Emerging Idea: Increasing Student Participation Using Sentence Stems 

Lindsey Muldoon

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This is a chance to improve outcomes for your students and to accelerate improvement overall!

Author:  Lindsey Muldoon, Shue-Medill Middle School, Newark, DE

The problem I am working to solve is course performance in ELA.  I am concerned about students who are not participating in class discussions unless specifically called on or prompted to participate.  My theory is that they do not feel confident enough to speak out in class or that they let the kids that usually do continue to take the lead.  So I developed and provided specific sentence stems for students to use during class discussions that are not teacher-facilitated.

The Process

1. Choose a few students to focus on.  This makes it manageable and not overwhelming.
2. Take baseline data (tallies) to see how often those particular students are participating in class discussions before you introduce them to the sentence stems.
3. Introduce the prompts below. The sentence stems are hanging on the wall (as a poster) that is easily accessible to all students as well as taped on individual desks, as a mini handout.  The sentence stems have previously been introduced to all students since the third week of school. They are used as sentence stems for reader response prompts after choice reading time at the beginning of each class period. (With exception to the “Adding on to….” prompt because that one is specific to a verbal response.) Students have also had practice using these sentence stems verbally during “Book Buzzing” Activities where they are encouraged to use them when sharing their thoughts and ideas about what they have read with a peer.  (*A Book Buzz is when students have an allotted amount of time to share with a peer about the Book they have chosen to read during choice reading time.  Once the timer goes off, they have 30 seconds to pair up with a new peer and repeat the process.)

The Sentence Stems (The sentence stems are hanging on the walls)

I think….

I predict….

I wonder…

I can make a connection with…

Connecting with _____ said….

I agree/disagree with…..

Adding on to…..

• Impact

  The students in group one increased their average number of occurrences of participation without teacher prompting from 3 to 4 occurrences during the four week period. The students in group two increased their average number of occurrences of participation without teacher prompting from 1 to 3 occurrences during the four week period.

  

  Students in both groups increased their course grades an average of one letter grade during the four week period. Student F in group two had the greatest increase in course letter grade with a change of three letter grades during the four week period. One-hundred percent of the students tracked improved their course grades.

  

• Practical Keys to Success
  • Students have had some practice with these stems leading up this data collection through routine classroom practices, so they were not BRAND new at the time of data collection.  Even if they were not using them verbally, they had practice using them in their written responses after reading our class novel and/or their choice reading material.  
  • When I started collecting data, students were in small “Book Club” discussion groups of no more than five students per group. I tested it out with five students and placed them in groups right next to each other so it was easier to collect data which was actually listening for the students using the sentence stems in their discussions.  In my classroom experience, the students felt much more comfortable sharing these stems in a small group of their peers then a whole group class discussion such as a Socratic Seminar.  
• Measurement
  1. Define the system to track student participation.
  2. Record the participant count for each student. Measure the change in course performance over time.
  3. Use the data collection tool Sentence Stems Data Collection