Structures
of participation: effects on communication
Many
class activities take on patterns that guide communication in ways that class
members learn to expect, often without even being reminded. Each pattern is a participation
structure, a set of rights and responsibilities expected from students and
teacher during an activity. Sometimes the teacher announces or explains the
rights and responsibilities explicitly, though often they are just implied by
the actions of class members, and individual students learn them simply by
watching others. A lecture, for example, has a particular participation
structure: students are responsible for listening, for raising a hand to speak,
and for keeping comments brief and relevant if called on. The teacher, on the
other hand, has the right to talk at length, but also the responsibility to
keep the talk relevant and comprehensible. In principle, a host of
participation structures are possible, but just a handful account for most
class activities (Cazden, 2001). Here are some of the most common:
• Lecturing—the teacher
talks and students listen. Maybe students take notes, but maybe not.
• Questions and
answers—the teacher asks a series of questions, calling on one student at a
time to answer each of them. Students raise their hands to be recognized and
give answers that are brief and “correct”. In earlier times this participation
structure was sometimes called recitation.
• Discussion—the teacher
briefly describes a topic or problem and invites students to comment on it. Students
say something relevant about the topic, but also are supposed to respond to
previous speakers if possible.
• Group work—the teacher
assigns a general task, and a small group of students work out the details of implementing
it. The teacher may check on the group’s progress before they finish, but not
necessarily. Each of these structures influences how communication among
teachers and students tends to occur; in fact each is itself sort of an implied
message about how, when, and with whom to interact. To see how this influence
works, look in the next sections at how the participation structures affected
classroom communication for one of us authors (Kelvin Seifert) as he taught one
particular topic—children’s play—over a twenty-year period. The topic was part
of a university-level course for future teachers. During this time, Kelvin’s
goals about the topic remained the same: to stimulate students’ thinking about
the nature and purposes of play. But over time he tried several different
structures of participation, and students’ ways of communicating changed as a
result.
Lecture
The
first time Kelvin taught about children’s play, he lectured about it. He used
this structure of participation not because he believed on principle that it
was the best, but because it was convenient and used widely by his fellow
university teachers. An excerpt from Kelvin’s lecture notes is shown in Table
20, and gives a sense of what he covered at that time. In some ways the lecture
proved effective: Kelvin covered the material efficiently (in about 20
minutes), related the topic to other ones in the course, defined and explained
all key terms clearly, and did his best to relate the material to what he
thought were students’ own interests. These were all marks of good lecturing (Christensen,
2006). Students were mostly quiet during the lecture, but since only about
one-third of them took notes, Kelvin had to assume that the rest had committed
the material to memory while listening. The students quietness bothered him a
little, but as a newcomer to university teaching, Kelvin was relieved simply to
get through the class without embarrassment or active resistance from the
students. But there were also some negative signs. In spite of their courtesy,
few students lingered after class to talk about children’s play or to ask
questions. Worse yet, few students chose children’s play as a term paper topic,
even though it might have made a highly interesting and enjoyable one. On the
final exam few seemed able to relate concepts about play to their own
experiences as teachers or leaders of recreational activities. There was an
even more subtle problem. The lecture about play focused overtly on a topic
(play) that praised action, intrinsic motivation, and self-choice. But by
presenting these ideas as a lecture, Kelvin also implied an opposite message
unintentionally: that learning is something done passively, and that it follows
an intellectual path
set
only by the teacher. Even the physical layout of the classroom sent this
message—desks faced forward, as if to remind students to look only at the
person lecturing. These are features of lecturing, as Kelvin later discovered,
that are widely criticized in educational research (McKeachie & Svinicki,
2005; Benedict & Hoag, 2004). To some students the lecture format might
even have implied that learning is equivalent to daydreaming, since both
activities require sitting quietly and showing little expression. An obvious
solution might have been to invite students to comment from time to time during
the lecture, relating the topic to experiences and knowledge of their own. But
during Kelvin’s first year of teaching about play, he did little of this. The
lecture medium, ironically, contradicted the lecture message, or at least it
assumed that students would think actively about the material without ever
speaking.
Questions
and answers
Because
of these problems, Kelvin modified his approach after a few years of teaching
to include more asking of questions which students were invited to answer. This
turned the lecture on children’s play into something more like a series of explanations of key ideas,
interrupted by asking students to express their beliefs, knowledge, or
experience about children’s play. Kelvin’s preparation notes changes in
appearance as a result . Asking questions and inviting brief responses was
reassuring because it gave indications of whether students were listening and
understanding the material. Questions served both to motivate students to
listen and to assess how much and how well they knew the material. In this
regard Kelvin was using a form of communication that was and continues to be
very popular with many teachers (Cazden, 2001). But there were also new
challenges and problems. For one thing the topic of children’s play took longer
to cover than before, since Kelvin now had to allow time for students to
respond to questions. This fact forced him to leave out a few points that he
used to include. More serious, though, was his impression that students often
did not listen to each other’s responses; they only listened carefully to
Kelvin, the teacher. The interactions often become simply two-way exchanges
between the teacher and one student at a time: Kelvin asked, one student
responded, Kelvin acknowledged or (sometimes) evaluated. (Mehan, 1979;
Richards, 2006). Some of the exchanges could in principle have happened just as
easily without any classmates present. In general students still had little
control over the course of discussion. Kelvin wondered if he was controlling
participation too much—in fact whether the question-and-answer strategy
attempted the impossible task of controlling students’ very thought processes.
By asking most of the questions himself and allowing students only brief
responses, was Kelvin trying to insure e that students thought about children’s
play in the “right” way, his way? To give students more influence in
discussion, it seemed that Kelvin would have to become less concerned
about
precisely what ideas about children’s play he covered.
Classroom
discussion
After
several more years of teaching, Kelvin quit lectures altogether, even ones
interspersed with questions and answers. He began simply leading general
discussions about children’s play. The change again affected his planning for
this topic. Instead of outlining detailed content, he now just made concise
notes that listed issues about children’s play that students needed to consider
(some of the notes are shown in Table 23). The shift in participation structure
led to several major changes in communication between teacher and students as
well as among students. Since students spoke more freely than before, it became
easier to see whether they cared about the topic. Now, too, more students
seemed motivated to think and learn about children’s play; quite a few selected
this topic, for example, for their term projects. Needless to say, these
changes were all to the good. But there were also changes that limited the
effectiveness of classroom communication, even though students were nominally
freer to speak than ever. Kelvin found, for example, that certain students
spoke more than their share of the time—almost too freely, in fact, in effect
preventing more hesitant students from speaking. Sometimes, too, it seemed as
if certain students did not listen to others’ comments, but instead just passed
the time waiting for their turn to speak, their hands propped permanently in
the air. Meanwhile there were still others who passed the
time
apparently hoping not to speak; they were busy doodling or staring out
the window. Since the precise focus of discussion was no longer under Kelvin’s
control, furthermore, discussions often did not cover all of the ideas about
children’s play that Kelvin considered important. On one occasion, for example,
he meant for students to discuss whether play is always motivated
intrinsically, but instead they ended up talking about whether play can really
be used to teach every possible subject area. In itself the shift in focus was
not bad, but it did make Kelvin wonder whether he was covering the material
adequately. In having these misgivings, as it happened, he was supported by
other educators who have studied the effects of class discussions on learning
(McKeatchie & Svinciki, 2005).
Group
work
By
the time he had taught about children’s play for twenty years, Kelvin had
developed enough concerns about discussion as a communication strategy that he
shifted approach again. This time he began using a form of collaborative
group work: small teams of students carrying out projects on aspects of
children’s play that interested them, making observations of children at play,
reporting on their results to the class, and writing a common report about
their work. hoped that by giving students a common focus, communication among
them would improve. Conversations would deal with the tasks at hand, students
would necessarily listen to each other, and no one could afford either to
dominate talk excessively or to fall silent. In some ways these benefits did
take place. With a bit of encouragement from Kelvin, students listened to each
other more of the time than before. They also diversified their tasks and
responsibilities within each group, and they seemed to learn from each other in
the course of preparing projects. Participation in the unit about children’s
play reached an all-time high in Kelvin’s twenty years of teaching at
university. Yet even still there were problems. Some groups seemed much more
productive than others, and observing them closely suggested that differences
were related to ease of communication within groups. In some groups, one or two
people dominated conversations unduly. If they listened to others at all, they
seemed immediately to forget that they had done so and proceeded to implement
their own ideas. In other groups, members all worked hard, but they did not
often share ideas or news about each other’s progress; essentially they worked
independently in spite of belonging to the group. Here, too, Kelvin’s
experience corroborated other, more systematic observations of communication
within classroom work groups (Slavin, 1995). When all groups were planning at
the same time, furthermore, communication broke down for a very practical
reason: the volume of sound in the classroom got so high that even simple
conversation became difficult, let alone the expression of
subtle or complex ideas
REFERENCE
Educational
Psychology,Second Edition
,Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton
Copyright ©
2009 Kelvin Seifert
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