3 Easy Ways to Increase Classroom Participation

Hello everyone and welcome the this episode of the teaching behavior together podcast! I am so excited you are joining us today for this chat about increasing class participation. This is one of my favorite topics and I am going to share three of my go to strategies when we are trying to increase participation. 

All of these strategies fall under the umbrella of active student responding opportunities. These strategies are great for whole class or small group lessons where you are checking for understanding prior to a task or experiential activity.

The first strategy I have for you is called response cards. Response cards can take a variety of forms, I am going to talk about a couple of the more popular ones and you can tweak those to make them feasible for your classroom. The most popular form of response cards is white boards and dry erase markers. I like to either laminate or insert paper into those page protectors and have students use that as the white board. This can be more cost effective and you should be able to find those materials easily. 

When using response cards, you pose a question or problem and students answer or complete that problem. When you give the signal, students raise their boards. You glance around the classroom and gauge understanding. If the majority of the class was correct you move on, if you noticed the class has mixed answers or the majority missed the answer, you review that content. This allows for minute by minute feedback on the understanding of the lesson. This way you can determine if the whole class understands a concept instead of just the student that raised their hand. 

Another way to do this would be to print out ABCD cards and have multiple choice questions for students to answer. They would just hold up the letter that represented their answer. If you want to go even simpler, you can have students use the ASL alphabet and hold up their hands with the answers. All of these modes of answers are referred to response cards. This is an evidenced based strategy that has been shown to increase participation in the classroom immensely. 

Ok, moving onto to the next strategy, choral responding. This is another great strategy for increasing participation. If students know they will have to respond they are more likely to pay attention, formulate a response, and engage with the content. This is a pretty simple strategy to use, all you have to do is ask a question, give a signal, and tell all of your students to respond. You can listen for the general understanding of the concept you are teaching. Again, this is a great way to determine if you need to reteach a concept or review something with your class. 

Lastly, there is a strategy called number heads. This strategy involves pairing students up into small groups. You will have the students count off within their group. For example, if you have groups of five, students will count, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and each person will have a number. During your lesson or at the end of your lesson you pose a question that the group will answer to demonstrate their understanding. You can either call out a number for the whole class and the student with that number in each group share’s the answer for the group, or you can visit groups individually and call on different numbers to share. This strategy is great if you want to increase collaborative opportunities in your class and has been shown to improve academic performance and collaborative skills amongst your students.

Resources Discussed in this Episode
Free Behavior Intervention Guide
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