Memo 9

     Keep Calm and Speak On:

A Closer Look at the Strategies that Incite Student Participation at the Secondary Level

At this point in my research, I have meticulously read through my notes in my teacher journal, my classroom observations, my question tracking tallying’s, and my classroom discourse notes. I still plan on having students answer the questionnaire and complete a self-reflection either this week or early next week. While analyzing my data, I first focused on scanning through the data from my classroom observations and my teacher’s journal. These two forms of data contained the most writing and narration of what I witnessed and felt within the classroom over the past three months regarding student participation and engagement.

While scrutinizing my observation notes and journal, I started to notice that patterns were emerging. The first thing I noticed was that there were several instances when students offered few or no responses to questions I posed to the whole-group. Within my notes, I noticed fairly quickly that two themes were starting to emerge, first, confidence and its role in participation, and secondly, the benefits of giving students time to formulate ideas before sharing to the whole-group. I decided to code my data by color coding themes, just as Falk and Blumenreich suggest in The Power of Questions. When something in my data linked to student confidence, I color coded the data blue. When something seemed to link more to idea formulation, I color coded it pink. Sometimes these themes overlapped a bit.  I used Google Docs to highlight these moments in my teacher’s journal and I used crayons to do the same on the loose leaf paper I used for my classroom observations. When scanning through my journal, it was clear that I had felt many moments of tension due to a lack of participants when I posed questions to the class during discussions. This went on for several weeks until I started to incorporate strategies to overcome this roadblock. In my data from late February, I start to see less moments of tension and more moments of success. Looking back in my observations, it is clear that there were certain strategies that helped students feel confident sharing to the entire class. For example, on February 19, I asked the students to identify one of the themes in Their Eyes Were Watching God. At first, I noted in my observation, “students nervous, looking at desk.” It was then that I decided to allow the students to turn and talk for three minutes before speaking as a class. As noted in my observation, “about 10 students raised hand after partner sharing.” Speaking with a peer helped the students gain the confidence to share their ideas with the rest of the group. When looking for patterns in my question tracker and classroom discourse notes, I confirmed that the depth of conversations and the frequency of participants did increase after incorporating strategies to gain confidence, such as partner sharing and think-peer-share.

Going along with the theme of giving time for response formulation and its benefits, my data shows that my biggest “ah-ha” teaching moments occurred when I gave the students opportunities to write before contributing to discussions. Many of these moments came after students had time to write in their journals before sharing their opinions on a given matter. Other times it came from class work lesson. For example, after February break we started to look at the importance of healthy relations and the idea of “respect.” After viewing a Respect Wheel, the students independently reflected on which categories were especially important to them. They wrote for about ten minutes before sharing to the class. As noted in my teacher journal, “The students had great real-world examples to share with the class. Student X brought up the link between trust and equality and how it relates to technology, including not going through your significant other’s personal conversations on his/ her cell phone.” My other forms of data also show that engagement and participation were high during this activity, which come directly from formulating responses in advance and seeing the relevance to the lesson.

 

Another pattern I noticed within my data included the link between engagement levels and the relevance of the given topic. Anytime I found a connection between participation and topic relevance, I highlighted the data in green. Looking through my data, more engagement and participation took place when the students could make real-world connections or see themselves in the content we were discussing. For example, in late January we read articles regarding the “Take a Knee” controversy. The students wrote about their opinion after reading several articles and watching video clips on both sides. Then, we had a whole-group discussion.  I noted in my teacher journal that, “The students were on fire! They brought their own personal connections to the reading and formulated their own opinions within discussions. Student X brought up the importance of activism in a public forum and even related it to the Civil Rights Movement.” Along with this lesson, the question tracker data showed that within the class period, 20 out of 22 students volunteered answers at some point. On my classroom discourse sheet, I noted that eight of these responses reached the level of discovery. This pattern of high engagement with relevant topics continued the days where I purposefully tried to cater to the students’ interests. For example, a highly increased rate of participation also took place on the days when I incorporated music, sports, and personal journaling into the lesson.

 

Another theme that emerged while scrutinizing my data included the pattern that students struggled to answer questions that required higher order thinking. I color coded this data in orange. For these moments, I sometimes tried to follow my literature review’s advice and practice “cold-calling” students. This resulted in many awkward moments where students told me that they “do not know” the answer. As noted in my teacher journal, “I felt uncomfortable asking X to identify the symbol behind the horizon. He looked mortified and after a moment of silence, responded that he had no idea.” Additionally, I noticed in my question tracker that the frequency of participation decreased within the lesson where I added many higher order thinking questions into the discussion. As noted in my observation, “looking at desks, idk [sic] (I don’t know) if they are deeply pondering or just tuning me out.” I have tried to alleviate this station recently by allowing students to turn and talk. However, depending on the question posed, this can make little change to the number of volunteers. Going forward, I will try to add more scaffolding techniques before posing these questions.

Lastly, an emergent theme I noticed in my data is that structured small groups can engage all students. After completing my literature review, this is something that was suggested. I recently tried incorporating this technique in class this week. I tried it by asking students to present their projects within small groups and follow some specific guidelines, including taking notes on everyone’s presentation, offering feedback, and reflecting on the project within a small group discussion. As I took classroom observation data, I noted that “all groups following instruction, no one off task!” Additionally, I later went on to write in my teacher’s journal that, “I couldn’t stop smiling while I paced around the room. All groups were on task. At that moment I felt proud to call myself their teacher.” When pacing up and down the aisles, I noticed that every single student presented and took notes on each other’s work. I would like to continue to incorporate the structured small group strategy in my classroom since it seems to work well to engage all students. In previous data notes from January, I noticed that many awkward moments took place when, “students sat in their small groups and refused to speak.” Clear guidelines and directions can help alleviate this issue and build community within my classroom.

 

Going forward, I plan to continue to collect data by giving students a self-reflection and questionnaire on their own participation and learning what I can do to help them feel more intrigued to engage in class conversations. Additionally, as previously noted, I plan to start recording some of these class discussions to ensure that my data is as accurate and plentiful as possible and continues to follow triangulation. I’m curious to see if any new themes will emerge after I gain this data and if reoccurring themes will continue to increase.

 

 

Data Chart

Data Source	Theme #1: Increased confidence levels correlate with improved student participation rates	Theme #2: Engagement levels rise when the topic is relevant to students	Theme #3 Students Struggle to Reach Higher Levels of Thinking	Theme #4 Students benefit from time to formulate responses prior to discussion	Emergent Theme : Structured Small group discussions engage all students
Teacher Journal	-Many moments of “silence” after posing questions	-“Proud moments” occured often when the lesson was catered to the students’ interests -J Cole, music project lesson and journal encouraged the highest engagement levels	-No responses at times when posing higher order questions -Cold-calling resulted in “I don’t know” and students possibly being embarrassed	-Greater “Ah-ha” moments and insightful responses when given the chance to write opinions first	-I couldn’t stop smiling while I paced around the room- all groups were on task within the small groups, at that moment I felt proud to be their teacher
Classroom Observations (Project Presentations, Journal Discussions, Think-Pair-Share)	-Think-pair-share helps students create confidence to speak in front of the room -Small group projects / presentations ensure all students feel comfortable sharing	-Choice board project presentations in small groups- all were on task the entire time (genuine enjoyment, laughter, smiles) -High participation levels on journals which relate to the course and allow students to put their feelings into writing, which then is shared in small groups, then whole groups	-Speaking with a partner first can increase the chance of answering high order questions	-The journaling at the start of class connects the content to the students’ lives and the writing piece gives them time to really think through before sharing -Sharing with a neighbor helps them think through their opinions and get feedback before presenting to the class	-Each group followed each step within the small group that was screened on the board, I didn’t have to reprimand or remind a group to be on task -Each group member was presenting his / her project and giving / receiving feedback
Question Tracking (Tracking the students who participate and the frequency)	-The quiet, shy students participate the least, yet some are the strongest students academically	-Frequency of participation rates drastically increases when students are given a choice and are asked to answer questions that pertain to their own lives	-Decrease number of responses when posing higher-order questions	-The frequency of reluctant participants increased after “turn and talk” and writing time before sharing	-For this particular project presentation, 100% of the students were speaking
Classroom Discourse (Depth of the ideas exchanged)	-Most answers did not go “off track” and focused on clear response, instead of “risk taking” answers / questions	-Students most likely to “discover” when the topics relate to the real-world and their own lives	-Answers were either insightful and analytical, but more often were flawed analysis	-The time to write helped students think of more analytical- in-depth responses since they had more time to formulate ideas -There was more “discovery” after the time to write or speak to a neighbor was given	-Students were asking each other questions about their projects and learning from each other
Student Self-Reflection (After small group Discussions, end of quarter evaluation)	Data not received yet	Data not received yet	Data not received yet	Data not received yet	Data not received yet