As teachers, we plan, we assess, we adjust and we do it all again; but sometimes even our best lesson plans, that seem to work so well on paper, just don’t work with students. What do we do when we create a great lesson but students don’t become engaged and don’t participate in a meaningful way? What do we do when an entire class doesn’t seem to be involved in our lesson? I believe this is the time we go back to the basics.
As I write this, we have just returned from a week-long Thanksgiving break, and as might be expected, students have not exactlly returned from the break as ready to learn over the next few weeks until Christmas break as teachers might want them to be. Students who previously worked well in groups and participated in discussion are suddenly not engaged, even to the point of not reading, doing research or completing tasks that lead to small and large group discussion and collaboration. The answer here is to back up and re-train students about how to participate in discussion.
Students must understand (or remember) that even though collaboration is done with the group, each group member is still personally accountable for his or her part in the collaborative group. If students are not taking this responsibility as a whole, then the research, problems or tasks must be broken down into smaller chunks and the idea of collaboration based on individual knowledge and contribution must be rebuilt. For example, if the discussion is going to center around reading certain materials or researching an idea on the Internet, the teacher may have to break down the reading or research into smaller pieces and assign each group member a piece. for accountability, each student might be asked to individually write a sentence (or two or three as needed) to describe their part of the research or reading. These sentences might be read to a partner or the group as a way of beginning discussion and then the entire group could use them to compile and refine a final product from the reading or research. The process of dividing the material among group members for research is a process that a group, well into a school year, would normally be expected to accomplish on their own but when engagement is lacking, the teacher may need to step in to push the task forward.
The “re-training” process may even involve the teacher stepping in to provide questions based on the writing of students that will stimulate the collaborative process and move it forward. A teacher might, for example, ask a student to explain a statement he or she has written to the group. The teacher’s expectation is that the student contributes to the discussion by answering and is individually accountable for the answer and its contribution to the discussion. If the student cannot or even if the student will not answer, the teacher may help with prompts or even explanations but the student will then be required to restate the answer to the group for discussion. This process “forces” student engagement while at the same time holding each student individually accountable for their part in the discussion.
No lesson, discussion or activity will always work well or even at all. When a lesson doesn’t work because of a lack of student engagement, the key is to break the lesson down into smaller parts and define each student’s role in the lesson. The goal of this process is to re-establish the norms for collaborative lessons with students and ultimately to get students back on track to organize and follow through with their own collaboration and discussion without having the details defined for them.