Good morning class,
When it comes to participating in class, I think a lot of students shy away because they don't want to be wrong. A wrong answer comes with feelings of embarrassment and that everyone's eyes are on you. We all know that feeling... and it's not a good one. I think, ultimately, creating a comfortable environment where students are encouraged to take risks and make mistakes will only benefit student learning. It is also important to leave room as an instructor for multiple answers/methods to solving problems, and that comes with preparation. I want to dive into Practice #0: setting goals and selecting tasks and how using this method can increase student voice in the classroom.
When planning a lesson for students, creating clear, descriptive and detailed goals is extremely important to effective instruction. That process, in and of itself, can take a lot of time and collaboration for the instructor. However, once the goals are created, they need to be shared with the students and the students given an opportunity to respond to those goals. Thinking back on one of the videos from earlier this week, I like the idea of letting the students read the goals aloud to the class and in small groups, letting them add to or change the criteria so that it makes sense to them. This way, the students feel that they have a voice and are in charge of their own learning. They feel that they helped build some of the goals and criterial, therefore, they can achieve it. Another possibility for increasing student voice is by using exit slips. These are personal, low pressure tasks where the students can respond to the goals of the lesson or solve a problem that will show the instructor if the goals were met.
I've attached a video below that discusses honoring the voice of students in a mathematics classroom and setting goals and success criteria. I hope you enjoy!