Practical Paideia

Anita Zalameda (Summit Christian Academy)

Encouraging students at any level to engage in the discussion can be difficult. Often this is especially the case during the dialectic years, where answering questions becomes less “cool” and silently staring at the teacher seems completely normal. In her 7th grade civics course, Anita addressed this issue in two intentional ways.

First she changed the setup of her classroom. Rather than standing at the front and having her students sit at rows of tables and face her, she moved all the tables into a rectangle while she lectured from the center. This small change forced the students to engage more on the discussion at hand. Additionally, everyone was at an equal distance from her (no back of the classroom discussions going on with this setup). The result was a class environment that felt more like a discussion than a lecture.

The second thing she did was inspired from a ACCS Repairing the Ruins session. Each student receives two participation tickets at the beginning of class. Every time a student participates, (by answering a question or maybe responding to another classmate’s question) one of their tickets is collected. While there were still students who participated more than others, (as there will always be) this method did encourage those students who might prefer to hide in the background to intentionally engage. This method required every student to engage in the discussion because they knew that they would need to pay attention enough to formulate a response. This method unintentionally promotes intellectual curiosity as well, as students listen to the discussion on a deeper level, they find themselves becoming curious about the content in a way that they weren’t before. While this method was used in a dialectic course, it would benefit students and teachers at any level of the trivium.