There’s a principle in poker that success is determined not so much by successful bluffs or close calls, but (a) the ability to fold a losing hand before it’s too late, and (b) the ability to get the most out of your best opportunities. The most important thing is not just to win with your good hands, but, when you win, to win big. To put it another way, success requires not being satisfied with small victories. The real pressure comes not when you have a mediocre hand and you’re agonizing over whether to stay in, but when you have the nuts and you’re trying to maximize your gain.
I was thinking about this the other day after having a conversation with a small group of students about how I could get more participation in class. As with many teachers, I often have difficulty getting students to speak up in the classroom. My main trick is to have students work in pairs, and there are a few other things I do—-for more on this, see chapter 1 of Active Statistics—-and it kinda works in that students do stay busy and focused in class, but we still don’t get the sort of lively discussions I’d like to see.
But this latest conversation in my office gave me an idea. In this mini-brainstorming session, different students in the group had suggestions, and I responded to each. And then I suddenly realized a pattern: after every student spoke, I responded. That’s natural: they’re talking to me, also they’re talking on a topic I’ve thought a lot about before, so when they say something, it’s natural that I’ll have immediate followup thoughts. Indeed, new ideas will typically come to me even before the other person has stopped talking. Also, that’s how conversation usually goes: someone will speak, I’ll reply, they’ll respond, etc.
But in roomful of students, if I do what seems natural and follow up each student’s question with my response, this takes away much of the life of the discussion. What I need to do, when student A speaks, is to just say nothing, or maybe make a brief nod of acknowledgment, to give the opportunity for students B, C, and D to join in. As it is, I’ve implicitly trained them to wait for my response, and that’s not good.
OK, this won’t always work, especially not at first. I’m waiting for class participation and, if I’m lucky, one student will speak up and say something, and that’s it. At that point it can help for me to keep the conversation going. But when students show some interest, when multiple students are leaning forward, ready to jump in, that’s the time for me to be careful and keep the student involvement going. In poker terms, this is the chance for a big win, and it’s important to do things right.
To put it another way, rather than getting frustrated at the times that I feel students should be participating but they’re not, I should just be willing to “fold” in such settings. My extra effort should be going into facilitating active participation in those settings where I’m holding some good cards, as it were, and students are ready to join in.
I’ll try this in future classes. I doubt it will work all at once–sometimes you just have to wait until you get a good hand–but I’ll try to remain aware of the possibility and take advantage when it happens.
As someone who was a student relatively recently ago (and still sometimes is), I have some additional suggestions.
In basically every class many questions are on my mind and mostly I would like to ask them. If I do not ask, this is usually for the following reasons:
a) The teacher appears hurried or I know from previous lectures that time is short and they often finish just in time
b) I am afraid to ask a stupid question
Regarding a) If teachers take their time and we sometimes finish 5min early or the last 20min are at a slower pace, I am much more at ease asking questions.
Regarding b) I also think some approving gestures are important for students. But it is also important to not overdue it. For example if someone asks and the teacher responds with “excellent question” to someone else; I am more afraid to ask a question, and want to appear excellent as well. Asking follow up questions to better understand the student is also a good idea, or maybe summarizing the question and ask if you correctly understood it. All this signals to the student that you take them seriously.
Regarding b), being very familiar with that feeling from my own student experience (+ often at conferences), when teaching I explicitly ask for stupid questions (and have a section on the LMS discussion page for my courses dedicated to them). I don’t know whether that helps, but I usually seem to get decent participation in class.
I am a fan of the saying or phrase “there are no stupid questions”. If you genuinely want information and ask a question I think that saying is applicable and appropriate to those situations.
Along those lines, and in line with your comment about asking for stupid questions, I wondered whether one could do something with that general view on the course discussion page. You could maybe somehow try to do something with that view by, for instance, calling the section “Ask your questions here (whether you think they are stupid or good ones)”. Or calling the section “Ask a stupid question here (and possibly find out whether it was indeed a stupid question or not)”.
And to further somehow do something with that view, and hopefully make students possibly aware of some things, I would even consider posting (and pinning it somewhere visible on the webpage) a question along the lines of “What even is a “stupid” question?”
I am also a student. I have observed that my willingness to ask questions depends on another form of appearing rush. If the teacher keeps on talking, and don’t have a couple seconds of pause between topics where they look at the students, I have to speak loudly and interrupt them to ask questions. And that makes me want to ask less questions than if I just have to raise my hand, see that they noticed me, and start talking.
Anon:
Yes, one trick I learned as a teacher, many years ago, is that if you want participation from the students, you can’t just say, “Any questions?”, wait 2 seconds, and turn back to the blackboard. When I want them to speak, I just stop talking. There will be an awkward silence, and eventually a student will speak up. It turns out that 15 seconds of silence is a long time! So I can get some participation, but the thing I’ve been missing is the thing where a bunch of students are talking in a classroom dialogue, without each student utterance being mediated by me.
Quote from above: “(…) , but the thing I’ve been missing is the thing where a bunch of students are talking in a classroom dialogue, without each student utterance being mediated by me.”
In line with the idea that people might learn differently, or that people understand something better when different words or examples are used, I wondered about the following.
If person A asks the teacher a question and the teacher answers or explains but gets the idea that person A does not fully grasp things, the teacher could say something like “I think it’s sometimes helpful and useful for something to hear something being explained in slightly different words” and subsequently ask if any of the other students might want to have a go at answering the question.
I reason, and could see, that this might sometimes result in:
-other students participating in answering the question because they simply want to help out
-the student who asks the question becoming more relaxed when listening to a fellow-student
-the student who asks the question might perhaps even turn around, or look to the side to the other student answering the question in their words
-there could then be a discussion between the student who asked the question and the one answering
-some other student might join in when they notice something is still not clicking
-before you know it you might have the class participating in a non-mediated discussion
(I’ve done something I sometimes get annoyed with when others do it: responding in a thread with the handle Anonymous when there is already an Anonymous there. Just to be clear, I just replied to the comment by Mr. Gleman with the idea of having antoher student answer a question, but I am a different Anonymous than the one Mr. Gelman initially responded to. Sorry.)
Huan made some good points. I that vein a useful response from the instructor might be “anyone have some thoughts in this direction?”
Josh:
Ahhh, good point! I’ll have to try that, next time the opportunity comes up in class.
It’s kinda scary to think that I’ve been teaching for nearly 40 years and yet I’m still learning these basic principles.
I am not a teacher, but I have been a student and especially during my research master I was taught in relatively small classes of 8-15 students or so. For me, that was very nice and helpful because I could more directly and frequently ask a question when I needed some clarity. That is useful, if not necessary, for my particular mind to be able to sometimes comprehend things and subsequently move on to the next thing. If I miss step one, hearing the rest usually has no point for me because I am completely out of it. This general issue may have contributed to dropping out of high school, and not following certain large-scale classes at university because that all likely was associated with the type of teaching that may not fit with my particular mind and way of learning.
Anyway, I was reminded of this all after reading your post because I think for me, receiving an immediate reply would be much more helpful and would likely cause me to be much more involved. But I reason there are probably many differences in students regarding these kinds of things. If I remember correctly, during the research master there were certain people who simply asked more questions, and commented more on things, than others. I am not sure it is necessary, or even possible, for everyone to ask questions or participate in a similar manner. Students who do not ask a question may have had the same question in mind that someone else asks and don’t need to ask the question anymore, or they simply don’t have any questions, or do not like to share ideas or thoughts that may pop up in their minds when hearing the teacher talk about something, etc.
I do like the poker analogy in a way, especially your point (b) the ability to get the most out of your best opportunities. That may be something interesting or useful for teachers to keep in mind. I think a certain way of “sensing” what is possible at a certain time or with a certain group of students regarding teaching and learning is possibly an interesting and useful way to view things. And, it might be the case that you may never know what a student has learned, and that some “participation” can not always be clearly noticed. Maybe paying extra attention and being especially focused during a class can also be seen as “participating” in a way, and such things may not have to involve speaking up or asking a question. Or to quote K. Rogers:
“Ev’ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
‘Cause ev’ry hand’s a winner and ev’ry hand’s a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.
You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.”
Great idea. One thing you can try alongside this that only requires a bit of additional board space: As students are adding their thoughts to these conversations, take on the role of note taker and thought organizer. Your goal here is to keep track of the conversation (helping reduce cognitive load on individual students and keep the discussion focused), elicit new ideas to contribute to the public summary (gently guiding the conversation and making sure important points are hit), and separate the ideas from the people who present them (so students can feel less attacked or defensive if someone disagrees with them). Every so often, ask people if they’ve moved from one position to another and see if you can get them to elucidate the thought process that led them there.
Another variation on this uses something like poll everywhere (they have a specific type of item where respondents can enter anonymous free text and can also thumbs up/down other responses) or even just a Slack channel to do a similar thing alongside the lecture. All of these methods do require a fair amount of student training, but are totally worth it.
Klint:
I’ve done that blackboard-organizer thing in the past but it hasn’t worked so well for me, I think because my own act of putting things on the board gets me too involved and intimidates students from speaking. Maybe I can try it again but in a less active way, where I just write the words on the board without thinking too hard about organizing them.
When I am gathering thoughts on a board, I ask the class participant, ‘Is it OK if I summarise your thoughts as…?’ If their response meanders, I say, ‘I liked what you said about [some new point that was raised by the student]. Let me write it down as…’ -> no question what they think – they have talked long enough now; some encouragement and signalling that somebody was listening appreciatively, they are not unheard; no blanket praise for the comment, because I do not want to encourage rambling.
Sometimes, I start organising the participants’ thoughts by placing them strategically on the board without telling the class why I put them there. I only reveal the pattern to them afterwards.
If I want to organise the class’s findings *with* the class, I personally use an empty PowerPoint slide and add new thoughts as separate text fields. That way I can move them around easily. But when it comes to these technical questions, you gotta to do what works best for you.
I have friends who swear by Excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com/) for the same purpose as your empty PowerPoint slide since it has live collaboration functionality (and students can participate in adding/organizing/diagramming), but I never had much luck with a similar product in the past (Google Jamboard). Maybe I resurrect it this semester?
I definitely had this issue early on (when I was teaching high school physics in the early 2010s). I settled on big boxes/blobs for each main idea they propose, and just attaching subpoints/responses/questions as bullets within each box/blob. Raphael’s strategies on confirming rephrases are great, too.
@Andrew
Could you clarify, what the folding in your analogy corresponds to in real life?
I can think of two possible answers:
1. If the concept is relevant to the next step, try a different approach to teaching it. If that does not work and you feel the class is getting stuck, or if the topic is not actually relevant to the class,
2. Skip to the next topic. If it is the last topic for that day’s class, I like to dismiss the class early: if nobody can absorb anything I am teaching anymore, there is no point in prolonging the ordeal.
While it is entirely admirable that Andrew, in his small class of students genuinely interested in the topic, is motivated to make the subject matter relevant, meaningful, etc., let us not forget that this rarefied atmosphere is far from the norm in U.S. higher education. As evidence, I offer this from the NYT of just a couple of days ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/opinion/plato-texas-academic-freedom.html
I presume that Andrew’s class might touch on modern topics, some of which could be controversial and therefore, adding positively to the discussion. However, if his class were at Texas A&M,
he might be in trouble because, incredible as it sounds, Plato is too hot to handle. Imagine, if you will, a statistics instructor getting into trouble from the Administration for saying that “An unbiased estimator, in a given situation, might not necessarily be the best, i.e., appropriate estimator.” Words have consequences.
The case is of a teacher doing exactly what Andrew does, and getting shut down, which caused a kerfuffle. Having taught at a range of non R1s, I can tell you that it’s not at all rarefied to use current day stuff in the classroom. In fact, it’s one of the key methods for students who are there for Gen Ed requirements or such to get them interested.
I never ended up being a professor, even though that was my goal, but I had plenty of great experiences as a TA handling the problem review sessions and lab exercises (in general chem and pchem). It was a real challenge to come up with meaningful explanations for doing problems that made sense to folks that had different experiences, ways of thinking and education goals. Upon reflection I know I could have done much better – it’s always good when a student says, “I don’t get what you just said…”
A few things:
1. Silence is key. If you ask them a question and don’t wait for an answer, you’ll train them that you’ll always start talking and they don’t have to. Long pauses are important.
2. It’s not just about getting *someone* talking, it’s about getting *everyone* talking. You can have lots of discussion from the same 5-10 people while the rest of the class stagnates.
3. A solution to 2 is cold-calling. Not in the law school horrible way, but asking someone to weigh in on the discussion (often, I’ll warn them that I’m going to do it ahead of time to let them think. “Fred, I’m going to ask you to weigh in, but first let’s hear from John!”)
4. Dumb jokes & self-deprecating stories. Demystify yourself and it’s easier for the students to talk. I know they’ve relaxed when they start calling me just by my last name (ie, going from “Professor Total” to “Total”).
At my job maybe we end up in the opposite situation — hopefully in a not mean spirited way, but a quick meeting is generally a good sign. It’s very easy to get to talking about things for an thirty minutes or an hour or whatever and not even notice. It’s fun and the time flies by, but not obviously the most productive thing.
It’s also strange to think about questions getting answered. That did happen a lot in school! But wow, the idea that you can learn about a new problem and solve it all in an hour or whatever — that seems wildly efficient compared to corporate world!
And that reminds me of the thing that I think you told me once — that sometimes if someone asks a question you don’t know so much about, you can answer a different related one, and maybe the person will find some value in that answer. I think that fits with the philosophy of science stuff where Question doesn’t necessarily come before Answer.
I am sorry that Andrew came to this realization after so many years. If he had taken his own advice about work flow, iteration and process, these issues would have been resolved much earlier. Take a survey after every term, make one change or more next time, test to see if it worked, etc.
Common classroom techniques
1. First day have students in groups so that they can begin to connect. I have them introduce each other. Leave a few minutes at the end in case they want to form study groups.
2. Talk about your availablity outside class. My door was always open unless I had a specific personell or student matter going on. I also encouraged them to stop me as I walked on campus saying if I am smiling I am making up a joke I can never tell and if I am frowning I am working on a problem not being a grouch.
3. I have on occasion after a student asked a question, led the class in yelling “Thank you Stephen (the student’s name) for asking that question now we all know …”
4. I tell the students that of course they can ask questions or comments and get respectful answers. They are paying me and if they are on scholarship, someone else is paying me to answer their questions.
5. Get there early and talk about whatever – sports, video games, talks on campus etc.
6. Stop class exactly on time to show that you want them to get their monies worth. Never go overtime even for tests. It is disrespectful to your colleagues and to the students – you don’t know who is rushing to the day care center or a job or a practice or …
7. Once I was being evaluated and the class was flat. I immediately divided them in groups and got them working. The energy picked up immediately. Leveraging their youthful energy.
8. Once or twice I had a student ask such an intersesting question that I wrote a blog article about it. I asked the student if I could use their name.
I have been out of the classroom for years now and my evaluations were never stellar, but I worked at it and showed students that I worked at it – the model I wanted them to see.