Promoting Broad Class Participation

It seems if we left it to students, there would be a few students who would participate in class discussions and the rest would happily sit quietly. How can we know though if all students are learning at any given point if we leave it to them?

Dr. Sharroky Hollie, a Los Angeles-based educator outlines 26 protocols to increase student engagement that share a common thread of being culturally and linguistically responsive. This is an excerpt from his book, Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning. 




Here are some strategies to consider when wanting to increase involvement by all:

Turn and Talk, Whole class response, individual whiteboards...and others

A few other options are listed here including thumbs up/down, etc. Or consider some call and response signals in Spanish.

PLICKER allows you to capture and visually display student responses. The app (available for iOS and Android) keeps track of students responses and can be assigned to individual students.

Polleverywhere allows participants/students to submit their responses to a prompt.

Dr Sharroky Hollie runs the Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning. In his book he details some specific classroom practices. Here is a document highlighting a subset of that work: Culturally and Linguistically Responsive practices

With any of these, how can we know whether students are learning and if they aren't what can you do about it? How can we use that information to change course?