Students and professors have the responsibility to foster spaces of open discussion
Nothing prepared me for the deafening environment of my morning lecture hall last fall.
My peers and I piled into a spacious classroom to take our seats five minutes before the lecture, starting various side conversations about potential weekend plans. The professor stands up front, patiently waiting for us to finish our chit-chats — this is the most talking these students will do for the next 50 minutes.
I sit about three rows back, blending into a sea of students, half of whom look completely disengaged with the lecture. They seem more interested in watching “Family Guy” on their computers or playing mobile games on their phones.
As the professor pauses to propose a question, a hushed panic fills the room.
Students side-eye one another, silently begging and pleading for some brave soul to answer. Some students freeze and avoid eye contact altogether, as if their stillness hides them from the question. An irked professor sighs and selects someone at random, spiking one unlucky student’s anxiety to levels reserved for first responders.
This is not an isolated incident. Regardless of major, class size, or classroom type, it’s becoming clear that current efforts to encourage classroom participation are ineffective at best and humiliating at worst. Educators often default to selecting students at random or “cold calling” to encourage participation, much to the dismay of the unlucky few selected.
“For professors who can tell someone wants to say something but is unsure, then that’s one thing,” said Dani Alegria, a senior and active participant in classroom discussions. “No one really wants to be embarrassed. I get the point is to get people paying attention, but I feel like there might be better ways to do that.”
Classroom participation thrives when professors provide ample structure and a collaborative environment for their classrooms, and when students learn to meet professors halfway to put themselves out there.
Alegria described an alternative to cold calls she witnessed in one of her upper-division classes, where the professor offers a list of pre-prepared questions for students beforehand.
“There’s a sign-up sheet with like ten questions and they [students] choose which question they want to answer,” Alegria said. “So if it makes people feel better that they can come prepared for an answer, they can.”
Students find reassurance in the safety net of structured discussion built within classes. Preparing in advance builds their confidence for more impromptu classroom discussions in the future. While some professors look for ways to make participation less intimidating through structure and predictability, others focus on reshaping the classroom environment itself.
One professor who tackles the issue of classroom silence differently is Dan Garrity, a professor at the College of Western Idaho. The commuter school restricts the amount of time he meets with students per week compared to his previous tenures at four-year universities. Ultimately leading to his students feeling less comfortable talking or asking questions in front of their peers.
To combat this and bring students out of their shells, he implemented the cultivation of what he describes as “classroom communities.” Garrity starts classes with a community-building exercise where students share “one cool thing going on in their life right now.”
The aptly named “what’s wonderful” ritual reportedly gives students not only the courage to speak up but a comfortable environment to do so.
“When you invest in community building in a classroom, all of your outcomes happen more easily, but better than that, more joyfully,” Garrity said. “If you’re courageous, 10 people will have the same question that you did, and they’re going to go, ‘thank God’,”
Garrity’s emphasis on comfort is starkly different from the awkward and uneasy silences lingering in BSU classrooms, but not every student believes comfort should be the only goal. Some students, like junior Dominic Mancini, see value in the sudden discomfort of cold calling, arguing it encourages non-participants.
“I think if you call on the wrong person at the wrong time, then it wouldn’t be such a good thing,” Mancini said. “But if you were to call on someone and they were to kind of branch out of their shells, then it’d be a good opportunity for them to start doing it more.”
Reflecting on his own experience with classroom cold calls, he offers non-participants some tough love.
“If I would get called on randomly and I got it wrong, it’d be embarrassing for me,” he said. “But I think trying to realize that it’s not that deep, and people don’t really care.”
Blunt but true. Unless a truly unshakable incident occurs, college students are likely not going to remember how someone blurted out ‘B’ when the answer was so obviously ‘A’.
Curating a participating classroom environment starts with professors, but it depends on students to buy in. Someone has to go first. Students must take that first step of just raising a hand — knowing someone else will exhale and thank God when you do.
