Last night, as I do nearly every Saturday evening, I attended Mass at my local Church. There were a few more people there than usual. When it came to singing The Gloria, I closed my eyes and sang and suddenly rememebered how it felt to sing when attending Mass at the Cathedral.
When I first moved to the UK, I didn’t know anyone beforehand. I knew about the Cathedral in town and so every Sunday, I would go there to attend Mass. When we sang hymns, it was beautiful because we had the Cathedral choir singing at the same time.
I am an introvert and, despite the fact I don’t like crowds, I used to hide amongst the big group of people attending Mass at the Cathedral. But when it came to any singing, I used to sing my heart out, my voice lifted with the voices of all the people around me and the angelic choir behind the Altar. It made me feel like I was a part of something. It made me feel welcome. It made me feel at home.
And it felt like that again yesterday, at Church. Maybe because I wasn’t fussing over my children, asking them to be quiet and, instead, I was actually focused on the service.
It got me thinking about my students and helping them to feel belonging in my classroom. Giving every student the chance to speak, to rehearse and to join in together can be a powerful way to help them feel they belong. This is why I have been thinking about rehearsal and helping all students participate (see this and this).
I have got all my students participating by answering questions on mini-whiteboards and I am now incorporating chances for students to rehearse and ‘think aloud’ in pairs. The next step for me is to get students to respond in unison through choral response.
I must confess, I have tried choral response before and it hasn’t worked very well. Because it is not a standard technique in my classroom, the instructions and the cue always seemed clunky and it took several minutes to get students to give me a one-word answer to a question. I dismissed it as being not worth it, particularly in my GCSE classes, where students seem more passive.
The feeling I got when I felt belonging as the congregation and I sang The Gloria yesterday, though, is unmatched. I want my students to feel the same way about learning in the classroom. I want them to feel at home and know that they are safe to respond to quick questions as a class. I want them to feel like we are all in this together.
As with Mass yesterday, the first step is attention. My students need to be fully attending to what I am saying and what we are learning about. Throughout my explanations, I ask questions to ensure students are attending. Pritesh Raichura calls these checks for listening.
Next, for key concepts, I move on to rehearsal so students have the chance to practise explaining it. Then, I check for understanding and we move on to practice questions.
But what about those lessons where I am teaching something that isn’t a big concept? For example, when I teach the names and functions of sub-cellular structures in a cell, my aim is for students to know these well so I can build on them in the future (although I don’t just teach it as a list of structures, see this for more on how I teach cells). For times like this, my plan is to use choral response to get all students saying the words and being able to answer simple questions.
At my school, we use ‘I say, you say’ to repeat words and practise pronouncing them, empowering students to feel confident when using those words during verbal questioning.
I want to take this further and start to ask questions that students can answer in unison. This is how I plan to use choral response:
Say: ‘All together’ to signal that the upcoming question will require a choral response.
Ask the question: The structure that controls the cell’s activities is the…
While asking the question, hold my hand out, palm facing students so it represents ‘Stop’.
When I want the response, turn my hand so it is flat, palm facing up, suggesting ‘Go’.
The reason I am planning to use gestures instead of a countdown is because it is quite different to the other cues I use such as 1..2…3…Show when posing questions for mini-whiteboards.
This one technique alone will not build belonging in my classroom but it can certainly provide an opportunity for those quiet, less confident students to feel like they are a part of the class, working together to participate.
Dr C's Science Classroom 
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