At a teaching center I visited recently this quote was posted on a bulletin board: “A teacher’s constant task is to take a roomful of live wires and see to it that they’re grounded.” The quote was attributed to E.C. McKenzie.
Blog » Participation
Student Questions: Quantity and Quality Issues
Posted Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerIn their review of literature section, the researchers listed below summarize findings from a number of studies regarding student questions. “It is well documented that student questions in the classroom are very infrequent and unsophisticated.” Averages reported in six different studies range from 1.3 questions per hour to 4.0. According to this research, teachers ask [...]
How to Respond to a Student’s Answer
Posted Thursday, October 29th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerIn a chapter on discussion written by a teacher recognized as a master of the discussion technique, C. Roland Christensen walks us through the options a teacher has when figuring out how to respond to a student’s answer. He uses a “decision tree” (developed by systems researchers) to help him sort through the various options.
Christensen [...]
Overparticipators and Peers
Posted Thursday, October 8th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerI am discovering that overparticipators have been studied quite extensively in the speech communication field. Researchers there refer to these students who contribute more often than they should as “compulsive communicators” and those researchers have developed a “talkaholic” (now there’s some fanciful jargon) scale to determine if a student is. The scale relies on self [...]
Buying the Passive Role
Posted Thursday, July 30th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerLast blog about participation, at least for a while, I promise.
Here’s a view that, according to researchers, was repeatedly expressed during interviews. “Students, as consumers, have purchased the right to choose a passive role if they wish. To make them uncomfortable by requiring they participate in discussion was deemed an unreasonable expectation by many of [...]
Reasons to Participate and Reasons Not to
Posted Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 by Maryellen Weimer
I’m still working on updating my resources on participation and discovering useful findings. Here’s a study where 10 sessions of 16 different classes were observed and the teacher-student interactions recorded. More than half the students in those classes did not participate in any of the 10 sessions observed.
In response to survey questions, students said [...]
A Review of Participation Research
Posted Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerI’m preparing some materials related to participation. It’s given me cause to reread some of the research on participation in the college classroom. Although not particularly uplifting, I thought you too, might benefit from a brief review of some of the findings.
More on Questions and Participation
Posted Thursday, June 25th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerI’m still thinking about participation … even more convinced of the point in the previous blog … we need to be asking questions that do a better job of engaging students’ interests. I’ve also been thinking about how I don’t often prepare questions.
The Power of a Good Question
Posted Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerWe need to spend more time thinking about the questions we ask students and how they can do more than just test what students know (or don’t know). They can also hook students and pull them into our fascinating content domains.