Total Participation Techniques

For my latest district professional development day I conducted a one-hour presentation on the topic of student opportunities to respond, which focuses on how long each student has to be actively engaged in order to “make it through” the current lesson.

Featured is the slide deck that I created for the presentation, and I used Total Participation Techniques by Persida and William Himmele as the primary resource for my work. According to the book, “Total Participation Techniques (TPTs) are teaching techniques that allow for all students to demonstrate, at the same time, active participation and cognitive engagement in the topic being studied.” Here is a quick overview of some of the slides that are not entirely self-explanatory:

Slide 1: Contains a link to the session’s resources (tinyurl.com/wasdtpt), which includes a PDF version of the slide deck and two handouts that outline many TPTs for teachers to use, clearly and concisely.
Slide 6: To model best practice, the presentation is wrapped in an essential question, which is “How can I create more beach balls?”
Slide 10: Mentions Webb’s Depth of Knowledge in order to connect past professional development to new learning.
Slide 12: A quote that emphasizes that regularly incorporating TPTs will not only increase student learning, but it is an effective instructional shift that is made by simply working smarter and not harder.
Slide 14: Connects the contents of the presentation to the Charlotte Danielson rubric, which is used for Pennsylvania’s models for Formal Observation and Differentiated Supervision.
Slide 17: To pique participant interest, four technologies that promote active participation are described: Socrative, Plickers, Nearpod, and Kahoot!.
Slide 18: To model best practice, everything is wrapped up by tying it back into the essential question.

Throughout the presentation the participants engage in four different TPTs: Quick-Writes (Slide 2), Ranking (Slide 8), Think-Pair-Share (Slide 13), and The 3-Sentence Wrap-Up (Slide 15). Every professional development session is an opportunity to model best practice, and in this instance the teachers are able to literally experience TPTs while learning about them.

Overall, the goals of the presentation are to (1) identify a problem that can exist (the beach ball scenario described on Slide 4), and then reveal explicit strategies (TPTs) to help solve this problem. Follow-up sessions could include (1) teachers sharing and reflecting upon the use of the TPTs in their classrooms, (2) ways to establish a classroom culture of risk-taking and active engagement (which lends itself to the use of TPTs), and (3) an in depth look at the technologies featured on Slide 17.

If you would like to modify the slide deck for your own use, feel free to contact me and I will be more than happy to send you the original version, which was created in Apple Keynote (version 6.5.2).

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