Measuring Oracy with...Google Forms!

This year my school is really trying to work on oracy - encouraging students to participate orally through multiple turn-taking.  We as teachers are doing a lot to plan to get 100% of our students participating in discourse.  What we're doing to track our progress and monitor how students are participating is by measuring student participation.

Measuring student talk?  What?  If you haven't done this before, you're probably wondering what this looks like.  As an example, in a circle discussion, you might draw a circle on a piece of paper and label the circle with where students are sitting.  Then as the discussion occurs, you can note what is happening in the discussion: who participates, how they participate (add on, agree, disagree, etc.), and if students are participating in a non-verbal way such as hand signals.  It might look like this:



This is great.  You can easily see who participated a LOT and who did not participate at all.

This was presented to us at a PD opportunity, and I immediately thought: GOOGLE FORM!

I am terrible with paper, and every day the places where the kids sit changes.  With a Google Form, I could just list all of my students and possible ways that students could participate in a discussion.

This is AUGMENTATION!  How?

• I can more easily track data
• I can view trends
• I can aggregate data more easily based on: subject and language of instruction!

Since I teach in a dual language classroom, I want to see who is participating more in English vs. Spanish.  I can also check to see who may feel more comfortable participating in literacy or numeracy, small group or whole group.

The best part?  I have told my students that I am tracking their participation using this form.  I show it to them.  They WANT to see how they participated.  I have students whose job is to run my discussions, and about halfway through our discussion time, I show them who has not participated yet and their job is to find a way to get those students involved.

I showed this to the staff at my school and we now have teachers in grades as low as Kindergarten using this to track the quantity and quality of their students' participation in oracy activities.

I have only used this so far in whole group discussions, but I am now starting to use it in small group discussions.  Some students just don't feel comfortable talking in front of a whole group!  But this is an awesome tool that you can try to use to check in and really see just how much your students' participation in discussions grows and changes over time.