Figure 3.1 Engagement Resources at a Glance
ANNOTATE: Students highlight, underline, and annotate texts.
WRITE: Students write informally and formally alone and with peers.
MOVE: Students take action with hands, feet, or whole body to act out concepts, make choices, and deepen learning.
Structuring active participation for all students is especially important in classrooms with English learners. When we leave participation to chance, ELs and other students often sit silently, passively, in class. Silently listening may help ELs learn some listening skills in English, but it doesn’t help them actively use language to process learning and communicate ideas in speaking and writing.
Remember that active participation alone, without internal engagement, is simply compliance. Our goal is to have students collaborate, talk, read, write, annotate, and move in the context of relevant and meaningful learning opportunities. Students listen and read to expand their world. Students speak and write to collaborate, deepen their own thinking, and strengthen the power of their voices in the world. For deep engagement, always structure active participation in tandem with relevant texts, tasks, and topics!
Figure 3.2 shows the many ways this guide helps you structure active participation.
Figure 3.2 Active Participation Resources at a Glance
Let’s get started with a focus on peer conversations, the most important strategy for everyday excellence with ELs.
Why Collaborative Conversations?
If you want to start with the one instructional change that will have the greatest impact on ELs in your classroom while also benefiting every student, make it this: structure peer-to-peer conversations in every lesson every day.
Why Peer Conversations Are the Most Essential Strategy
Anyone? Anyone?
In the classic 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a history teacher asks a question to his class full of students who appear bored. “Anyone? Anyone?” he asks after each question. He gets silence. No student raises a hand. No student speaks.
It’s funny in the movie, but we who teach know this uncomfortable situation. Even if we are way more effective than the history teacher portrayed in the movie, we know what it’s like to ask our students a question and get . . .
silence.
Or, a few students raise their hands to answer. They are the same few students who always raise their hands, not the students who most need this lesson, not the ELs, not the students currently performing below grade level. The students we most need to reach are not engaged.
It’s humbling. It’s frustrating. What can we do?
Structure Peer Conversations
Peer conversation structures put all students in the active role of doing the thinking, talking, and responding to the tasks in our lessons. A peer conversation structure is any partner or small-group discussion structure (e.g., think-pair-share) that has peers discuss a question with peers instead of responding one at a time to the teacher in front of the whole class. See pages 54–61 for a go-to reference to the peer conversation structures to use every day.
With a conversation structure, we make one simple shift: When we ask students a question, instead of calling on individuals in front of the whole class, we have students discuss the question in pairs or groups. For example, if I want to ask students to make a prediction before we read a new text, I might traditionally call on three different students to make predictions one at a time. Now, making the simple shift, I have students discuss their predictions with partners using the think-pair-share structure.
Let’s compare the difference in student participation. See Figure 3.3 for a comparison of how students engage when you call on individuals in a whole-group discussion versus when you have partners discuss the same question or task.
Why Peer Conversations Especially Matter for ELs
The comparison in Figure 3.3 is relevant to any classroom with any population. Now if we consider the diversity in the classroom and imagine the class includes fluent English speakers, English learners, students who excel with the skills and content concepts involved in the task, and students who are struggling, what trend might you expect in who participates in each scenario?
Figure 3.3 Compare Approaches to Classroom Discussion
When a teacher asks a question to the whole class and waits for individuals to respond, who does the thinking for the task? Who does the talking? Who uses, and thus learns, the language for the task?
Who is silent?
When a teacher calls on individual volunteers, ELs are typically silent. Typically, students who struggle with the language, literacy, concepts, and competencies required by the task are the ones who choose to not participate. In other words, the students who most need to engage in this task to build their capacities are the ones who don’t actually engage. The ones who already “get it” are the ones who do.
It’s a classic case of the “rich” getting richer as the “poor” get poorer, although instead of economics the gap is in learning. Every time we ask questions and wait for volunteers, we widen the opportunity gap for ELs, for students who struggle with what we are teaching, and for any students who are hesitant to take social risks. We widen the gap between the students who already get it and the students who most need the opportunity to learn.
We can change this inequity by drawing names to randomly select students each time we call on individuals (e.g., with Popsicle sticks). This is an important strategy, but it alone doesn’t solve the problem that most students are silent and passive every time we ask a question and call on students one at a time. It’s a matter of simple math. In a class of twenty, if one student is talking to all, twenty are listening. Even with equitable participation and the teacher only talking as much as students, the average student speaks only 1/21 of the time, or 4.7 percent. In a class of thirty, that average drops to 3.2 percent.
This doesn’t even factor in the amount of time a teacher is talking (e.g., giving directions, modeling, explaining) and students are listening, or the amount of time the class spends working silently (e.g., independent reading, writing, or problem solving). Add these factors together, and it is no surprise that many ELs go through entire school days without speaking a word about any academic text, task, or concept in school.
This is a problem you can change with one simple shift in teaching: structure peer conversations instead of calling on individuals with raised hands.
Three Important Benefits of Peer Conversations for ELs
BUILD ORAL ACADEMIC LANGUAGE: To learn language, we must use language. Listening and reading help us build the receptive language of understanding. Speaking and writing help us build the productive language of expression. ELs who are silent in classrooms may get a high dose of receptive language, but without the opportunities to actively communicate via speaking and writing, they never get to apply the language they are using. Application is essential for deep learning. Daily opportunities to discuss academic ideas are essential for building academic language. ELs need daily opportunities to take risks with language, make mistakes, and