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Pathway 3 Conclusion

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. Equitable discussions require intentional action from instructors, and as this pathway shows, there are many techniques that can help you include more students in classroom conversations, especially those students whose voices might otherwise go unheard or unappreciated. In this pathway, we learned a number of instructional moves that can help you bring more students into the classroom discourse. These include: 

  • Intentionally bringing students from underrepresented groups into the classroom discussion
  • Asking students from dominant groups to assume a listening role in some conversations
  • Tracking student participation to look for and address inequitable patterns
  • Increasing wait time to allow more students space to join the discussion
  • Cold calling students from different groups to bring more voices into the conversation 
  • Asking students to share ideas you have already seen in their pre-work
  • Moving around to elicit participation from different areas of the classroom
  • Inviting participation with both verbal and nonverbal cues
  • Using small groups as more comfortable discussion spaces for challenging topics
  • Building in opportunities for discussion outside scheduled class time
 

Active participation in class helps students learn, and the moves we’ve covered in this pathway can help you expand participation among your students. While the moves here help all students enter the classroom discourse, they are particularly important for showing students from traditionally excluded or marginalized groups that your classroom is a space where their voices are welcome and valued. 

 

We hope you’ll take some time to peruse the research and resources to help you decide which moves you want to use and how to adapt them for your own classroom context. And when you’re ready, our next pathway will help you develop materials and resources that will help students with different backgrounds, experience, and knowledge succeed in your classroom.

This article from the National Library of Medicine offers 21 Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity, with concrete tips like increasing wait time and giving students time to write before they speak. 

This tip sheet from Brown University focuses on fostering equitable participation and includes tips for understanding and breaking down barriers to student participation. 

The nonprofit IDEA shares strategies for helping students engage in dialogue with peers whose experiences and views may differ from their own.

This resource on promoting effective participation from the University of Waterloo offers guidance on being transparent about your expectations around participation and tips for teaching students the skills they need to participate. 

This tip sheet from the University of Michigan discusses how to include more voices through structured interactions. 

This tip sheet from Brown University includes ideas for fostering and assessing equitable participation at the start of the course and throughout the term. 

This Iowa State tip sheet on developing participation as a skill helps instructors reflect on their own definitions of “participation” and offers advice for communicating their expectations to students. 

In this Faculty Focus article, instructors from a variety of universities share their favorite techniques for drawing students into classroom discussion. 

A blog post from Carnegie Mellon University's Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation explores cognitive, social/emotional, and physical factors instructors should attend to in order to elicit participation from all students. 

IDEA shares why and how instructors should thoughtfully incorporate more interaction with their students outside of class.

Billson suggests that allowing for interruption in discussion may only reinforce the dominance of extroverted students in class, while non-interruption, conversely, may afford greater inclusivity by carving out space for quieter students to become more involved and voice their thoughts (1986).

Dallimore, Hertenstein, and Platt find that frequently using cold-calling may make the classroom more equitable for women as it helps increase voluntary participation for women, as compared to low cold-calling classrooms (2019). 

Marrs and Novak describe how assigning pre-work positively impacts student participation in areas such as improved classroom interactivity, quality and quantity of teacher-student feedback, retention, student preparedness for class, student study habits, and cognitive gains in biology college classrooms (2004).

Researchers investigated the experiences of LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual) undergraduates in a biology classroom that incorporated active learning (in contrast to traditional lectures). In active learning courses, small group discussions can be incorporated, requiring students to more actively engage with their peers and instructors. Researchers suggest that instructors consider instructional practices to overcome potential challenges to make their courses more inclusive (Cooper & Brownell, 2016).

According to a research review, assigning students complex, open-ended tasks that require active collaboration and deliberation with others can extend participation and foster an environment where students learn from one another (Webb, 2009).