5 ways to boost classroom participation

5 ways to boost classroom participation

Do your students seem sleepy? Bored? Otherwise disengaged? They’re lack of engagement could be a sign that students aren’t learning. Stop this behavior in its tracks with these 5 tips:

 

1. Create a safe space for participation – Every teacher has experienced crickets after asking a question. Why didn’t anyone answer? It certainly can’t be because no one knew the answer. According to Learn NC, asking and answering questions in class can feel risky for students: “It is probably not “cool” to ask a question, even if the answer helps them with their learning.” In order to give every student an outlet of communication, a teacher must promote a sense of comfort so shy and can shine. If you design your classroom with multiple modes of communication, you can reduce some of the discomfort shy students face.
2. Turn a lecture into a conversation – It’s a mistake to speak at students when you can converse with them. How is the possible in a large classroom? Speak with them through an app like nClass to conduct pulse checks, quizzes and polls throughout the class so you can respond to feedback in real time.
3. Embrace technology – These days it seems impossible to tear students away from their smartphones and laptops, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Keep students engaged online through comment threads on topics discussed during the lecture–even make them anonymous through nClass.
4. Flip your classroom – If you’d like to promote classroom participation, sometimes you’ll need to focus instruction around it. By flipping your classroom–assigning lecture material as homework while bringing problem sets into the classroom–you’ll seamlessly orient the class toward participation. Not only is this format more engaging, Educause explains it allows teachers to detect and correct errors in thinking much earlier than in a traditional classroom.
5. Grade participation – Now that you’ve got your students talking, it’s time to measure their success. To keep students engaged as the semester progresses, it’s important to give them feedback. With nClass, you can record of classroom participation throughout your lectures, making grading a snap.

How do you boost classroom participation? Let us know in the comments.