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Knowing Your Students and Giving Voice To All Thoughts and Ideas • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
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Lots of low stakes opportunities to speak up at the beginning of the lesson - even asking about how their day is going helps with some quieter students. Engage quiet classes - teach without speaking for the first 5-15 mins (see Friday Gem #1) Small group conversations using silent debate on Teams. Good for the quiet girls or those who need more thinking time. Pause once you’ve asked a question. This allows all pupils to have an answer ready (good for neurodiversity). Share/prep questions in advance so pupils have thinking time before the lesson. Ensure questioning doesn’t encourage sound bite answers from students. Allow them time to fully develop and verbalise their response. Harkness method for purposeful pupil-led conversation that engages every member of the group. Music on quietly so there's some background noise for them to talk under with their neighbour. Assign a pupil/groups of pupils a focus/topic which they know they will be asked about so that they have an area of expertise to focus on in questioning. Ask a student to sum up their group’s ideas, rather than just give their own individual idea. Ensure questioning is democratic by using hands down (‘pounce’) to ensure that every student has been heard that lesson. If a pupil gets something wrong, praise an element beyond simply answering e.g. the process they used to get their answer/how they phrased it etc... Ask pupils to ask the questions rather than the teachers. Usually we get to know our girls through the day to day observations, trips, clubs etc... while this will be slightly hindered this term, we can use our colleagues’ knowledge and experience to find out at least something about our girls. We already know a lot about them. Quieter girls are often quiet because they lack confidence. Pick out those pupils and praise them, remembering something they have done in a previous lesson will be powerful - the child needs to feel attachment and belonging to the group; being seen by the teacher and by the group through peer feedback, enables them to feel like their contribution is valued. It's really important they get that peer validation so ask students to peer assess and respond to each other in class conversation. Being known is about being seen, feeling safe and feeling soothed so that you can reach out to your teachers to help. Harkness lends itself to this. Reflecting on our 11+ days - it is not about creating classrooms of extroverts but remembering the value of introversion too. Discussion around the fallout of two girls within a group of 8, which makes teaching difficult. Could have a conversation about psychological safety and the impact this has on the group.
