Before monitoring for equitable participation, students should also be scaffolded into understanding ways to participate in discussion. By providing students with support in engaging in discussion, this helps facilitate more equitable participation from the beginning.
Sentence stems students can be provided with when engaging in a critical conversation:
Teachers could print these out and hang them on a wall in the space they’re facilitating in. Teachers could also ask participants to come up with additional sentence stems to add. Teachers could bring these four in as examples and then ask participants to create additional ways to respond within the group.
Another way to scaffold students is to encourage the use of hand signals to let students nonverbally participate or indicate how they’d like to participate. The video below (1:55) from Edutopia shows five hand signals teachers can introduce to students. Teachers can also build on this by using this video as a starting point and asking students to brainstorm hand signals they would like to incorporate during discussions. The hand signals are especially helpful for synchronous video discussions.
In addition, if students are reading texts ahead of time, scaffolding the text will also prepare students to engage in group discussion. Teachers can: