When SCOTAY Came to my Class
By Natasha May
Have you ever posed a question to your students and received silence, no matter how long you waited and gave them time to think? Did this discourage you from trying this again?
This has been my experience in a math course I’ve been teaching this year. I’ve had similar experiences before, particularly in large classes, but without fail, there was always at least one student who was willing to speak up to offer an answer or ask a question. In my small class of 30 this year, there were a few students who would answer questions, but they weren’t quite as eager as those students I had engaged with in my large classes. They would offer their answers reluctantly to save me and their classmates from the silence. I am patient and the silence didn’t bother me so I outwaited my students to encourage them to practice their oral communication skills. This is one of the course learning outcomes, that students will communicate mathematical ideas with precision and clarity in the form of oral presentations. This is assessed in the tutorials, where the group is even smaller. As a course instructor I need to support this course learning outcome and so I continually encourage them to practice their oral communication skills in my class where they aren’t being graded.
Interaction between students is also something that I design into my classes. I had the ideal classroom for this, with round tables and moveable chairs. However, my students were also reluctant to engage with each other and practice their oral communication skills with each other. Perhaps I was intimidating them and discouraging them from interacting with each other because I was rotating from table to table to observe and check.
As you can imagine, this challenge weighed heavily on my mind. It isn’t like I hadn’t experienced similar reluctance for participation in other classes I taught, but it felt different this time, harder.
I expect that the clarity in which I am now able to explain and pinpoint what was challenging me in my class is because of the very program that helped me overcome this challenge, the Student Consultants on Teaching at York (SCOTAY) Program. SCOTAYs, or Student Consultants on Teaching at York, are undergraduate students with a keen interest in teaching and learning and the enhancement of the student experience. The SCOTAYs role is to provide a low stress opportunity for faculty to reflect on their teaching practice through the eyes of a student. It turns out this is exactly what I needed, an outside student perspective for what was happening in my class so I didn’t continue to intimidate my own students, and more effective for me, the opportunity to reflect deeply on my teaching, my experiences and discuss this out loud with my SCOTAY.
During my initial meeting with my SCOTAY I started to really reflect on my experiences in my class and came to the realization that I thought my students were very shy and reluctant to participate and I wanted to know what I was doing, or not doing, that was causing this reluctance, or what I could do in the future to encourage participation. I appreciate that my SCOTAY asked me what I wanted her to observe during our preliminary meeting, and moreover, asked very helpful and specific questions to ensure she knew exactly what to observe. This preliminary meeting was really helpful for me in reflecting on my teaching practice in this particular course and thinking of ways to encourage my students to participate.
During the observation, my SCOTAY sat with my students and interacted with them, observing both their behaviour and my own. After the class, we met to discuss her observations. The feedback was positive. From my SCOTAY’s perspective, I give students enough time, they understand what they are being asked to do and do it, they simply seem to be too shy to share with the whole class, so finding other ways for them to share will help. Through our conversation, I realized that I wasn’t employing some of the activities I use in other classes because of my students’ reluctance to participate. I hadn’t wanted to try something risky in case they didn’t participate, but I realized in that moment this might be exactly what is needed.
When I designed specific activities for my students to engage in together and used anonymous online tools, like Padlet, there was more interaction and participation. This gave me confidence to push a little further so I broke them up into random groups so they could work with classmate they may never have talked to before and used active learning strategies like jigsaw and carousel to encourage interactive problem solving and oral communication, as well as collaborative learning.
I highly recommend the SCOTAY program to any instructor. To enroll in the program as an instructor, here is the link to register.
About the Author
Dr. Natasha May is a contract faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics (Science) who has taught a variety of mathematics courses, from problem solving, communicating and teaching mathematics to mathematical logic and discrete mathematics for computer science and information technology.