spoke in a discussion or offered up a solution in the class review day. This senior assistant teacher is a senior student selected for a yearlong position in a classroom to support the classroom teacher by working with individual or groups of students similarly to a college-level teaching assistant. Students were given opportunities to participate by providing one of four solutions to the warm-up problems for the day, during a whole class discussion of quadratic function transformations, and when working through a review quiz by sharing out solutions.
Participation seating chart used for analysis.
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The class senior assistant teacher initially tracked which students spoke by placing a simple tally mark next to each student’s name on a printed class roster; I was pleasantly surprised to see that all but a few members of the class participated in some way during our quiz review class. On a day that served as a review for the quiz that would follow the next day, I hoped that all students would participate in some way to help me establish a sense of how prepared each student would be. I was reassured to see that most students who did participate spoke on more than one occasion, by asking questions, volunteering their process, or helping another classmate; however, I was hoping that there would be participation from all students at least once in the entire class discussion.
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After looking over the tally in roster form, I converted this into a seating chart of the classroom to observe if a pattern existed between the positioning of students’ seats to who participated. Upon analyzing, there appeared to be at least one student from each table who participated in the discussion and lesson. I could not see a noticeable pattern of position within the classroom to the number of times the student spoke. I initially believed in the idea that across the front and along the center of the classroom tends to participate more, but this was not necessarily the case here, or in other informal observations I had made this year. It was interesting to observe more of an absence of a pattern with student participation during this lesson. Carol Weinstein’s research, however, did affirm the interactions that I saw amongst the students seated in each small group. There were clear interactions between students seated at the same table, while there was very little discussion between students at other tables. This piece of information would be a critical factor when deciding which arrangements would create space for more cross-class collaboration.
When matching the student name to the amount of tally marks, it did seem that the more social students had a large presence in the conversation; students who I had noted to be frequent participators each class seemed to maintain their high level of participation. I was intrigued by the spectrum of participation in terms of number of times an individual participates. The numbers ranged from five instances at most, then jumped to either two, one, or zero contributions. This drop lead me to think more deeply about how I can engage the more introverted students in whole group conversations. Every student in my classroom has valuable pieces of information to contribute to the collective’s learning, so I wanted to experiment with different ways to bring all voices to discussions. In order to do this, I wanted to place a larger focus on the way I question my students, as well as allowing students to take more ownership of asking the questions to the class.
When matching the student name to the amount of tally marks, it did seem that the more social students had a large presence in the conversation; students who I had noted to be frequent participators each class seemed to maintain their high level of participation. I was intrigued by the spectrum of participation in terms of number of times an individual participates. The numbers ranged from five instances at most, then jumped to either two, one, or zero contributions. This drop lead me to think more deeply about how I can engage the more introverted students in whole group conversations. Every student in my classroom has valuable pieces of information to contribute to the collective’s learning, so I wanted to experiment with different ways to bring all voices to discussions. In order to do this, I wanted to place a larger focus on the way I question my students, as well as allowing students to take more ownership of asking the questions to the class.