Pathway 3: Including More Student Voices in the Conversation
Pathway 3: Including More Student Voices in the Conversation
Equitable classrooms include a variety of viewpoints and voices in class conversations. Encouraging students from all backgrounds to contribute to the classroom discourse takes a little extra work but brings innumerable rewards. In this pathway, we’ll look at ways to get more students actively engaged during class, whether the setting is the smallest seminar or the largest lecture.
Pathway Steps
Classes can easily fall into a routine where the same students talk again and again, leaving less space in the discussion for new voices and viewpoints. However, instructors striving to create inclusive classrooms intentionally find ways to bring these missing voices into the conversation.
Inclusive instructors looking to cultivate equitable participation think carefully about the ways they structure discussions. One way instructors include a variety of voices in the classroom discussion is by carefully choosing the students they call on to participate.
Intentionally calling on students from different groups helps create equitable discussions, but what happens when students don’t raise their hands? Todd Rakoff uses an age-old technique: “cold calling.”
Another technique to bring different student voices into the conversation is “warm calling,” where the instructor chooses whom to call on (rather than inviting raised hands) but does so knowing that the student is already prepared to contribute to the discussion.
Instructors can encourage different students to participate not only by calling on them directly but also through physical proximity.
Engaging in partnered and small-group work gives many students a chance to join the classroom discourse at the same time.
Participation in a course is not limited to the time spent in the classroom each week. Providing students with multiple avenues for sharing their thoughts and questions outside of scheduled class time brings more students into the conversation, particularly those who feel uncomfortable speaking in large groups.
Complex factors influence which students feel comfortable speaking up in your classroom and when. Although some of these factors are outside your control, there’s a lot you can do to expand participation.