TLAC’s Own Back to School: Part 2 (Importance of Student Participation)

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In a follow up to our last post on the Yerkes Dodson curve, TLAC CAO Erica Woolway reflects on a recent study that has important implications for the start of the school year.

This study came out of the Czech Republic in 2023 by Klara Sedova and Martin Sedlacek.

The researchers used two data streams to categorize over 600 9th grade students into groups – their internal motivation to perform well in their Czech Language class, self-reported on a survey, and the frequency of course-related vocal contributions they made in class. They used this information to create different groupings of students and then collected their performance data on the final assessments in the class. As expected, the group called “eager,” those who reported high internal motivation and spoke frequently in class, performed best. Also unsurprisingly, the group called “aloof,” or those who reported low internal motivation and who did not speak in class, performed the worst on the standardized assessment. Perhaps you’re thinking about students in your classes who match each of these profiles right now. What did surprise the authors were the ‘diligent’ and ‘chatty’ groups. The ‘diligent’ profile was of students who reported high internal motivation but who did NOT contribute vocally to class. Think of your students who seem to be attentive at all times, complete every assignment you give, but they do not volunteer. The profile of student affectionately coined ‘chatty’ were the opposite of diligent – those who say they were not internally motivated but who spoke quite often in class. Think about the student who perhaps rarely completes their assignments but DOES love to talk (about the content). The ‘chatty’ students actually outperformed the ‘diligent’ students on the final assessment.

A direct quote from the study: “Internal behavioral engagement does not sufficiently guarantee good school   performance. Inequalities in student talk can create uneven learning opportunities.” What they found is that even though the chatty students were less motivated, they outperformed their more motivated students.

The authors continue, “Our study also identifies students who are internally behaviorally engaged but stay silent as being at risk…The task for the teacher is to help these students to raise their voices and thus improve their learning opportunities.” This bears out in the data: highly motivated but largely silent students lag in achievement.

To echo our last post on this topic, this makes the use of Cold Call practically a moral imperative for us as teachers. If we only rely on students who are inclined to participate, we are enacting the Matthew Effect in our classrooms where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Cold Call ensures that we are asking ALL students to vocally participate and contribute in our classes, regardless of their internal motivation. It’s also critical that we set this expectation for Cold Calling early in the year – ideally from the first few days or weeks of school*.

We’ve long seen this phenomenon play out in our workshops – that those who participate in the most actively get the most out of our workshops. And once we Cold Call a participant (always giving them a chance to write their thoughts first and then using what they’ve written as an invitation to participate – “James, I love what you’ve jotted about X, do you mind kicking off the conversation for us?”), that participant is then much more likely to participate multiple times throughout the workshop. This is born out in the research as well, most notably in this study, where researchers at Northeastern found that more Cold Calling caused students to answer more questions voluntarily than in classrooms with low rates of Cold Calling.”

We’ve long cited the work of Atul Gawande in this area whose work became a key component of the World Health Organization’s Checklist and is captured in his book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. He found that having doctors and nurses introduce themselves during a pre-surgery briefing significantly reduced deaths and complications during surgery by more than half. The act of team members introducing themselves, though seemingly simple, had a powerful effect on team dynamics in the operating room. Gawande called this the “activation phenomenon” and it gave junior team members a voice, making them more likely to speak up later if they spotted an error. The same can be true in the classroom – we need to signal to students that their voice matters and encourage them to use their voice early and often in each class period and throughout the school year.

When we introduce Cold Calling in our workshops, we describe it as an invaluable tool for building “voice equity” in the classroom. The work of Sedova and Sedlacek confirm that this isn’t just about voice equity, but about educational equity as well.

Want to study Cold Call and other techniques with us? Join us in Miami on December 4-5th at our Engaging Academics Workshop!

*One potential mis-reading of this post would be that we don’t think silence is valuable in class. As Carl Hendrick has recently discussed, being able to cause a classroom to be silent for a period of time for the purposes of thinking is immensely valuable. We are not argue for the adage that “a noisy classroom is a learning classroom.” We are arguing that the learning environment must at times cause students to externalize their thinking via speaking or writing at the discretion of the teacher… and also to be silent at times.

 

 

 

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