Making Room for “Quiet Learning” in Our Classrooms

17 Sep

A year ago we connected one to Stephen Brookfield’s workshop packet supporting “discussion as a way of teaching.” I wrote that piece – which appears here – while reading a new flurry of columns on silence in classrooms, which I reported on here; both of these posts were park of preparing for a workshop focusing on making room for quiet in a classroom by focusing on the positive function of silence in learning and teaching.

For this year’s launch of WOW posts, we’ve culled three images from last year to focus on cultivating silence as integral to learning early in a semester.

In playing with ideas from the Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Preskill book on teaching with discussion, I began to formalize ways of incorporating silence into class sessions – for reflection, for catching up a bit, for listening to what isn’t and is almost said, for hearing subjects and authors in addition to (even before) our own ideas.

Our hope is that the images themselves will spark new thinking, and that the PowerPoint version (shared here in full as Brookfield’s Slides using Silence) will be adapted by teachers who want to insert process slides into slidedecks they create for class sessions.

Tags: discussion, silence, Spring15, WOW

Comments 1 Comment
Categories *WOW - Words on Wednesday
Author IleneDawn

One Response to “Making Room for “Quiet Learning” in Our Classrooms”

UMinnTeachLearn 13 July 2015 at 9:58 am #

Reblogged this on TILT and commented:

Having said versions of these sentences often this month – Engagement is not always demonstrated through acts of speaking. Yes, introverts *and* extroverts benefit from quiet. Teachers need the pause to make connections as well – it’s a win-win – it seems time to reblog this post from last fall. With its focus on Quiet Learning, the post links additional posts drawing on the work of Stephen Brookfield.

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