Point of Participation

Maximizing engagement for students can be difficult. Tedious procedures force students to follow rigid guidelines. While helpful, these can force students to produce the bare minimum required to complete activity objectives while avoiding the larger language goals of the assignment. On the other hand, providing too little instruction can force wildly abstract interpretations of the given task and may lead students to focus prominently on a non-essential point of emphasis. In a pandemic environment, the abrupt shift to utilizing online resources seems to have confused procedures employed to contribute in the classroom. While most educators may now be comfortable with their online, digitally enhanced, paperless, and hybrid practices, some lingering procedural opacity seems to have carried over. 

Translation tools are here to stay in the second language classroom for better or worse. The ability of students working from home to translate using their own tools has made students more comfortable than ever with instructions and lexical items. Most of the turn-taking issues and general communicative incompatibility of the online classroom has reduced student's willingness to face ambiguous tasks. While things have gotten easier for teachers to assess in some ways using LMS and other tools, it has created a bureaucratic approach to the expectations of completed activities. Students have always tended to strive to fill-in blanks offered in a worksheet they may be more likely after their time in the dark days of online classes to complete tasks with minimal effort and investment. To the chagrin of teachers working under the assumption that students will always work in good faith, assignments graded as complete/incomplete has offered students a shortcut to that teachers should not overlook nor shy away from.  

Overt instruction is not always helpful

While educators may want to provide overt instruction, it may be more beneficial to have students focus on outcomes generated with their own interpretation. This requires a re-thinking of the way we design our lesson plans. More focus needs to be placed on cultivating a register that enables learners to approach target objectives using their own strategies while still completing the appropriate steps to "show their work" in a sense.  Meta-language filled introductions with detailed rationale are unnecessary and counter-productive. Presenting the intended outcome is more efficiently prescriptive as a sample than clearly written instructions. The opening and prompt should ideally embody the speed and approachability of the task. When deemed efficient, video can be used to allow students to deconstruct and or reconstruct a more ambitious activity. 

A lesson plan that focuses on participation and register

The attached lesson plan template and sample provides an example that focuses the educator on the actual text (verbal and written) employed to introduce and exemplify objectives. By focusing on the most direct way to instruct, educators can maximize the time spent on task. Attached is a minimalist template with space to consider the approach of tasks and the necessary scaffolding needed to pull it off. 

*note- lesson plans are useful for planning and succinctly sharing ideas. Lesson plans here are a convenient vessel for the intended considerations advocated. Lesson plans have a time and place. This is not intended to advocate for or against lesson plan design or criteria as much as it is a convenient visual representation.

In the template

Objectives

Here the educator should focus on the end result intended in the activity. Examples could include: 'use target vocabulary', 'consider necessary language', 'provide examples', display procedure. 

Scaffolding

In this section, the educator inputs the actual text or verbal instructions required to get the students started. Emphasis should be placed on the end result desired. Avoid using lists. Provide a sample if considered abstract, but avoid giving step-by-step instruction. Students should be allowed to engage in L1 or L2 and obtain the results desired in their own way. This column includes necessary considerations needed to perform quickly and intuitively.  Items to consider include: 

Prompt- what you will say to initiate the activity

Room arrangement- necessary classroom organization

Resources- any required materials needed to identify the mode of engagement

*note- I include a link to a worksheet providing specific examples for the reader, although the textbook used in class offers the same material with the same areas (or lack thereof) for students to mark their contributions.

Engagement

The point of participation should be clear based on prior knowledge or a scaffolded sample. The students should be able to produce desired results without being shown how to get there. Most students in digitally literate areas should be aware of programs, resources, and required procedures. Educators working online and in paperless classrooms particularly should be weary of introducing new media to support outcomes. Too often new programs become an exploration into the alternative possibilities and steer students away from the goals of the activity.

Specifically, when considering engagement educators should focus on their presence in the classroom and their role as facilitators. Engagement should contain 3 strata: Student, teacher, and resources. 

Student

Initiation should be inherent to the activity. Students should not need prompting to wrap their heads around how the assignment is to be carried out. The students should be able to understand the point of participation expected (ex. fill in the blanks, write paragraphs, speak to partners, present). A limited number of actions should be identified in the first few classes and scaffolded appropriately for students in order to quickly move past the phase of negotiating roles. 

Teacher

The teacher's role should be apparent from the scaffolding. The teacher's location, role, and availability should be contained in any samples given and should be inherent to the assigned activity.

Non-verbal Cues

A unique concept to lesson planning may be non-verbal ambient cues. One way that educators can cut back on teacher talk time and focus the register or tone of the class is to utilize music to start and end activity segments. Interestingly the tempo and increased noise in the classroom may help give the classroom environment the intended rhythm of the assigned task. More research-based evidence of this is coming soon! Also, gestures should be considered essential. Since the dark days of the early pandemic, students have seemingly become less aware of the urgent need to contribute in second language classrooms. The sense of urgency may be reinstalled with gesture inviting active participation. Approachable tasks like offering an opinion may be more easily navigated if less time is given to consider an answer. Pressing the pairs to contribute to the class as a whole works to reinforce the efficacy of the activity, the need to listen to prompts, clarify if needed, and generally follow along and formalize thoughts necessary to be productive members of the class.

Presenting the information in bite-sized increments has become more vital to reaching outcomes successfully than giving explicit procedural directions. Students will likely remain on task if the goal is attainable and procedures are implicitly efficient and well-known. Working your way to larger and more abstract language goals may hinge on this cascading success more since the beginning of the pandemic. Create attainable goals quickly to maximize the percentage of class time spent on task and increase motivation through a sense of achievement. Thinking of activities in this way should help educators focus their assignments and coursework on producing outcomes and will hopefully enable more time spent on task.

Sample Point of Participation Lesson Plan