Week 4 Element Spotlight: PARTICIPATION
We know the look. The eyes gloss over. The posture slumps. You can almost see the daydreams forming. We’ve lost them.
Have you ever stopped to analyze what triggers this all-too-common response from students? When it occurs and why? You probably don’t need to look any further than the Maximize PARTICIPATION Element.
That’s what we’ll turn our attention to this week in the The Decisive Element Challenge. All week on the blog we’ll explore how teachers work to fulfill the intent of this element: Provide tangible tasks for all students at all times.
But what does tangible really mean?
What does it mean to provide it for them?
And all? Really? ALL? At ALL times?
The fact of the matter is that we often don’t think about what students are doing when we’re preparing our lessons. We think about what WE are going to do. And then this turns into students who should be “listening” or “taking notes” or “paying attention” or even “talking with their partner” or “reading the text.”
It doesn’t matter if you’re 6 years old, 16 years old, or 36 years old — if you’re instructed to “listen” you really don’t have to do anything.
Some might retort that it’s on the students to participate under their own volition. They are correct only to a certain extent. Confronted with a choice between participating in the clear, tangible, beneficial thing that will advance their learning in meaningful ways or not doing that thing, then yes, it’s on the student to make the right choice. (Roughly 99.6% of students will choose the correct action in that circumstance.) But given the choice between doing nothing and doing nothing under the guise of doing something vague and nebulous that their teacher will have no way of verifying and won’t do a thing to help their learning, you really haven’t even given the students a choice in the matter.
That’s on you.
This week, really consider what your instructions look like from the participants’ perspective. What do you REALLY want students to DO? How will you undoubtedly KNOW that they’re doing that? How might they misinterpret that instruction to mean “You really don’t need to do anything right now, just so long as you look like you’re pretending to pay attention” or “As long as someone nearby me is doing something, I really don’t need to do anything productive for my own personal learning at all”? Does it apply equally to the kid in the back corner as it does to the one in the front row?
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