As teaching fellows, we often quantify our work by audience participation. However, while participation is just fine, intellectual participation is a standard of excellence that many strive to achieve. How do we define intellectual participation visually? Verbally? Physically? And how do we measure intellectual participation in the classroom?

Intellectual participation doesn’t technically look like anything. However, it is generally identified as students actively “exploring, questioning, creating, contributing,” etc to class discourse (Bradbury & Muhlhauser 1). For example, rather than students speaking directly to the teacher in response to a question, intellectual participation may involve:

• Students questioning one another
• Students challenging one another
• Students investigating the topic independently rather than relying on the teacher for guidance.

While visual intellectual participation is relatively easy to identify, verbal intellectual participation is far more nuanced. The class takes cues from the instructor on how to “sound active,” observing how the instructor demonstrates participation and following suit. As a result, if an instructor is greeted with silence in response to their demonstration, they might fall into the trap of believing that this silence reflects poorly on their teaching and try to ‘bait’ their students into participation.

The ‘feeling’ of physical intellectual participation is described by instructors as a shift between feeling “feeling uncomfortable or unsettled and feeling comfortable, familiar, or in “flow (Bradbury and Mulhauser 1).’” Intellectual participation generally feels ‘good,’ and as such we tend to seek profound moments of audience interaction to ‘persuade’ ourselves that we are good at our jobs, that we are positively and earnestly impacting our students.

How can we measure intellectual participation?

It’s universally understood that participation is notoriously difficult to measure and grade. Whether you have a loud classroom or 3 students that repeatedly speak up during class sessions, it’s impossible to determine the ‘quality’ of any classroom participation, much less intellectual classroom participation.

Bradbury and Mulhauser suggest continuously evaluating the nature of classroom participation and the incentives driving it; for example, “Why do we reward some actions over others, and what do we lose when we do this?’ and “ are the actions we associate with intellectual participation student centered or teacher centered?(Bradbury and Mulhauser 1).