One of my professors in graduate school stands out in my mind. He was a great guy. Really, he was. Unfortunately, he had some problematic habits related to questions and answers in the classroom. Some days he would ask a question and immediately answer it himself. Some days he would ask a question and wait for someone to respond and then would complain about the way the response was provided. Ultimately, we all spent more time in silence and listened to the professor talk to himself. He usually ended his monologue with, “I don’t bother them, and they don’t bother me.”
I think the professor might have benefited from the work of authors Todd Whitney, Justin Cooper, and Terrence Scott. Their book Creating An Actively Engaged Classroom provides a number of strategies that can be used to encourage student responses to questions. In the introductory matter of the book, the authors make their case for explicitly teaching students about the various response opportunities that may arise within a typical day. This makes sense. How can we expect students to provide responses if we haven’t made it clear what a response opportunity looks like and what kinds of responses might be appropriate?
Think about the different kinds of work being done in your classroom each day. There are individual assignments, small group assignments, large group assignments, and centers running at various times. If you ask questions during those assignment times, do you students know the appropriate way to provide a response? If not, perhaps it would be good to invest some time building response routines, so that students have more certainty in how to engage.
Over the next few weeks, we are going to look at a variety of response types provided by Whitney, Cooper, and Scott. I hope that you will find some of these useful in your own classroom.
Phil Harrison Coaching 