Blog 2: Non-responsive Students

Why do not some students participate in lessons?

According to my previous teaching experiences, this can happen because of two reasons. Firstly, the teacher may be aggressive towards the students, discouraging them when they give a wrong answer, not listening to  students etc. as you can see, it may originate from the teacher itself. On the other hand, there are some elements that are caused by students themselves. The first reason is that they may not fully know the answer or they do not have any idea about the topic. In this case they don’t want to look silly in front of their peers, thus they prefer remaining silent. In this case the teacher should promote students to join the lesson by saying “It does not matter if it is right or not, just tell your opinion because that matters.”, secondly, they may think that it is not worth answering questions. As a student myself, in high school I usually avoided answering questions, and sometimes I even did not bother with answering them on my own. I thought that the teacher will give the answer soon, so I don’t have to bother with answering and thinking about it. In this situation, the teacher should actually pick  a few students and require them to participate in the class by asking more questions, getting their opinions. If the teacher gives the answer after asking a student, other students stop listening to him. Those are my take-aways to promote students participating in the lessons. 

According to a research done by Alshoraty (2014) they came into conclusion that the prominent reasons of not participating in the class are caused of boredom, instructor's mood, and interestingly their preference about listening to the lesson.

The image is retrieved from Google Images.

Alshoraty, Y.I. (2018), Reasons for University Students' Non-Participation in Class Discussions, European Journal of Social Sciences, 42(2), 272-277, Retrieved from https://eis.hu.edu.jo/deanshipfiles/pub100315954.pdf