5 Ways to Encourage Participation from All Students
By Otis Kriegel
“I want everyone in my classroom to be ‘all in,’” a colleague once shared with me, “but I never know how to get everyone involved.”
This struggle is common. One of the underlying goals of any teacher is total participation. Engagement is key to real learning. When kids feel comfortable, they commit more to the curriculum, the project, or the task at hand. Their thoughts add insight, interest, and inspiration to the classroom dialogue and their own individual learning.
As seasoned classroom teacher and cofounder of the art collective Illegal Art, I am passionate about promoting self-reflection and inquiry in the classroom. Illegal Art is based upon creating participatory public art projects that encourage “self-reflection, thought and human connection.” The art projects established the conditions that encouraged thousands of participants to take part in public art.
The question I continue to ask myself is How do we take this approach and bring it into the classroom environment as a way to inspire students to open up, participate, and express themselves?
Here are five techniques I employ in my classroom to create a space that encourages and supports participation from all students:
1. Lead with Empathy
Empathy is an effective means to encourage classroom communication: “I know this is hard. If you are struggling with this topic, that is perfectly normal and expected. Let’s talk about what is challenging and how we can move through this together.”
By approaching the problem in this way, you acknowledge students’ fear of being wrong and make it okay. You make it acceptable to address the challenge with an incorrect answer or an educated guess. Those initial thoughts can help lead the class to a meaningful discussion. Without a foundation of empathy, it will be hard to establish a sense of safety where students feel comfortable taking the risks required for real engaged learning and class participation.
2. Wait to Call
During small-group or whole-class lessons, I always take two breaths before I call on anyone. Giving students that extra time to think evens the playing field. Wait to Call provides an additional moment to think for those students who might not be the ones to throw their hand up in the air, always ready to answer your question. Take a breath, and see how many more hands are raised.
3. Turn and Talk
Don’t make talk all about your interactions with your students. Sometimes they need to speak to one of their peers. My students often turn to a neighbor and discuss a question or topic before participating in a whole-class discussion. This gives them a few moments to work out their thoughts, receive feedback from a peer, and get comfortable with their ideas. When returning back together as a whole class, many of those students who may not have felt ready to contribute are ready to go.
4. Tell Them You Are Going to Call on Them
I let students who struggle to share in either small- or whole-class discussions know in advance that I am going to call on them. I might even talk through what they are going to share so they are ready. I have found this helps them prepare for success, as well as encourage them to express themselves in the future. Cold calling, where a teacher asks a student a question without first asking him or her to participate, can stifle involvement and clog the pathways to involvement. Cold calling can scare a classroom of kids into clamming up, bring on tears, and make everyone feel awful.
5. Anonymous Participation
When I was in graduate school a fellow student was teaching first grade and struggled to get students to express their feelings. One day she grabbed a cereal box, covered it in white paper, and wrote “The Feelings Box” on the side. She explained to the kids, who were learning to write, that if they felt something they wanted to express or share they could write it down and pop it in the box. It was their choice whether to write their name on it.
I adapted this technique — I chose to call it Suggestion Box as homage to a participatory-based art project I did with the same name. I used Suggestion Box in my classroom numerous times for various topics such as contributing questions about a science or math concept or comments about a topic in social studies. The comments were insightful and thoughtful and inspired powerful, captivating conversations. I would choose a few to discuss during a lesson and others I would post on a wall. The box provided the students with a chance to ask something that they might be to shy to bring up in the whole group.
There are many ways to encourage participation in class and in life. These are a few suggestions as starting points. I would encourage you to use what works for you, change the concepts to make them function in your classroom or school, develop new strategies and share them, and brainstorm new ideas with your colleagues.
What techniques do you use in your classroom to encourage participation from all? Are there lessons you’ve learned over the years about how to create a classroom where all your students feel comfortable and willing to participate? Leave your input and ideas in the comments.
Starting as an international outdoor adventure guide, Kriegel made his way the classroom afterwards and has been teaching for the past 16 years. Having taught in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Berlin, Germany, Kriegel has taught all of the grades 1st -8th in monolingual, dual language, inclusion as also created and taught a Digital Arts program for a public Middle School in New York City. Otis was adjunct faculty at New York University and a guest speaker at The Bank Street College of Education, City College of New York, Touro College and others. An experienced presenter, Kriegel has spoken at numerous conferences and given workshops to hundreds of new and veteran teachers alike, as well as consulted with educational administrators and principals. He wrote Everything a New Elementary School Teacher REALLY Needs to Know (But Didn’t Learn in College) (Free Spirit, 2013) and Starting School Right: How do I plan for a successful first week in my classroom? (ASCD Arias, 2016).
Kriegel is also an artist, who cofounded the public art collective, Illegal Art, whose book, Suggestion (August 2005), was published by Chronicle Books. Kriegel’s public art, photography and video/film projects have been featured in such media outlets as National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Public Art Review and The New York Times. His work has been exhibited, commissioned and published in catalogs throughout the Americas and Europe, and was an artist-in-residence at the 2013 SXSW Festival. Kriegel was also commissioned by The White House to participate in the South By South Lawn Festival.
Follow him on social media:
Twitter: @mynameisotis
Instagram: @otisnow
