Culturally Responsive Classrooms in 6th Grade ELA

6th Grade ELA

Meghan McGrew

In our class discussions, students felt like there was an imbalance as to who was speaking and felt like it wasn’t equitable. If we quantitatively track student discussion then we can get real time results about the equity that happens in discussion to give real time feedback to students as measured by data collected via equity maps.

The data that I collected was dropping into a conversation for 5 minutes and mapping their discussion and providing them with feedback. Below are maps of two groups with an 50/50 distribution of female and male students. Below is data showing a 5 minute conversation that was tracked. The data showed that the boys spoke the most in the discussion.

I showed the students the data and talked about the fact that the boys talked more. We debriefed moves that they could try out the rest of the discussion to incorporate more of the girls’ voice.

The next time we had a discussion, I revisited that group and tracked their discussion. They were more aware of their talking time this time around. The data revealed that one of the girls took on a larger role in the discussion and the boys took a step back.

To use this strategy in your classroom tomorrow download Equity Maps! Using the app is easy, you preload groups into a map and when you drop in to the group you click on who is talking. When you finish the meeting you are able to show students who was talking and how much.

I thought that this app proved to be useful in the classroom. With groups that had the even split of males v. females it showed a very clear gender inequity. In almost every group that I went to, boys dominated the discussion. Students were really interested in their results and when I visited a group more than once they vocalized that they needed to either step back or to step forward in the conversations. I think giving students quantitative data was powerful because they could see the disparity in the conversation. This also allowed us to have an artifact to talk about dominating a discussion and providing moves to get more students into the conversation.