How many of your students are participating?

Is this the most important question a teacher needs to consider?

Something a bit different this week. I am going to share an activity I do with many of the maths departments I am lucky to work with. I suggest you do this individually first and then, if you find it useful, share it with your colleagues, perhaps in a departmental meeting. I also suspect this exercise will be useful for non-maths teachers and teachers of different phases, but I cannot guarantee it.

To complete the exercise, you will need a piece of paper and about 5 minutes. And at the end of this post, there will be an anonymous survey for you to input your answers. I will share the results in the next newsletter. Exciting!

Pen and paper ready? Okay, let's begin.

Part 1: The background

When a school approaches me for support, I always ask the head of maths or line manager what they think the areas for development are. It is often around stretch and challenge, curriculum design, assessment, or modelling. It is never - and I repeat, never - around student participation. And yet, in almost every school I visit, it is the student participation in lessons - or, more precisely, the lack of it - that is holding back teaching and learning. Until that is sorted, any other areas for development have to wait.

Part 2: What is participation?

In Teach like a Champion, Doug Lemov coined the concept of the participation ratio. At its simplest, the participation ratio is the number of students actively engaged in the lesson at any one time. To make this more concrete, I think it is useful to consider these three questions:

1. How many of your students are listening (and how do you know)?
Unless students are listening to our instructions, explanations or the answers of their classmates, everything we do is a waste of time. Now, it is obvious that the student talking to his neighbour during your explanation is not listening. It is also likely (although by no means a guarantee) that the student looking out of the window or doodling in his book is also not listening. But what about the child who is sat there, in silence, eyes fixed upon you? Are they listening? How do you know?

2. How many of your students are thinking (and how do you know)?
If we are sure that our students are listening in a given phase of a lesson, the next question is are they thinking? Again, consider the child sitting there quietly. Sure, they might be thinking hard about our instructions, explanation, the question we have asked, the task we have set, or the response of their classmate, but how do we know for sure? How do we know that they are not daydreaming, safe in the knowledge that we are unlikely to ask them as they are one student in a class of thirty?

3. How many of your students understand (and how do you know)?
Once you are sure that all your students are listening and thinking, the final piece of the puzzle is to determine if all students understand. Do all students understand the instructions, the explanation, the answer you have just gone through, or the explanation given by a classmate? They may smile, they may nod, they may not ask you any questions, but how do you know for sure?

Part 3: Five phases of a lesson

For the purposes of this exercise, I am going to break a lesson down into five phases:

1. The Retrieval Do Now / Starter
Many lessons start with questions on topics students have encountered in the past. The last lesson, last topic, last term, last year framework fits this bill, as do things like Flashback 4, Corbett Maths 5-a-day, and bespoke retrieval starters.

2. The prerequisite knowledge check
Here we also have retrieval questions, but these are linked to the current lesson. The prerequisite knowledge check is there to ensure you are building new knowledge upon solid foundations.

3. The explanation / worked example
Most lessons will contain some form of teacher explanation, followed by modelling, often in the form of a worked example.

4. The practice
Following the modelling, it is likely time for students to practice. This practice could involve a worksheet, a set of questions on the board, or an activity. The practice may be done independently or collaboratively.

5. The plenary
Some lessons will end if a specific way. Perhaps there is a summary of what has been learned, or a final check of understanding via some form of Exit Ticket.

Not all lessons will contain these phases, but hopefully, you can recognise some of them in your teaching.

Part 4: The exercise

Okay, over to you. Please could you copy the five phases of a lesson onto your piece of paper like this:

Now, please assign a letter based on the current participation ratio in each phase of a typical lesson, either H (high), M (medium), or L (low).

To help you decide, ask yourself this question:

How easy would it be for a student in this phase of the lesson to be either not listening, not thinking, or not understanding, and you not pick up on it?

If the answer is: no chance, I know all my students are listening, thinking and understanding, then give that phase of the lesson a H. If, however, there is a good chance that quite a few students might not be listening, thinking or understanding, then either an M or an L is more appropriate.

If you are doing this exercise with a colleague, assign your letters independently. But when you are both ready, put your pieces of paper between you and compare. Which phases of a lesson are your participation ratios similar, and is it for the same reasons? If they have put H for their Do Now, and you have an L, ask them how they get such a high participation ratio.

Part 5: Things I often see

I am in a fortunate position these days in that I get to watch lots of lessons each week. Here are some reflections about participation in each of the five lesson phases:

1. The Retrieval Do Now / Starter

Often the Do Now will play out like this: students are given 5 minutes to complete the questions that are on the board, writing their answers in their books. Once that time is up, the teacher chooses a student to answer Question 1. This answer is then either confirmed or corrected by the teacher, and the rest of the class is then expected to make appropriate corrections in their books (often in a green pen).

Is this a high participation ratio? Well, the question to ask is how does the teacher know how many students are thinking and really understand? Sure, they know something about the thinking and understanding of the one child who answered the question, but how about the other 29? Could they have got away with doing little to no thinking during the Do Now, safe in the knowledge they can now just copy down the correct answer? Might they now be confused and yet are reluctant to say? And remember, students specialise at Busy Tricking, especially during the Do Now.

Based on my observations, are you still happy with the rating you gave your Do Now? If not, please change it.

2. The prerequisite knowledge check

When the prerequisite knowledge check happens - and often, it does not - it usually plays out the same way as the Do Now, with at most one student being quizzed on the answer to each question. This is potentially even more problematic than the Do Now, because a lack of understanding about the concepts covered in the prerequisite knowledge check will have a direct impact on the likelihood of students understanding the new concept in the lesson that is built upon these.

Based on my observations, are you still happy with the rating you gave your prerequisite knowledge check? If not, please change it.

3. The explanation / worked example

In my experience, the explanation or modelling phase of the lesson is the one with the lowest participation ratio. Often it is teacher-dominated, with students' role being to sit there quietly and then copy whatever is on the board into their book when told - see my previous post on the Myth of Copying Things Down for more on this. How do you know students are listening, thinking and understanding in this scenario? But even when students are involved in the explanation and worked example, again it is typically a small number being called upon to answer questions whilst the majority can remain under the radar, smiling and nodding along.

Based on my observations, are you still happy with the rating you gave your explanation / worked example? If not, please change it.

4. The practice

There are two components to the practice phase. The first is the practice itself. If you are good at circulating around the room, you can get a good sense of whether students are engaging in the practice task. But what about when you go through answers? The image above is an example of something I see a lot. The teacher has gone through the answer to Question 1. This student got the question wrong, and has corrected it in green pen. I asked the student to explain to me why their answer was wrong and how to get the correct answer. They didn't have a clue. How many students in the class were in a similar position? I didn't know, but crucially neither did the teacher.

Based on my observations, are you still happy with the rating you gave your practice phase? If not, please change it.

5. The plenary

Some lessons do not have a plenary, and so long as there have been regular checks for understanding throughout the lesson, this is no problem. Lessons that end with an exit ticket which all students complete and the teacher responds to in the next lesson can have a high participation ratio. But I often see things like the example above. It was the last question the teacher asked in a lesson about congruency laws. Crucially, it was also the trickiest question of the lesson - a final epic challenge, as the teacher described it. Students were given a few seconds to think about whether these two triangles were congruent and then raise their hands if they had an answer. Only two students did. The first student chosen got it wrong. The second student chosen got it right. The teacher rounded-up the explanation given, congratulated the student, and then the class left the room. How many students were thinking hard about the answer? How many were listening to the student's explanation? And how many understood it? Your guess is as good as mine.

Based on my observations, are you still happy with the rating you gave your plenary? If not, please change it.

If you are doing this activity with a colleague or your department, now is a good time to ask them which ratings changed and why.

Part 6: The survey

I would be fascinated to know the final ratings you gave for each part of your lesson. This will enable me to learn what a large group of teachers feel are the key areas of concern in terms of student participation so I can make some suggestions to help boost it in future newsletters. So, I have put together a brief survey. All data is completely anonymous, and I will share the findings in the next newsletter.

If you had a few minutes to spare, I would be incredibly grateful if you could complete it:

And please share this post with other colleagues so we can collect as much data as possible. Thanks!

Three final things from Craig

1. Have you listened to the second episode of my monthly conversation with Ollie Lovell? This time we reflect on reasons students don’t understand, behaviour in schools, copying things down, and more!

2. My calendar is full up for this academic year, and September/October 2023, but I am now taking bookings for November onwards. So, if you are interested in a workshop, departmental support, or coaching, please check out this page

3. Have you checked out my Tips for Teachers book, with over 400 ideas to try out the very next time you step into a classroom?

If you found this newsletter useful, subscribe (for free!) so you never miss an edition, share it with one of your colleagues, or let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment. And if you have any questions about setting up your students on our Eedi platform, just hit reply!

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this, and have a great week!
Craig