Protocols That Get All Students Talking in Class Discussions
Kristen Smith discusses the importance of intentional response protocols in class discussions, particularly in math classes. Observing a correlation between student participation in discussions and math mastery, Smith shifted her teaching approach to include strategies that encourage all students to engage. She emphasizes the importance of normalizing mistakes and breaking down stereotypes about who can excel in math. To achieve this, she uses sentence stems for agreeing and disagreeing, praises mistakes for their educational value, and provides scaffolding for students with learning differences or anxiety.
Smith implements various engagement techniques, including randomized calling, strategic warm calling, and popcorn out. Randomized calling uses a random picker to ensure fairness and diversity in participation, while strategic warm calling sequences student responses to enhance learning. Popcorn out is used for quick, short-answer answers in familiar topics. These methods balance the representation of student voices with the learning needs of the task. Smith's shift from hand-raising to intentional response protocols was gradual and required overcoming her biases, but it has significantly enhanced student engagement and mastery in her classroom.
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