Have you ever called on students to ask them for an answer or explanation and gotten the feeling that they were just repeating what the earlier students had said? I’m guessing you have.
You probably wished that students would state their own thoughts so you had a better idea of what they were thinking. This issue is problematic, because it gets in the way of having authentic and meaningful conversations.
With this issue in mind, it’s worth exploring why it happens. Check out the 2-minute video below as I believe it will add an interesting dimension to the conversation.
As the video mentioned, you just watched a brief example and explanation of the the Asch conformity experiments by Dr. Solomon Asch. It demonstrates that the behavior of one member in a group is influenced by the other members of the group. It has been repeated numerous times with similar results in a variety of contexts.
So, knowing that the way one student responds is affected by the other students in the class, what can we do to minimize this effect?
One option is to have students write down their responses before sharing them as a class. For example, instead of asking a whole classroom of students a question, you can have them begin by writing their thoughts down in their notebook or on a white board. This gives students more time to process and rationalize their thinking and makes it harder to change their stance when others say a different answer during the conversation. Asch actually tested this and found that “conformity significantly decreased when shifting from public to written responses.”
Other methods might be digital student response systems and polling software. For example, Desmos allows teachers to anonymize their students so that they may feel more comfortable sharing their ideas, knowing that they won’t be judged by them.
I hope that this has been as interesting for you to ponder as it was for me. What other ways do you use to mitigate this issue when working with others? I’m especially interested in any methods you use to prevent this when working with other educators. Please let me know in the comments.
I totally agree that once a student (or a teacher) has heard others’ ideas, it is difficult, if not impossible, to share yours if they are different. This is especially true in the math classroom when a student who is looked up to shares his or her ideas first. In my classes, we have a routine of silence for the start of every task so “you have room for your own thoughts.” I ask students to write their questions/comments/guesses/estimations silently, and I am very strict about enforcing this. Even so, I see students erasing their own answers as soon as they hear someone else share.
One of the big questions I pose during week 1 is “When and why is it important to collaborate, and when and why is it important to work independently?” We discuss answers to this question explicitly, including the rationale laid out here, and then we reiterate these ideas over the first few weeks of school. I love the video, and will use it to exemplify this reasoning. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Nathaniel. I’m glad it resonated with you too. It’s really amazing to me that so much of what we do as educators has very little to do with the standards we teach. Part of it is certainly to help them be functioning humans. I had no prior to being an educator.
I also love the ideas you share and am glad others who visit this post will be able to read them.
A common strategy that I use when several students use the same oral answer is to say, “What if I told you that none of those answers were correct?” It’s amazing how many hands shoot up to give a different answer. The interesting thing is that the original answers were not necessarily incorrect, I’m just trying to get more participation. Then, if I have several different answers, I’ll record those on the board and have the students (politely) argue which answer they believe is correct and why, or argue for why they believe one is wrong. Great discussions come out of these!
What a great strategy Laura! That is such a clever way to break students out of that rut.
I am working on a PLC next year how to get more students to talk in Math class. This is very interesting. I have also stopped asking students if they have questions and started asking what would you tell anothwr student that was confused about this? Or how what do you think would confuse someone about this. How can I change this to make it easier for my next class?
Love this Melissa. I’m not claiming to have all the answers, but I do want to highlight problems I see. It sounds like your modifications are definitely worth using and exploring.
I often employ the techniques Laura mentioned, especially introducing debate and arguments.
I think there’s also a connection to the fear of failure, and defeating that fear takes as high a priority in my classroom as the math itself. Everything I communicate to my class seeks to diminish the fear of making mistakes. But for this specific issue, part of the classroom culture that I communicate is that unanimous responses are boring and variety is the spice of life. So if 5 different students give me the same answer, even if it’s the correct answer, I tell them to stop boring me. In the same manner, when 5 different students give me 5 different answers, I get excited and keep asking for more. It not only helps diminish the fear of being “different,” but it also creates suspense that KILLS the students (in a good way).
And in the case that everyone gets the correct answer and I accuse them of being boring, what often happens is they come up with more creative ways to express the correct answer to make me happy. It’s a win-win.
Thanks for sharing these ways to counter this behavior, Justin.
I have students pair and share, specifically indicating which partner goes first, (i.e. driver’s seat/passenger seat or clock side/mascot side of the room). Then after giving both in the pair an opportunity to share with one another, I will ask students to share the partner’s thinking in the large group. This is especially helpful in eliminating anxiety for students who are nervous to share their own ideas. It also requires all students to ask clarifying questions of their partners to understand the idea b/c they may very well have to share/explain to the large group. This has been a successful technique for me b/c classroom discourse focus is the idea not a student.