Participation and Self-Moderation Techniques
Encouraging students to develop skills at self-moderation can help them become better at participating in class and self-assessing whether they could participate more or become more cognizant of the space they’re taking up. Below are some common examples of techniques used to encourage student self-moderation. These techniques also help relieve the burden on faculty to call on students for their own participation.
The Token Metaphor
Share with the class the metaphor that every time they enter class, they are given 3 invisible tokens. Each time they speak (ask a question, offer an idea, etc.), they metaphorically hand over a token to the professor. Halfway through class, ask the students to consider:
- How many tokens do I have left?
- Did I use mine all up in the first half hour?
- Do I have them all left?
*This exercise was introduced by Dr. Gada Mahrouse
Reflection Exercise: Student Participation Styles
Ask your students to reflect on and interrogate their own participation style. This exercise can help students understand their participation as a spectrum rather than a binary of participation and non-participation.
- Individually, ask students to assign the following participation styles, ranging from “less often” to “more often,” based on their comfort with and practice of these techniques. Such as:
- Asking questions;
- Offering ideas;
- Giving recommendations;
- Listening;
- Taking notes; and
- Talking with peers during breaks about ideas in class.
- Have students share their own participation spectrum in groups to discuss their different styles and how each of them might benefit or learn from their peers differently through those styles.
- As a class, discuss how there are a variety of reasons why people choose or are more comfortable with certain participation styles (e.g. navigating experiences of oppression and harm in the classroom, being neurodivergent, having anxiety, or being tokenized).
- Emphasize that the classroom can be a space where we choose to expand and try things out and that we are here to collectively learn with and from each other.
- Ask students to try to challenge themselves by individually coming up with a participation goal for their semester.
Participation Self-Assessment
Another strategy that can be useful is participation self-assessment, where students grade themselves based on a participation rubric (sample) [PDF] that models and outlines different ways that participation may be assessed in a class. This exercise can be done at the start of term, at the mid-term, and at the end of term to help students track their own progress through their participation, and can also be used as a grading rubric for participation assessment in the course.
Facilitation Techniques
Collective
The following strategies can be used to encourage collective facilitation of class through co-creation and collective accountability.
Creating Over Criticizing
While students appreciate opportuniti