How to Participate in Class

The first thing I want to tell you is that, if you get nervous about participating in class, you are not alone. If you’re the type to endlessly rehearse your comment in your head, for so long that the discussion moves on and your chance to actually say the comment out loud slips by completely—I’ve been there.

But I also want to tell you that you can get better at this. When I was a doctoral student teaching sophomore tutorial (a writing intensive class for psychology majors) in the Psychology department at Harvard, a colleague introduced me to a wonderful paper by Jocelyn Hollander called “Learning to Discuss: Strategies for Improving the Quality of Class Discussion.” In this paper, Hollander frames the act of talking in class as a skill. And, because it’s a skill (and not, say, a static trait you’re doomed to possess forever), that means it’s changeable. Skills can be learned. Skills respond to practice—generally by going up! Thinking about participating in class discussions as a skill opened up a world of possibility for me. When you approach any particular behavior as a skill, you start to see the world as full of opportunities to practice the skill, and you become curious, rather than judgmental, about your own behavior. What kinds of conditions allow you to perform at your best in this new skill? Why did X work when you did it, but Y was less successful?

Your first task in preparing for class discussion, before you dive into the reading itself, is to spend a little bit of time thinking about why the professor might have assigned this reading in the first place. Ask yourself: Where does the reading show up on the syllabus?  Is it a foundational reading? What other readings is it grouped with?  Is it meant to provide a counterpoint or less common perspective?  Try to get into your professor’s head—they assigned this piece for a reason.  Next, think forward in time a little bit: How much fluency do you need to have with this reading? Are you going to be required to write about it later? Or do you just need to know enough to be able to contribute a few points during class? Knowing this will help you prioritize your time: spend lots of time with the readings you’ll be writing about later, and therefore really need to understand, less time on the readings that show up in one class, but aren’t mainstays of the course.

During my first year of grad school, I found myself with a severe case of imposter syndrome, and no time or place triggered that feeling more than the weekly, 3-hour seminar in which every student in my cohort sat together, in a large, amphitheater-style classroom, discussing issues related to education (the course was meant to give us a shared background in historical and current-day issues in education, and it probably did deliver on those goals— the accompanying anxiety disorder was for free!). Since this class was the only time all week that we were all together, I felt like everything I said (or failed to say) during class was a referendum on whether they’d made a mistake in admitting me.  I had to be brilliant, and yet I rarely was. I quickly adopted a highly obsessive method of preparing for class—I read each assigned article very closely, underlined key words and phrases, made notes in the margins, and highlighted chunks of text.  In my second pass through the article, I opened a Word document and created a bulleted list of the most important points. By the time class rolled around, I was probably more familiar with the readings than the people who had written them! Then, I would show up in class and listen to the discussion going on around me, stare down at my notes, and say nothing. It was a lot of wasted work, needless to say.

If I could go back in time, I would tell the student version of myself that I was preparing for the wrong task! By the time you get to class, everyone has read the article. The discussion might start off hewing closely to the content of what was read but, chances are, it will pivot pretty quickly from there. You can prepare for this in two ways:

1. Make it your goal to participate in the class discussion early. Not only does this take the pressure off, because once you’ve said something you’ve broken the ice, and it’s way easier to speak up again later, but you also have a greater chance at shaping the discussion if you participate early.

2. Ahead of class time, instead of (only) summarizing the article, write notes that focus on connectionsbetween the reading and something else (more on what that something else could be below).

The idea behind connection-focused notes is this: For each reading, write 2-3 additional bullet points where you go beyond the content of the reading at hand and connect to something related, but not included, in the assigned article. You’re going beyond the text here, and this will ensure that you have something different to say, something that not everyone else in class has already thought of.

Your “connection-focused” notes could be about:

1. Other assigned readings from this class

2. Something else you’ve read that was not assigned for this class

3. A current event or controversy—something that is going on in today’s world that feels relevant to this reading

4. A personal experience that is both relevant to the course material and

   appropriate to share (use with caution, see more below)

5. Genuine questions you have about the reading; these could be questions for clarification, or deeper thoughts about the issues raised in the reading or its relationship to other readings from the course

The reason I would discourage you from connecting to personal experience (option 4), unless the personal experience you’ve had is closely related to the reading at hand, and also appropriate to share in class, is because these kinds of contributions sometimes lead to each student sharing a separate, but kind of similar, personal anecdote, and this can stand in the way of a deeper analysis of the reading. That said, though, there are times when personal anecdotes in class are very appropriate and even illuminating—say, an education class where you relate your experience actually using a technique the class just read about.

To sum up, your notes on each reading would look like this:

• 2-3 bullet points to summarize the big points of the article

• 2-3 connection points where you think beyond the reading itself to draw a connection between this reading and something else

• Any questions brought up by the reading

Of all the possible extra-textual connections you could make, I think the best kind—that is, the kind that will be most appreciated by your professor—are from category (a) above; that is, comments that connect the reading at hand to other readings in the syllabus, or otherwise place the reading under discussion in the context of what is being learned over the course of the semester. Think of it this way: professors spend a lot of time designing their syllabi. They chose this reading for a reason, and they’ll be thrilled for someone else to be thinking about this too!

The paradox is this—it’s hard to be relaxed enough to take in new material if class participation makes you so anxious that your brain’s ability to learn shuts off AND you will probably feel really good about yourself, and get more out of the class, if you push yourself to participate even when it makes you feel anxious. I know I always did.

I hope these strategies make it a little easier for you to get your hand up there, and to feel confident while you do so. Think of it this way: at the very least, by throwing your hat in the ring and adding your voice to the mix, you’ll be that much farther along on the journey of discovering what learning strategies work best for you.

Image by Felicia Buitenwerf via Unsplash