Saturday 29 October 2011

How To Ensure Student Participation in Classroom?

You’ve just finished with your lecture on an important topic and you feel you have delivered it well. But after you finish and turn to the class; the reaction of the students stun you. All you can see is blank stares, sleepy eyes and nil responses. This is what many teachers experience in their classrooms from time to time. 
 
It is not easy to engross every child in the lecture every time. To always keep them motivated is a task. You’ve just taught them a topic in depth and hope it will clear their concepts but nothing happens as you have thought. There might be reasons for students not participating in the classroom discussions.  The topic of presentation might bore them or some children might feel hesitate to answer, and some may even have a fear of speaking in front of the class.
 
There are many strategies that a teacher can adopt to double their reflexes in the class and to make them more pro – active for participation.
 
Make topics interesting- No matter what you may do to catch attention of students but sometimes they just aren’t interested in the topic.  Challenge is to make things interesting for the student by making connections to their lives and things around them.

Ask good questions- Even if students are interested in participating, the questions still need to be clear and direct. Good questions connect to the students’ prior knowledge and boost their willingness to speak.

Everyone answers – To make sure every student participates, teacher must ask all students to represent their answer in whatever manner they want to. For instance some may raise their hands and others who are unsure of the correct answer can discuss with other students and then form an opinion about it. Another method is to use thumbs up or thumbs down to express.

Clap if you agree – It is a fun way to make students participate in the class. Like for instance, if a student is answering a question verbally, you can ask rest of the students to clap once if they agree. Then if there is majority of clapping, you’ll understand if they are following or not.

True and false question cards – If initially students hesitate to get involve, then you can ask them to participate in the question –answer session by raising true and false question cards. For instance, students can vote their opinion for every student’s answer by raising true and false question cards. Red for false question card and green for true one.