Weekly Questions: How do we bring out the voices of students who do not always contribute? What teacher and student moves shift the mathematical power from teacher to student?

 Essential Question: How do we find and feature all students’ competence?

Bringing out the voices of students who don't always contribute has been a huge question in this world of online learning. I have only seen the face of one student in my mentor teacher's second class, and probably only heard the voice of about 5 of the 25 or so students in the class. There are a few things that I am thinking about this week to maximize student voices, some overall and some specifically in the context of online learning. This week, I will present these in more of a bulleted format to help organize my thoughts.

1. Group Work. Some students love it and some students have yet to like it at all, but on the whole it seems the most logical way to give student voices the power. Particularly in the world of online, it's impossible for the teacher to be with every group at the same time, guiding and plugging up the airwaves, so to speak. Students have to be the ones bringing their thoughts to the forefront in these settings, obviously shifting some of the power to the students. The less the teacher has to involve themselves in the group, the more the students get the power. I particularly enjoyed how Featherstone et al (2011) described these moves, making sure the teacher only jumps in when necessary, and doing so in order to assign competence to students to bring out voices even more.
2. New Class Leadership. For me, this took the form of my leadership of a task in place of the teacher. Since I am a new face for the students, I think they were able to take to me with less of a risk involved in responding. However, I think this could be done with asking students to lead tasks they might be confident in. We were doing a short review task at the beginning of class where students were asked to identify which one didn't belong out of a group of objects. It seems totally plausible that a student be asked to guide the sharing of ideas as the class discusses why a box might not belong with the rest.
3. Presentations. This is somewhat like the others, but it's a case study shown in Dunleavy (2015). Students are asked to present their thinking to the class to launch a discussion about it. I think this shares the same possibilities as the leadership changes with bringing a student to the front.
4. Shuffle Quizzes. These keep popping up for me, and they seem to be best as a subset of groupwork. This ensures that groups are keeping all voices in their discussions by the teacher randomly asking one member to share out. Since students don't know which member will be asked to share their thinking, all students have to be involved in the discussion and prepared to respond.
5. Prioritizing Student Voices. While not specifically adding new voices to the table, ensuring that student voices are heard far more often than the teacher's voice helps shift the mathematical power and may encourage more voices. Leaving space for students to speak more often than before suggests statistically that you are more likely to hear from at least a few more students than you have previously.
6. Wait Time. Couple student voice prioritization with wait time and it will help bring new voices into the discussion. The same few students may ask to participate, but waiting for more offers will help new voices get heard as they prepare their thoughts.

Those are my main thoughts thus far, but I may revisit this post as I continue to come up with more ways to shift student voices to the forefront.