What's the Problem With Quiet Students? Anyone? Anyone?

By Mary M. Reda
Chronicle of Higher Education

Katherine Streeter for The Chronicle

My colleagues' stories and the theory I was reading helped me understand how instructors see the "problem" of quiet students and fueled my sense that "getting them talking" preoccupied many of my colleagues. Even with my new interdisciplinary understanding of silence, I realized there was a crucial question that we weren't asking: What can quiet students tell us about classroom discussions and silence?

Through a yearlong study of a first-year composition class in which students periodically wrote about their experiences of classroom silence, followed by a series of interviews with five students who self-identified as "quiet," I explored what students themselves believe about speaking and silence. I discovered that students understand classroom discussion and silence quite differently than their instructors generally do. Students have complicated interpretations of the classroom that we rarely confront when we focus on "getting them talking." When I asked my students about their classroom experiences, I didn't hear the kinds of stories I expected to—complaints of boredom, confessions about being unprepared, angry litanies of alienation. Instead, in the hundreds of pages of reflections and 15 interviews, students explored their active choices to speak or to be quiet—choices that involve careful analysis of the professor, their classmates, and themselves.

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