In our work as teacher educators, we’ve found that novice educators often have misconceptions about what good teaching looks like, and this can lead to a lack of awareness of what students are actually doing and learning. For instructional leaders working with new teachers, this can be a critical area of focus.
One of the hardest habits for novice teachers to break, for example, is that of the traditional Q&A, where a teacher asks a question and calls on a student to answer. This is the type of questioning reminiscent of that old scene in the Ferris Bueller movie, where the teacher asks a stream of questions, each followed by the familiar solicitation for responses, Anyone? Anyone? And then the teacher proceeds to answer his own question.
Often, Q&As that begin with the question, “Who can tell me . . . ?,” end up becoming a guessing game between the teacher and the students: Who can tell me? No, try again. Anyone else? No. Who else? Eventually, one student answers correctly, and the rest of the class breathes a sigh of relief, if they are even paying attention anymore.
If we could start anywhere to help new teachers improve their effectiveness, it would be here—in the way they assess student learning during their lessons. The act of doing this is known as formative assessment. We know that formative assessment, the consistent monitoring of, and acting on, evidence of student understanding, leads to the type of responsive teaching that can accelerate student growth. This isn’t just our opinion; there is a wealth of research supporting formative assessment as being one of the most effective practices in boosting student learning.
So how do we support teachers in moving beyond the traditional Q&A format and toward practices that engage all students? We give them the tools to remember to stop and assess learning as it is happening—what we call Total Participation Techniques. These tools enable teachers to monitor student understanding multiple times throughout every lesson. In contrast to the traditional Q&A approach, they also foster active participation and cognitive engagement from all students at the same time.
There are two tools that provide a strong foundation for understanding how the use of Total Participation Techniques can transform classrooms: The Ripple and The Cognitive Engagement Model.
If we could start anywhere to help new teachers improve their effectiveness, it would be in the way they assess student learning during lessons.
The Ripple: Calling on Someone Should Be the Last Thing You Do
The Ripple is a model for structuring student interactions in a way that provides all students an opportunity to respond to a prompt. Picture a ripple in a pond. It starts out as a central dot that ripples out in concentric circles. What if our classroom interactions followed a similar pattern?
The first step of the Ripple instructional approach begins with the initial dot, represented by each student’s individual response in the form of a quick-write or some other visible form of an answer. This first step is the most important step, because it gets all students involved at once. The second step is to have students work in pairs or small groups to share their responses. Finally, the third step, when time allows, is to bring the content from the students’ quick-writes and peer conversations to the whole class.
As you can see, with the Ripple, calling on students becomes the final step in the questioning sequence. At this point, Who can tell me? or Who wants to share? is a perfect way of “rippling out” the topic, since everyone has had a chance to formulate and consider their response. The Ripple is a simple metaphor that begins with the understanding that calling on someone should literally be the last thing we do. That doesn’t mean teachers can never call on students; it simply means we should save the act of calling on someone until all students have demonstrated their attempts at understanding the target content.
Sounds simple, right? And yet it’s very hard for new teachers—and even veteran teachers like us—to remember to use the Ripple strategy. Why? Because every fiber of our teacher-being wants to go back to the modeling we experienced during the countless hours of classroom instruction we received, first as students of K–12 classrooms and later as college students studying to be teachers. It’s not natural to slow down and take time to ensure students have space to process and deepen their understanding of what they’ve learned. Unfortunately, if we don’t do this, it’s very easy to lose the learners and our own understanding of what they’ve learned.
In short, the Ripple increases student engagement with the content—but it’s a technique that new teachers especially need intentional support and encouragement to execute consistently. When they get that support, they’ll gain insights into the role of formative assessment and how they can be more responsive to learners’ needs.
The Cognitive Engagement Model: Getting to Higher-Order Learning
The second tool for understanding how Total Participation Techniques can transform learning is the Cognitive Engagement Model. This is less a teaching strategy per se than a lesson planning and evaluation model. It helps teachers and observers categorize student learning across two indicators: the level of student participation and the level of cognitive intensity required to participate in the activity.
By plotting these levels across four quadrants, the Cognitive Engagement Model helps teachers assess the impact of their lessons, whether in hindsight or at the design stage (see fig. 1). The goal for student learning is that at least part of every lesson can be found in Quadrant 4.
The Cognitive Engagement Model can be intimidating at first, particularly for new teachers, but it isn’t complicated. Instructional leaders can use it to support new teachers in reflecting on their practice and its effect on student learning. We have seen teachers make great strides in their craft through this model. But using it does take time, which raises a crucial point of emphasis: All teachers, but new teachers in particular, need structured time for self-analysis and group debriefing. For tools like the Cognitive Engagement Model to work, this time must be built into administrative and instructional coaching schedules.
To use the Cognitive Engagement Model, instructional leaders can start by asking new teachers to video record a lesson, giving them technical support and guidance to do so. The next step is to use the video to look for evidence of student learning and participation levels using the Cognitive Engagement Model. First, let teachers self-assess the components of their lesson by describing lesson activities and aligning them to the appropriate quadrant (see fig. 2). Then engage them in a supportive discussion about what they’ve found. (In schools where strong teaching communities exist, this discussion step can take place in trusted group settings.)
Use the completed model as an opportunity to explore possibilities for improvement, recognizing that it’s not uncommon to miss opportunities to get to Quadrant 4. We can all find ourselves asking a Quadrant 3 question that could have easily been tweaked to become a Quadrant 4 prompt. Approach these moments by using questions rather than criticisms. How might you have modified this question so that all students could have participated? How might you have modified the activity to make them all think more deeply about the topic? Let the teacher generate the ideas.
In this way, the Cognitive Engagement Model can help teachers reflect on their practice and understand, at both a practical and conceptual level, the shifts they need to make to increase engagement and learning.
From Teacher-Centered to Student-Centered
Using Total Participation Techniques ensures that real student learning is happening alongside the teaching. These techniques can take the focus off our own preoccupations as educators and place it instead on finding sources of evidence for student learning. This is especially important for new teachers, who can easily become so immersed in filling their new role as “teacher” that they lose sight of how students are experiencing the lesson.
We remember our early years as teachers. The tasks we focused on were basic and traditional. They included things like delivering the content, making sure we were following curricular timelines, keeping pace with our teacher colleagues in the same grade level, and—yes—asking “Who can tell me?” all in an effort to cover the necessary material before the end of the year. During those first years, we focused on ourselves and what we assumed we were supposed to be doing as teachers. Gradually, as we became more seasoned in our teaching, our focus began shifting from our teaching to our students. What were they learning? Did it even matter what we were teaching if, in the end, they learned little or weren’t paying attention?
But we don’t have to wait for new teachers to make this shift on their own. Through methods like Total Participation Techniques, instructional leaders can help new teachers more quickly become aware of, and attuned to, evidence of student learning and engagement and the impact of their practice.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ Do you agree that new teachers often fall into bad instructional habits based
on the ways they were taught? What are
the best ways to disrupt such habits?
➛ How would you describe high-cognition
learning activities? How can instructional
leaders better support new teachers in increasing high-cognition time?
➛ As reflected in this article, what are key
differences between teacher-centered
and student-centered instruction?
Appointment Agendas: Mixing Up Peer-to-Peer Discussions
As shown in the Ripple method, having students meet with a peer or in
small groups can be a key component to increasing participation and learning. One tool that we regularly use to help students process what they are learning alongside their peers is the appointment agenda. The appointment agenda allows for mixing up how students would typically pair up on their own.
Having students complete their appointment agendas, simply a list of daily time
slots by the hour, is often the first thing we do at the start of every semester as university professors. The appointment agendas allow us to pair students, or get them in even-numbered groups, by simply calling out a random time (it does not need to match the actual time of day). We ask students to meet with the person whose name is in that designated time slot. To make larger groups, we simply ask pairs to merge with other pairs nearby.
To complete the appointment agendas, students are asked to stand up and find
someone with whom they are not sitting. Each student then writes their name on the other student’s 8:00 a.m. slot. They then move on to find the next person to fill in the 9:00 a.m. slot, and so on until all of their slots are filled. (We ask them to only have a peer’s name recorded once on their agendas.)
Inevitably, when most students have their slots filled, there will be a few students
who have empty time slots. To find everyone pairs, we’ll ask everyone to sit down. We then call out the times for each slot, sequentially, and ask students to stand up if they need an appointment for that slot. If two people stand, they become pairs
for that slot. At this point we can break the rule of people not having more than one person represented on their agendas, or we can make groups of three for the odd numbered student who still doesn’t have a partner.
Once the appointment agendas are completed, we simply select a random
time slot and ask students to meet with the person designated for that time. For example, we might say, “Please take your quick-write and meet with your 2:00 p.m. appointment. Share what you wrote and talk about it. Then talk about what you think other students may have written. What are other ways to answer this question?”
Appointment agendas are a simple but effective tool to support whole-class
participation and intellectual processing. As such, they support the formative assessment emphasis that is at the heart of Total Participation Techniques.
— Pérsida Himmele & William Himmele
Total Participation Techniques
51 easy-to-use, classroom-tested techniques to motivate students to participate in learning.
