Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 36: Means of participation
Building ratio through questioning

The video Sadie McCreary: Means of Participation shows Sadie's AP Chemistry class at Eastern Guilford HS in Greensboro, North Carolina. Sadie is sailing along through the kind of lesson every teacher would wish for. Her students are willing and active participants. They're focused and productive. The lesson feels positive, rigorous, and dynamic. There's no downtime.

First, Sadie outlines a series of questions for students to answer “out loud with a partner.” As she gives these directions the room crackles easily and naturally to life. Students chatter away, on task, without hesitation; everyone's participating. Coming out of the Turn and Talk, Sadie Cold Calls students warmly and inclusively to check their answers. These follow-up questions make sure the Think Ratio is high, too: “The Celsius temperature scale is based on what, Matthew?” she says.

Matthew is ready for her Cold Call, observing that the Celsius scale is based on the freezing point of water, and, with a gentle reminder, also its boiling point. Sadie switches to Call and Response to reinforce the importance of freezing point and boiling point and her students seem to read her mind, responding crisply and in unison. She switches back to Cold Call to assess how well students have understood the Kelvin scale and yet again things run almost perfectly to plan—she's easily able to sample the room and involve any student. An eager hand-raiser in the front corner really wants to say his piece. Some teachers might need to rely on him to drive the conversation—his is the only hand up at the moment —but not Sadie. The eager hand-raiser waits patiently—and does not call out—as she Cold Calls a few more students and then asks for volunteers, which she gets easily. There's no awkward pleading for more or different students to raise their hands. When Sadie asks them to take notes, students update their tidy and organized notes seamlessly.

The lesson seems to gallop along and yet it seems relatively effortless for Sadie, standing there at the front of the room, smiling graciously.

Sadie's lesson is so successful because of her clarity about what to do when. For students in her class, there are a series of familiar routines for how content will be engaged and there is no ambiguity about which routine to use when. We call these routines for engagement the Means of Participation. Investing time in planning them and ensuring that which you’ll use when is clear to students makes you more likely to find yourself like Sadie: smiling in the midst of a class bursting with energy and productivity.

Routines are important. They “hack the attention economy in the classroom and help pupils learn hard things faster,” writes Peps Mccrea, and allow working memory to focus on the academic task rather than the process for doing that task, which has become familiar and habitual. On the 100th Turn and Talk when you say, “With your partner, how does the structure of electron shells help us explain the behavior of the noble gases? Go,” students have almost their entire working memory focused on the question and almost none on an array of potential extraneous distractions: Who am I supposed to talk to? Does she want to talk to me? Is everyone else going to do it? Should I be writing this down?

Cues are always the first step in any routine. “A routine,” continues Mccrea, “is a sequence of actions triggered by a specific prompt or cue that is repeated so often it becomes an automatic [or nearly automatic] response.” The cue starts the chain of actions for any habit. So Means of Participation involves framing clear routines for each of the formats by which students participate in your class and then signaling quickly, reliably (and often subtly) to students which format you'd like them to use. The cue sets students up to engage confidently, correctly, and with minimal load on working memory. If students participate in less than optimal ways—calling out answers when we don't want them to or not answering when we hope they will—it's often because we haven't clearly communicated the Means of Participation for a given question. Considering student responses through this lens can also help us to assume the best (see technique 59, Positive Framing). When students call out or engage in other behaviors we weren't expecting, considering whether our own framing of Means of Participation might have been unclear can be a helpful first step.

Watch again and you can see how intentional Sadie's cues are. Her “default”—the system of expectation for how to participate unless signaled otherwise—is that if she asks a question you raise your hand if you want to answer. There is always, also, the possibility of a Cold Call. This clarity about how to answer allows her to both take hand-raisers or Cold Call and to allow as much Wait Time as she likes. Students understand this because she has explained it to them. Occasionally, when she is especially eager for hands, she communicates that to her students by saying “Hands!” or raising her own. When she wants Call and Response, she says, “Tell me” and students understand that signal. When she says “With your partners,” everyone knows a Turn and Talk is coming, and they know exactly how to engage their partner. Because Sadie has established these cues to make her Means of Participation clear, the room quickly comes to life whenever she asks a question.

In many classrooms, however, teachers ask students questions without signaling clearly in what format they should answer. When students have to wonder Should I raise my hand? Can I call out? Was that question rhetorical? Should I write that down? you get hesitation, confusion, and lack of follow-through instead of the crackling intellectual energy of Sadie's classroom. You get classrooms where teachers ask very good questions, but the same few students hesitantly call out answers again and again. Or classrooms where the teacher will ask a question and then after a few seconds of apparent impassivity from students, answer it herself. As I pointed out in the introduction to ratio, it doesn't matter how good the question is if only two or three students bother to answer it. Means of Participation is the signaling system by which you switch clearly and transparently among the formats in which students can answer, like Cold Call, taking volunteers, and Turn and Talk so everyone answers productively and confidently.

The word “default” here describes the basic rules of participation that are always in place in Sadie's classroom unless she signals otherwise. These are: raise your hand, don't call out, and know that I may ask you your opinion via Cold Call.

The first step in MOP, then, is the rollout where you explain the default (and perhaps some of the other systems you'll use for participation) and why. It should be brief but compelling. Better to just describe the default and add short descriptions of the other formats later rather than talk it to death on the first day!

Ironically one of the best models I have of a teacher doing this is not a classroom teacher but a soccer coach, James Beeston. The soccer field is not the classroom, but I submit that there's a lot for every educator to learn from how James rolls out his expectations in the video James Beeston: Switched on at All Times. I've transcribed what he says below:

The main thing from tonight's session … It's going to require intensity from both a physical and a mental standpoint. I'm going to be asking you questions throughout, to check for understanding. Don't shout out the answer. That's a big, important thing because I want you to think about the answers that you're giving. If you know the answer and I go like that [raises hand], raise your hand. If you don't know the answer, that's OK. We'll work through it; we'll problem-solve together. Sometimes I might call on you guys even if your hand isn't raised, OK?, because the game requires you to be switched on at all times, so I am going to be calling on guys at times to make sure the focus is still there, all right, so we're locked in from the first minute to the last minute.

This “rollout” takes James about 45 seconds. He explains what he's going to do (“Sometimes I might call on you guys even if your hand isn't raised”) and why (“… the game requires you to be switched on at all times”). He tells them what to do when he initiates a routine (“… don't call out; I want you to think about the answers”). He sets his standards high but he also makes it safe to struggle (“We'll work through it; we'll problem-solve together”). And then he immediately begins practicing what he preaches so players understand that he means it because they start building the habit right away.

In fact a second video of James, James Beeston: How Can We Use This?, shows him questioning his players a bit later (after they've practiced for 20 minutes or so). From a ratio perspective—how many participants think about his questions, how much of the time, and how deeply—it would be hard to do much better.

Sadie had a very similar rollout on her first day to set up her default. Then she layered in new routines and their cues using a chart like the following one, which captures some of the common routines students use to participate in class, the cues a teacher might use to signal them and some other factors to consider.

To establish this technique in your classroom, your might start by making a chart like the one above. Get specific as you plan about your expectations and cues. Finally, craft and practice your rollout. Read more about how to build a procedure into a routine in technique 50, Routine Building.

Once you've established the procedures, planning for your MOP can become part of your lesson preparation (see technique 3, Delivery Moves). To maximize engagement and flow, you'll want to be intentional about varying approaches. We see Sadie do this in her chemistry lesson. Cold Call into Turn and Talk, then some volunteers and a bit of Call and Response. After that a bit of Everybody Writes.

When I spoke with Sadie, she shared this guidance about how she plans for MOP: “On my best days I plan for it in advance. If it's a meatier question then I always have students write or Turn and Talk first to increase participation, then I circulate while they are talking and warm call a few students [I call this technique “pre-call”]. If it's a question that is easy enough to ask out loud and I want to gather data in the moment by calling on specific students, then I Cold Call students who are typically high or medium or low to get a sense of whether they understand the concept. For something really simple that I want all students to quickly remind themselves of—choral response and we all say it aloud.”

Frontloading

In a recent blog, London-based science teacher Adam Boxer shared an idea he called “frontloading” to get the most out of Means of Participation. His reflection started with the observation that even if you diligently communicate the desired Means of Participation, some students still may not hear it if it comes at the end of your directions. He gives this example:

“What is the word equation for photosynthesis? Please write your answer on your mini-whiteboard and hold it face down until I ask you to show me.”

“On the face of it, this is a good instruction. The question is clean and clear and the MOP is established in terms of how the students will write and present their answer,” Boxer writes, but he adds that you may still end up with students raising their boards before you have asked them. “The second you ask them the question, they start writing down their answer (or at least thinking about it) and they are no longer listening to you. It's not that they are being defiant or messing around, they just didn't take in the instruction. And again, it's not because the instruction isn't clear … it's a property of its placement.” He suggests frontloading—placing the Means of Participation at the beginning of the direction so that students hear it first and process it before they start thinking about the question.

“OK, in a second I'm going to ask a question. Please write your answer on your mini-whiteboard and hold it face down until I ask you to show me. What is the word equation for photosynthesis?”

If routines aren't firmly established, he suggests using a script more like this to build reliable follow-through:

“OK, I'm going to ask a question and you are going to one [hold up a finger], write your answer on a mini-whiteboard; two [hold up two fingers], keep it face down; and three [hold up three fingers], show me only when I say.”

You might even ask students to repeat that back to you if you're still getting routines built, Boxer suggests.¹⁷

Here are some of his examples of other frontloaded Means of Participation phrases:

“By putting your hand up in the air, I'd like you to tell me …”

“Without calling out, can anyone tell me …”

“In silence, you are going to …”

“I'd wager ten quid that works better every time,” he notes.

Online Lessons: Means of Participation Icons

The shift to remote teaching posed a unique set of challenges to teachers' working memory—challenges my team and I felt ourselves when we led trainings online. Like so many teachers, we often found ourselves using a presentation to structure our session. As we presented one slide we were often thinking of what the next slide covered, and trying to assess how our participants were responding to the session—reading their expressions, toggling over to the chat to field their questions or respond to their comments, prepping a breakout room. The new setting and the addition of technology resulted in working memory overload and it was shockingly easy to forget how we wanted participants to engage in the content of each slide. Even if we'd planned our Means of Participation we sometimes forgot to use what we'd planned at the right time and in the right way. Or we remembered but struggled to listen and respond as well as we could have. Our solution was to use icons to make our Means of Participation easy to remember so our working memory could be focused on participants.

We developed a set of icons that we placed at the bottom of our slides to remind us of the Means of Participation we'd planned:

Suddenly we didn't have to strain to remember what participation moves we'd planned. With our working memory free we could listen far better to the discussion and think more deeply about the content. We shared this idea with several schools and watched them do remarkable things with it. Memphis Rise, a school in Memphis, Tennessee, for example, standardized the icons across the teaching staff and gave teachers a glossary of the terms and guidance on how to use them well. Here's a page from that document:

Source: Memphis Rise Academy, Memphis, Tennessee.

In the video Madalyn McClelland: Maps, you can see not only how Madalyn uses the icons to guide her own teaching but how to make participation transparent to students.

Interestingly, this is an idea that can also be productive in the classroom. One of my favorite schools in the UK, Torquay Academy in Torquay, has similarly developed a set of icons that they share with students. They also share the intent of the teaching techniques they represent so that when they see the “Wait Time” icon they know that the purpose is to think deeply and not rush, and so forth.¹⁸