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@ehud @academicchatter

re: getting students to participate.

I teach a larger class (50 students), but have learned a few tricks that get discussion going. I suspect these can be translated for smaller seminar classes as well. Here are a few things that I have found work well for me to encourage discussion and to broaden the set of who participates.

1. Most important: I insist on hands for answering questions when having a general discussion. I will often wait 15s-20s before calling on someone who has not answered yet. I specifically ask for "hands from people who haven't said anything yet".

2. I give a "check" on each day if a student participates in the discussion. Any answer, right or wrong, gets a check. Any question, stupid or not, gets a check. (There are no stupid questions.) They see me marking the list. Participation leads to extra credit at the end of the semester. [Several shy students have told me that they made "getting a check" as a goal.]

3. I hand out index cards at the start of the class. Before a question/discussion, I will sometimes take 30s to have them write their answer down on the index card. And then ask the question. This gives people time to formulate their answer. (Note: I never collect or look at the cards.)

4. I have 30s-1m in class discussion groups of 3-4 students in each group and then spend another 1m or so asking people from the groups to discuss what their group said - so someone can talk about group ideas, rather than putting themselves on the spot. In fact, if someone says "I think X", I say, "what did your group discuss about it?"

5. I end the class with a 5-10m small discussions followed by a 5-10m all class discussion on an "open question" that no one knows the answer to. I make it clear that these are open questions in the field, not "test questions to answer".

6. I start the semester with a specific set of calls that say "I know this stuff. I'm willing to help you learn it, if you want." And "If you want to learn this stuff, then you need to dialog with me. You should always be thinking a step ahead. 'what is he going to say?' And if what I say is not what you expect, then ask a question."

7. As part of that opening call, I include explicit statements about "You belong here." "Everyone can do well in this class." And I identify the things that have historically made the class particularly difficult, to help guide them not to make those mistakes.

8. As part of that opening call, I encourage them to come to "student hours". (I don't call my time set aside to meet with students as "office hours", after a student told me they avoided the office hours because they "didn't want to disturb me when I was working.") I tell stories about students who struggled and came and asked for help early and were able to turn it around. I also tell stories about students who struggled, ignored my notes saying "come talk to me", and asked for help after the final (at which point, there was nothing I could do to help). I ask what they could have done. One year, I got the class [50 students] to chant "Come to student hours". :)

9. As part of that opening call, I point out that I have taught this class for a decade and students who participate do noticeably better than students who don't. This is causal not correlational because I have seen students who were not participating start participating (which I suggested when they finally came to student hours after failing the first midterm) and suddenly started doing much better in the class. I point this causality out in my opening call.

10. One year, we were in a classroom that was very non-conducive to participation. (I knew this from a previous experience in that room.) So I started my opening class with "Last time we were in this room, everyone did 20% worse than usual because it was really hard to get people to participate. How can we fix that? Any ideas?" I made it a question that they were invested in, got some suggestions (some of which are above), and used them. They did really well that year. Actually, better than most other years.

I don't know if any of these may help you, but I've found they work for me.

Would love to hear other suggestions!