PALS is excited to welcome a guest post by Kristin Lacey. Lacey is a PhD student at Boston University working on nineteenth-century American literature. In her post, Lacey explores how she and her students form their classroom community and how they build agency into the semester’s activities.
With each semester I’ve taught, I’ve asked more of my students. By “more,” I don’t mean more reading and writing—I mean more investment in building a meaningful classroom community together. Asking students to regularly provide feedback on the class’s progression and their experience teaches students—particularly those who are reticent to ask for help or speak up in class—that they have agency in shaping their educational experience. None of the exercises I do with my students are groundbreaking alone, but taken together, they form the backbone of a classroom that honors students’ work and learning. Below I outline several activities I do in the beginning of the semester and one activity we do throughout that help give my students agency in the classroom.
Paradoxically, giving students a stake in the classroom begins with an exercise that students 1) have no say in and 2) meet with almost universal outcry. This terrifying proposition? Learning (actually learning) their classmates’ names. I learned this strategy from Johanna Winant on Twitter in 2017 and have been using it since to great effect. In the first class during syllabus review, I tell students that they will take tests on their classmates’ names at the start of the second, third, and fourth class sessions; this might vary depending on class size—in my class of nine, a third test was unnecessary. I also say that they must get at least 70% on the last test. I don’t give them the other end of this toothless ultimatum and have never had to—your mileage may vary. I have never had a student miss more than two names by the last test. The actual test looks like this: I ask students to take out a pen and half-sheet of paper. I then stand behind a student (in a non-threatening manner) and their classmates write down the student’s name; we then go around the room until everyone’s name has been written (or wildly guessed). I correct the tests after class (or during, if they’re doing a free write or pair share), write the correct response for near-misses, and hand them back.
Students often meet this task with shock or ask “why” point-blank; I respond that it’s important to practice collegial scholarly conversations by knowing who we’re talking to and responding directly. Perhaps the best unintended outcome of the exercise is the immediate student camaraderie that results from facing this seemingly insurmountable task. One class immediately burst into a strategizing session: “Everybody, take a selfie and put it in a Google Doc so we can study!” Inevitably, I walk into the classroom on the second day and students panic as they remember their impending fate: “Wait, what’s your name?! What’s her name?” and sometimes will organize their own rapid-response icebreaker as a memory tool. Rather than nag students throughout the semester about addressing each other by name, I simply require it, and they always rise to the occasion.
In my second class session, I ease students into providing reflective feedback by doing a group brainstorm about what works well and what doesn’t in a group discussion. Students begin to understand that I will be asking them to reflect on their past experience in order to make our class a more effective learning environment. Selfishly, this is also a great way to get students to say, “I hate when one person dominates the conversation!” so that I don’t have to. I ask students to remember what they and their classmates find useful for discussions, and the list we produce together serves as an aspirational backdrop for the conversations we have thereafter. Later in the semester, we do another group brainstorm about what works well (and doesn’t) in peer review workshops. It is here that I hope someone will say, “It’s annoying when my peer reviewer doesn’t give me anything to work on and just says it’s great!” If not, I take my cue and share that nugget of wisdom: No paper is ever perfect or “done,” and you can always find something to improve.
I use the second class, too, for an exercise borrowed from my beloved undergraduate mentor, Samina Najmi: I ask students to think about perceptions we have about students who stay quiet in class—not perceptions that they claim or believe, but that someone in the universe might have. Students are often reluctant to be the first to voice negative perceptions, but after reassurance, students say variations of the following: Quiet students can’t keep up, haven’t done the reading, or simply don’t care. I explain that the neutral or positive perceptions—quiet students are anxious, thinking, listening, forming their own responses—are much more likely to be true, and that I welcome whatever form of participation students can muster. I find that students don’t take this as an excuse to remain quiet, but instead as a promise that they won’t be judged for being quieter or for not having perfectly polished answers. This past semester, I had one student say that she’s always been terrified of speaking in class, but that after our class, she found it “wasn’t so scary.” This is a particularly important message to convey to marginalized students, including first-generation college students who might take longer to find their way in class discussions—for me, there isn’t a single definition of participation, let alone of valuable participation.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I check in with students anonymously throughout the semester through what I call “Post-It check-ins.” Once a month at the end of class, I ask students to anonymously write what works well for them about our class and/or what they’re struggling with; they then leave the Post-Its on the wall or board by the door on their way out. Afterward, I adjust in-class activities, discussion structures, or reading schedules to reflect their needs. This can be as easy as including a ten-minute refresher on writing a claim, preceded by the acknowledgement that some students had questions about it. Students are incredibly thoughtful, even in the space of a Post-It, about their experience and their genuine investment in improving their work. It’s important, though, to actually do something with the feedback you receive to maintain students’ trust as they share their important (and sometimes vulnerable) thoughts. Even if you’re unable to change lesson plans in the days following a Post-It check-in, a verbal acknowledgement that you’ve read and plan to address students’ worries goes a long way: “I know some of you are confused about passive voice—how to find it and how to change it—and we’re going to do an exercise next week that should help.”
Trust students to be your collaborators in the classroom. It doesn’t mean you’re any less responsible for their learning, or that you need to call your students “co-teachers,” or that you don’t have authority: it simply means that giving students a stake in the classroom—how it’s organized, what you spend time on, and what skills they develop—makes it a more just, livable, and human place in which to learn.
Kristin Lacey is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Boston University. She has taught courses on satire, nineteenth-century American literature, and literary representations of “madwomen.” Her dissertation studies the rise of individual ambition in the nineteenth-century United States, particularly how women navigated this cultural shift in fiction and primary materials like conduct manuals and women’s magazines.
Welcome to Pedagogy & American Literary Studies 
3 thoughts on “The Agentive Classroom”