Literature Review
- What is the importance of oral participation? Why should we care whether or not a Student speaks in the classroom?
One of the main purposes of education is to prepare students for the jobs they'll have in the future. According to a survey conducted by Marcel Robles, the top two soft skills (desirable qualities that do not depend on acquired knowledge) business executives want in their employees are integrity and the ability to communicate effectively (Robles, 2012). Robles sent a survey to 182 business executives asking to rank each of the ten soft skills as either extremely important (5), very important (4), somewhat important (3), not very important (2), or not important (1). Out of the 57 executives who filled out the survey, 100% ranked communication skills as very important (4) or extremely important (5).
A different study on New Zealand accounting firms and their hiring practices found similar results. Out of the 146 accounting employers surveyed, 64.1% "always" took oral communication into consideration when hiring, and 90.8 "always" or "often" took oral communication into consideration when hiring a new employee (Gray, 2010). In examining what the most valuable oral communication skills employers were after, Gray found that listening attentiveness, listening responsiveness, conveying a professional attitude of respect and interest, asking for clarification or feedback from management, and speaking with clients were the most important oral communication skills needed. These employers found that their new accountants need not only to take in information, but to be able to listen and respond effectively to both clients and management.
More important than pruning students for the jobs they'll fill after graduation, students need oral communication skills in order to make sense of their world. According to Fisher, Frey and Rothenberg, oral language is the foundation of literacy (Fisher, Frey & Rothenberg, 2008). This is seen in children in that they learn to use spoken words well before they learn to read or write. According to Vygotsky's theory of development, children learn to speak at 1.5 years of age or earlier, and yet they learn to read at 5-6 years of age (Kozulin et. al., 2003). Vygotsky speculates that there are specific developmental stages that children go through. There exists optimal ages to learn to speak, read and write, and those optimal ages are based on what the child can already do. This theory appears to imply that the understanding of oral language leads to the understanding of written language. Nikki Arnot seems to support this argument. In her article, "Substantive Conversations: The Importance of Oracy in the Classroom," Arnot says, "I have found that unless I regularly provide opportunity for students to talk about the information we are concentrating on, it is doubtful they make sense of it" (Arnot, 2014). To me, this statement was a little surprising at first. I would have thought that having students write a reflection on the content immediately after reading would also do the trick in helping students make sense of the content, but she is saying the oral communication seems to work best. On further reflection however, this supports what I find in my own life. Whenever someone asks me what I am studying, I rarely ever give them a short answer. Instead, I usually grab that opportunity to share more than they wanted to know. It helps me process the information. It lends importance to the subject, especially when my response leads to a genuine conversation about whatever I was studying. I frequently talk with my friends and family about the things I'm doing in my classroom or have studied in my Masters program with the specific goal of making sense of it all, and bettering my teaching practices.
Unfortunately, despite all of the wonderful reasons why we should explicitly study oral communication in the classroom, oral communication often seems to take a back seat to written language. According to Fisher, Frey and Rothenberg, the balance of talk in the classroom is often heavily weighted towards the teacher (Fisher, Frey & Rothenberg, 2008). Teachers often use a call and response method where students are asked to give a one-word response, or asked to give the response that the teacher is looking for, rather than encourage the student to explain his or her thinking to the class. Arnot shared this finding in her own teaching practices. In the beginning years, she used more of a "preaching" strategy, and used "thin" questions rather than "thick" questions. Thin questions to her meant those that require only a one-word response or those "targeted responses." Both of which, for her, led often to long silences, which is precisely what I want to avoid in the classroom.
In addition to asking "thick" questions more often than "thin" questions, Arnot offers a variety of strategies to facilitate "good conversation" (Arnot, 2014). She uses peer responses, inferring, think-alouds and making connections and predictions. I've seen teachers do many of these, and also differ from these. One teacher at my old school focused on students making connections, and she divided those connections into three distinct types: text-to-text, text-to-world, and text-to-self. This seemed like a brilliant way to get students to thoughtfully communicate about a text. Another teacher I worked with had students look up quotes from the novel they were reading. Each student shared their quotes orally with each other and explained how that quote went with the theme their table was currently studying. The teacher I work with now has students reflect a lot on their own work with their peers. He is always asking them to share what went well, and what needs to improve, and he asks them to reflect on these questions for everything: protocols he has made, written work they've completed, oral presentations and posters created.
All of these strategies lead to meaningful conversations in the classroom and are supported by the Common Core State Standards. The following are a few of the common core state standards that reflect these ideas regarding communication and align with the focus of my research (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The bolded print is my own condensed summary of the standard. It helps me better understand what is at the heart of the standard.
Pose Questions: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.C
Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a topic or issue...
Take Multiple Perspectives into Consideration when Responding: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.D
Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims, and evidence made on all sides of an issue...
Support those Perspectives with Evidence from Multiple Sources: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.2
Integrate multiple sources of information presented...in order to make informed decisions and solve problems...
Evaluate a Speaker's Point of View and Reasoning: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.3
Evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, assessing the stance, premises, links among ideas, word choice, points of emphasis, and tone used.
Organize Your Thoughts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.4
Present information, findings, and supporting evidence, conveying a clear and distinct perspective, such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning, alternative or opposing perspectives are addressed, and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and a range of formal and informal tasks.
Know Your Audience and Speak to Them: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.6
Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating a command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.
By facilitating discussions using Arnot and my previous teacher's strategies, students will be practicing the skills set out for them in the Common Core State Standards.
A different study on New Zealand accounting firms and their hiring practices found similar results. Out of the 146 accounting employers surveyed, 64.1% "always" took oral communication into consideration when hiring, and 90.8 "always" or "often" took oral communication into consideration when hiring a new employee (Gray, 2010). In examining what the most valuable oral communication skills employers were after, Gray found that listening attentiveness, listening responsiveness, conveying a professional attitude of respect and interest, asking for clarification or feedback from management, and speaking with clients were the most important oral communication skills needed. These employers found that their new accountants need not only to take in information, but to be able to listen and respond effectively to both clients and management.
More important than pruning students for the jobs they'll fill after graduation, students need oral communication skills in order to make sense of their world. According to Fisher, Frey and Rothenberg, oral language is the foundation of literacy (Fisher, Frey & Rothenberg, 2008). This is seen in children in that they learn to use spoken words well before they learn to read or write. According to Vygotsky's theory of development, children learn to speak at 1.5 years of age or earlier, and yet they learn to read at 5-6 years of age (Kozulin et. al., 2003). Vygotsky speculates that there are specific developmental stages that children go through. There exists optimal ages to learn to speak, read and write, and those optimal ages are based on what the child can already do. This theory appears to imply that the understanding of oral language leads to the understanding of written language. Nikki Arnot seems to support this argument. In her article, "Substantive Conversations: The Importance of Oracy in the Classroom," Arnot says, "I have found that unless I regularly provide opportunity for students to talk about the information we are concentrating on, it is doubtful they make sense of it" (Arnot, 2014). To me, this statement was a little surprising at first. I would have thought that having students write a reflection on the content immediately after reading would also do the trick in helping students make sense of the content, but she is saying the oral communication seems to work best. On further reflection however, this supports what I find in my own life. Whenever someone asks me what I am studying, I rarely ever give them a short answer. Instead, I usually grab that opportunity to share more than they wanted to know. It helps me process the information. It lends importance to the subject, especially when my response leads to a genuine conversation about whatever I was studying. I frequently talk with my friends and family about the things I'm doing in my classroom or have studied in my Masters program with the specific goal of making sense of it all, and bettering my teaching practices.
Unfortunately, despite all of the wonderful reasons why we should explicitly study oral communication in the classroom, oral communication often seems to take a back seat to written language. According to Fisher, Frey and Rothenberg, the balance of talk in the classroom is often heavily weighted towards the teacher (Fisher, Frey & Rothenberg, 2008). Teachers often use a call and response method where students are asked to give a one-word response, or asked to give the response that the teacher is looking for, rather than encourage the student to explain his or her thinking to the class. Arnot shared this finding in her own teaching practices. In the beginning years, she used more of a "preaching" strategy, and used "thin" questions rather than "thick" questions. Thin questions to her meant those that require only a one-word response or those "targeted responses." Both of which, for her, led often to long silences, which is precisely what I want to avoid in the classroom.
In addition to asking "thick" questions more often than "thin" questions, Arnot offers a variety of strategies to facilitate "good conversation" (Arnot, 2014). She uses peer responses, inferring, think-alouds and making connections and predictions. I've seen teachers do many of these, and also differ from these. One teacher at my old school focused on students making connections, and she divided those connections into three distinct types: text-to-text, text-to-world, and text-to-self. This seemed like a brilliant way to get students to thoughtfully communicate about a text. Another teacher I worked with had students look up quotes from the novel they were reading. Each student shared their quotes orally with each other and explained how that quote went with the theme their table was currently studying. The teacher I work with now has students reflect a lot on their own work with their peers. He is always asking them to share what went well, and what needs to improve, and he asks them to reflect on these questions for everything: protocols he has made, written work they've completed, oral presentations and posters created.
All of these strategies lead to meaningful conversations in the classroom and are supported by the Common Core State Standards. The following are a few of the common core state standards that reflect these ideas regarding communication and align with the focus of my research (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The bolded print is my own condensed summary of the standard. It helps me better understand what is at the heart of the standard.
Pose Questions: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.C
Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a topic or issue...
Take Multiple Perspectives into Consideration when Responding: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.D
Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims, and evidence made on all sides of an issue...
Support those Perspectives with Evidence from Multiple Sources: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.2
Integrate multiple sources of information presented...in order to make informed decisions and solve problems...
Evaluate a Speaker's Point of View and Reasoning: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.3
Evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, assessing the stance, premises, links among ideas, word choice, points of emphasis, and tone used.
Organize Your Thoughts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.4
Present information, findings, and supporting evidence, conveying a clear and distinct perspective, such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning, alternative or opposing perspectives are addressed, and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and a range of formal and informal tasks.
Know Your Audience and Speak to Them: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.6
Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating a command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.
By facilitating discussions using Arnot and my previous teacher's strategies, students will be practicing the skills set out for them in the Common Core State Standards.
- How do we encourage students to engage in meaningful conversations?
From my needs assessment, I found that the teacher's attitude and expectations play a big role in getting students to participate. Furthermore, students want to see the teacher encouraging students to share their ideas and believing in them.
According to Li et. al., "Encouraging people have, to use a metaphor from the game of pool...a cue ball personality -- making things happen in contrast with an eight ball personality of sitting passively on the table waiting to be knocked around. Encouragers are trendsetters who help translate dreams into reality" (Li et. al, 2011). Encouraging people make things happen rather than sit placidly until the final move. Li et. al. further states that encouragement is "a process whereby one focuses on an individual’s resources in order to build that person’s self-esteem, self-confidence and feelings of worth. Encouragement involves focusing on any resource that can be turned into an asset or strength" (Li et. al, 2011). I especially love that last part: focusing on any resource that can be turned into an asset or strength. With my students, I could highlight the student's strengths, whether that was an idea they wrote in a paper or an idea they shared with me in the hallway. I could then encourage them to share that idea with the class, or use that idea as evidence of their thoughtfulness and why they need to share more with their peers. By focusing on something insightful the student has said, the student will know that their ideas are worth sharing. Hopefully, this will strengthen students' confidence and comfortableness in discussions.
In the book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck seems to support the use of encouragement by both parents and teachers, but she says that there is more to the story. She connects encouragement with the need to both set high standards and also give students a means of reaching those standards (Dweck 2006). Without these two things, encouragement won't help students. Instead, with high standards and no means of achieving, words of encouragement will ring hollow for kids. With low standards, a clear means of achieving, and high encouragement, we're creating "poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise" (Dweck 2006).
Since I'd like to avoid both of these scenarios, I need to know what I have to do to create an environment of high encouragement, high standards and a clear means of achieving them when facilitating discussions. One idea that might help create this environment lies in the mindset of the teacher. Dweck says that parents and teachers either have a fixed mindset ideal or a growth mindset ideal when it comes to their children (Dweck 2006). A teacher with a fixed mindset ideal has a picture in their head of their ideal student, and it's the student "who comes in with innate talent." A teacher who has a growth mindset ideal has a picture in their head of the student they'd like to have in class, and it's the student "whose primary goal is to expand their knowledge and their ways of thinking and investigating the world. They do not see grades as an end in themselves but as a means to continue to grow." The teacher with the growth mindset ideal will be full of encouragement, but in order to see growth, they must also set room for them to grow by giving those high standards and also support them just enough to give them the means to achieve.
This may seem obvious, but I think this idea of growth is very important when considering implementing encouragement in the classroom. In Kelly Gallagher's book, Improving Adolescent Writers, he shares his mantra of "Everyone moves," meaning that if we charted students' understanding and skill levels on a graph, he wants to see that next point a little higher than the previous one, and so on (Gallagher, 2006). The goal isn't to get all students up to the same level. Rather, the goal is to get all students moving, and continuing to move, up. This resonates with how I saw the students on a continuum in their participation. Everyone was at a different level in the classroom, and therefore my high expectations for one student will look very different than another student's.
Because the students are on very different levels and because I want to meet students where they are currently, I think I should individualize the encouragement I give to each student. One way of doing this is to conduct individual conferences with students. In a study on the effectiveness of student conferences, Hussein and Al Ashri found that students' performance in writing improved when the teacher employed student conferences (Hussein & Al Ashri, 2013). They suggested that the increase was due to students having immediate, direct teacher feedback. Students didn't have to guess what needed to be changed, or have a peer guess at their work. They could discuss with the teacher why certain aspects of the paper were effective, and what aspects needed revision. This might work in my classroom for participation.
According to the article, "How can conferencing with students be effective without taking forever?" short conferences are more effective than long ones (www.writing.mit.edu). Therefore, teachers should come to the discussion prepared to discuss three or four questions, or prepared to discuss a student's piece of work by having very specific talking points so as to keep the conference short and to the point. This website also suggested that students should be active participants in the discussion. The teacher should avoid talking too much so that the student knows that their opinion is valued.
In addition to the teacher encouraging the students, research suggests that meaningful encouragement comes from peers. In a study conducted by Filer and Chang, students who were encouraged by peers to take an algebra class were more likely to enroll than students who were not encouraged by their peers (Filer & Chang, 2008). This study supports the idea that peers are a powerful source for change. Based on their findings, and based on my observations of how my students value their peers' opinions and ideas, I would like to give students the opportunity to encourage each other to voice their ideas.
According to Li et. al., "Encouraging people have, to use a metaphor from the game of pool...a cue ball personality -- making things happen in contrast with an eight ball personality of sitting passively on the table waiting to be knocked around. Encouragers are trendsetters who help translate dreams into reality" (Li et. al, 2011). Encouraging people make things happen rather than sit placidly until the final move. Li et. al. further states that encouragement is "a process whereby one focuses on an individual’s resources in order to build that person’s self-esteem, self-confidence and feelings of worth. Encouragement involves focusing on any resource that can be turned into an asset or strength" (Li et. al, 2011). I especially love that last part: focusing on any resource that can be turned into an asset or strength. With my students, I could highlight the student's strengths, whether that was an idea they wrote in a paper or an idea they shared with me in the hallway. I could then encourage them to share that idea with the class, or use that idea as evidence of their thoughtfulness and why they need to share more with their peers. By focusing on something insightful the student has said, the student will know that their ideas are worth sharing. Hopefully, this will strengthen students' confidence and comfortableness in discussions.
In the book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck seems to support the use of encouragement by both parents and teachers, but she says that there is more to the story. She connects encouragement with the need to both set high standards and also give students a means of reaching those standards (Dweck 2006). Without these two things, encouragement won't help students. Instead, with high standards and no means of achieving, words of encouragement will ring hollow for kids. With low standards, a clear means of achieving, and high encouragement, we're creating "poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise" (Dweck 2006).
Since I'd like to avoid both of these scenarios, I need to know what I have to do to create an environment of high encouragement, high standards and a clear means of achieving them when facilitating discussions. One idea that might help create this environment lies in the mindset of the teacher. Dweck says that parents and teachers either have a fixed mindset ideal or a growth mindset ideal when it comes to their children (Dweck 2006). A teacher with a fixed mindset ideal has a picture in their head of their ideal student, and it's the student "who comes in with innate talent." A teacher who has a growth mindset ideal has a picture in their head of the student they'd like to have in class, and it's the student "whose primary goal is to expand their knowledge and their ways of thinking and investigating the world. They do not see grades as an end in themselves but as a means to continue to grow." The teacher with the growth mindset ideal will be full of encouragement, but in order to see growth, they must also set room for them to grow by giving those high standards and also support them just enough to give them the means to achieve.
This may seem obvious, but I think this idea of growth is very important when considering implementing encouragement in the classroom. In Kelly Gallagher's book, Improving Adolescent Writers, he shares his mantra of "Everyone moves," meaning that if we charted students' understanding and skill levels on a graph, he wants to see that next point a little higher than the previous one, and so on (Gallagher, 2006). The goal isn't to get all students up to the same level. Rather, the goal is to get all students moving, and continuing to move, up. This resonates with how I saw the students on a continuum in their participation. Everyone was at a different level in the classroom, and therefore my high expectations for one student will look very different than another student's.
Because the students are on very different levels and because I want to meet students where they are currently, I think I should individualize the encouragement I give to each student. One way of doing this is to conduct individual conferences with students. In a study on the effectiveness of student conferences, Hussein and Al Ashri found that students' performance in writing improved when the teacher employed student conferences (Hussein & Al Ashri, 2013). They suggested that the increase was due to students having immediate, direct teacher feedback. Students didn't have to guess what needed to be changed, or have a peer guess at their work. They could discuss with the teacher why certain aspects of the paper were effective, and what aspects needed revision. This might work in my classroom for participation.
According to the article, "How can conferencing with students be effective without taking forever?" short conferences are more effective than long ones (www.writing.mit.edu). Therefore, teachers should come to the discussion prepared to discuss three or four questions, or prepared to discuss a student's piece of work by having very specific talking points so as to keep the conference short and to the point. This website also suggested that students should be active participants in the discussion. The teacher should avoid talking too much so that the student knows that their opinion is valued.
In addition to the teacher encouraging the students, research suggests that meaningful encouragement comes from peers. In a study conducted by Filer and Chang, students who were encouraged by peers to take an algebra class were more likely to enroll than students who were not encouraged by their peers (Filer & Chang, 2008). This study supports the idea that peers are a powerful source for change. Based on their findings, and based on my observations of how my students value their peers' opinions and ideas, I would like to give students the opportunity to encourage each other to voice their ideas.
- What is the relationship between oral Participation and Student Confidence?
Based on the student interviews I conducted for my needs assessment and based on my past observations of student discussions, my impression for many of the students who don't speak up is that confidence plays a large role, and that confidence is tied to patterns within our culture, as well as within the individual's past experiences. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcom Gladwell talks about the effects that culture, tradition and power have on interactions with people. Gladwell uses the example of Korean Air and how, from the years 1988 to 1998, the chances of Korean Air losing a plane in an accident was seventeen times higher than United Airlines. He attributes this difference to differing forms of communication between the captain and copilot for each airline, and argued that it was a result of differing power distances. The Power Distance Index (PDI) is how a particular culture values and respects authority. He says that in the United States, we have a very low PDI, meaning that people in the U.S. see themselves as equals to people of higher authority, and higher authority figures often try to downplay their own importance. Korea on the other hand, has one of the highest PDIs. In the cockpit, communication is crucial. According to many studies on the black box transcripts of Korean Airline's crashes, many accidents occurred because the captain (the higher authority) didn't recognize the value of what his co-pilot (the lower authority) was saying, and other times, the co-pilot didn't voice his concerns as severely as he should have because of the culture of proper power distances he came from. He seemed to be afraid of the ramifications of speaking. He didn't seem to have the confidence to voice his true opinion and save lives.
Korean Air fixed this issue by hiring a consultant from the U.S. who required all Korean pilots to learn English. The consultant also taught the pilots and co-pilots to listen and voice their opinions openly to one another. The consultant claimed that English was the universal language of Air Traffic Control (ATC), but it also held another function. It helped both captain and co-pilot put on a different identity than the one associated with their high power distance culture. The students in my class come from our culture in which they typically do not share their opinions in large groups. In my AR, I hope to change this culture by making students aware of the issue. In the TED talk, "Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are," Amy Cuddy passionately and effectively asserts that a person can in fact fake it until they not only make it, but become it. In her study, she had participants hold either high power stances (body postures that conveyed confidence and power) or low power stances (body postures that conveyed a lack of confidence and weakness) for two minutes before they went into a fake interview. Cuddy found that those who held the high power stances were rated by outside observers as higher in confidence, comfort levels, enthusiasm and as people they would like to hire over those who held the lower power stances. Her TED talk is especially important to me and this research because there is this part in her talk where she shares how she always felt like an imposter after a car accident that left her two standard deviations lower in her IQ level, and how, after years and years of faking it and finally becoming it, she had a student come into her office who broke down, saying that she felt she didn't deserve to be at Harvard. This is the moment where Amy Cuddy breaks down and realizes that she herself no longer feels like an imposter. This is also the part that hits very close to what I want to do in my classroom. She says that she told this student, "No, you do belong here, and tomorrow you're going to raise your hand and give the best comment of the class." In other words, she encouraged this girl. She set high, individual, attainable goals for this girl, and Cuddy says that the next day, that girl did exactly that. She raised her hand and had the best comment in class. In my classroom, I hope to replicate the way Cuddy encouraged her student.
Korean Air fixed this issue by hiring a consultant from the U.S. who required all Korean pilots to learn English. The consultant also taught the pilots and co-pilots to listen and voice their opinions openly to one another. The consultant claimed that English was the universal language of Air Traffic Control (ATC), but it also held another function. It helped both captain and co-pilot put on a different identity than the one associated with their high power distance culture. The students in my class come from our culture in which they typically do not share their opinions in large groups. In my AR, I hope to change this culture by making students aware of the issue. In the TED talk, "Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are," Amy Cuddy passionately and effectively asserts that a person can in fact fake it until they not only make it, but become it. In her study, she had participants hold either high power stances (body postures that conveyed confidence and power) or low power stances (body postures that conveyed a lack of confidence and weakness) for two minutes before they went into a fake interview. Cuddy found that those who held the high power stances were rated by outside observers as higher in confidence, comfort levels, enthusiasm and as people they would like to hire over those who held the lower power stances. Her TED talk is especially important to me and this research because there is this part in her talk where she shares how she always felt like an imposter after a car accident that left her two standard deviations lower in her IQ level, and how, after years and years of faking it and finally becoming it, she had a student come into her office who broke down, saying that she felt she didn't deserve to be at Harvard. This is the moment where Amy Cuddy breaks down and realizes that she herself no longer feels like an imposter. This is also the part that hits very close to what I want to do in my classroom. She says that she told this student, "No, you do belong here, and tomorrow you're going to raise your hand and give the best comment of the class." In other words, she encouraged this girl. She set high, individual, attainable goals for this girl, and Cuddy says that the next day, that girl did exactly that. She raised her hand and had the best comment in class. In my classroom, I hope to replicate the way Cuddy encouraged her student.
- What is the importance of enhancing the classroom environment, and what is the role of oral Participation on the classroom environment?
In my needs assessment, a few students mentioned how they were afraid of what other students would think of them if they shared their opinion. One student talked about how an idea was rejected simply because it came from a particular student. In fact, she thought that it was the best idea, and yet because a particular student presented it, the class went in a different direction. These negative feelings towards other students shocked me. I'd only been with these students for a few weeks before I conducted these interviews, but my impressions of the classroom environment were very positive. Because of these feelings that are present, I need to re-examine our classroom environment and figure out ways to promote more acceptance and higher comfort levels than those currently.
According to Wilson-Fleming and Wilson-Younger, a classroom environment is the students’ and teacher's shared perceptions of the environment (Wilson-Fleming & Wilson-Younger, 2012). In order to create a positive classroom environment, Colombo, Cullen and Lisle posits that establishing an atmosphere of trust right from the start is crucial (Colombo et. al, 2004). Colombo et. al also share a number of strategies a teacher can adopt to create this safe space. The first is to set ground rules, and they suggest having the students come up with those rules themselves. I will definitely incorporate this into my action plan as a first step in creating an atmosphere of trust. Another strategy for creating a safe space is to monitor classroom dynamics by being aware of individual students' perceptions of the discussion. Colombo et. al advise the teacher to be aware of who is sharing and who isn't. For Socratic Seminars, Tredway advises something similar (Tredway, 1995). She has three to five students act as observers by filling out an observation sheet. They track how many times a student speaks and the type of comment they made. I did this originally in my needs assessment, but I think it would be a good idea for students to implement in my action plan. Students can be aware of who participates and who doesn't, and how often. That way, students can see whether they are dominating the conversation, or whether they need to contribute more. The idea of monitoring classroom participation would also lend itself to me confronting students who are not participating, and give me the opportunity to encourage them to make their voices heard in our large group discussions.
University of California Berkeley's Center for Teaching and Learning website suggests having students discuss in small groups first because students often feel more comfortable in small groups rather than large groups (University of California Berkeley Center for Teaching and Learning). Since in my needs assessment I saw students who seemed uncomfortable even sharing their ideas with a few students, and because students expressed a perception of negative relationships, I think working o small group participation first might benefit them. Although my teacher already had students do many small group activities, I think it would still help students to continue working in small groups before looking beyond to large groups. Once they become comfortable, then we'll work on large group participation.
I think all of these strategies, working first on small group participation, monitoring those discussions, establishing high and clear expectations, would be beneficial for the classroom and hopefully, students will feel more comfortable and determined to voice their ideas with their peers.
According to Wilson-Fleming and Wilson-Younger, a classroom environment is the students’ and teacher's shared perceptions of the environment (Wilson-Fleming & Wilson-Younger, 2012). In order to create a positive classroom environment, Colombo, Cullen and Lisle posits that establishing an atmosphere of trust right from the start is crucial (Colombo et. al, 2004). Colombo et. al also share a number of strategies a teacher can adopt to create this safe space. The first is to set ground rules, and they suggest having the students come up with those rules themselves. I will definitely incorporate this into my action plan as a first step in creating an atmosphere of trust. Another strategy for creating a safe space is to monitor classroom dynamics by being aware of individual students' perceptions of the discussion. Colombo et. al advise the teacher to be aware of who is sharing and who isn't. For Socratic Seminars, Tredway advises something similar (Tredway, 1995). She has three to five students act as observers by filling out an observation sheet. They track how many times a student speaks and the type of comment they made. I did this originally in my needs assessment, but I think it would be a good idea for students to implement in my action plan. Students can be aware of who participates and who doesn't, and how often. That way, students can see whether they are dominating the conversation, or whether they need to contribute more. The idea of monitoring classroom participation would also lend itself to me confronting students who are not participating, and give me the opportunity to encourage them to make their voices heard in our large group discussions.
University of California Berkeley's Center for Teaching and Learning website suggests having students discuss in small groups first because students often feel more comfortable in small groups rather than large groups (University of California Berkeley Center for Teaching and Learning). Since in my needs assessment I saw students who seemed uncomfortable even sharing their ideas with a few students, and because students expressed a perception of negative relationships, I think working o small group participation first might benefit them. Although my teacher already had students do many small group activities, I think it would still help students to continue working in small groups before looking beyond to large groups. Once they become comfortable, then we'll work on large group participation.
I think all of these strategies, working first on small group participation, monitoring those discussions, establishing high and clear expectations, would be beneficial for the classroom and hopefully, students will feel more comfortable and determined to voice their ideas with their peers.
Summarizing My Ideas into an Action Plan
Based on the research, for my action plan I will first establish the expectations for a safe environment in accordance with Wilson-Fleming and Wilson-Younger's work. I will have the students come up with those expectations themselves. After we set those expectations, I will meet individually with students who seemed uncomfortable participating, and encourage those students by sharing specific aspects of their work that I appreciated, and asking three to four questions of the student regarding present and future participation. In addition to hearing encouragement from me, I plan on having students share out their encouragement for their fellow peers, as that has been recognized as an effective strategy in promoting specific behaviors.