For Tuesday and Thursday’s classes, I logged when and from which table any student spoke up in class to answer a question, share a thought, etc. I arbitrarily assigned numbers to each table according to the diagram on the right.
The data appear below.
| Tuesday 2/3/15 | Thursday 2/5/15 | ||
| time | table | time | table |
| 1:42 | 3 | 1:42 | 8 |
| 1:44 | 3 | 2:10 | 4 |
| 1:44 | 5 | 2:22 | 1 |
| 1:45 | 2 | 2:25 | 3 |
| 1:46 | 8 | 2:32 | 8 |
| 1:46 | 3 | 2:33 | 7 |
| 1:53 | 3 | 2:34 | 7 |
| 1:54 | 5 | 2:35 | 3 |
| 1:55 | 5 | 2:39 | 8 |
| 2:04 | 4 | 2:43 | 1 |
| 2:05 | 1 | 2:44 | 8 |
| 2:07 | 4 | 2:52 | 2 |
| 2:08 | 3 | 2:53 | 7 |
| 2:09 | 3 | 2:54 | 7 |
| 2:10 | 8 | 2:55 | 8 |
| 2:10 | 2 | ||
| 2:10 | 6 | ||
| 2:10 | 7 | ||
| 2:11 | 5 | ||
| 2:12 | 8 | ||
| 2:13 | 4 | ||
| 2:28 | 7 | ||
| 2:30 | 6 | ||
| 2:30 | 3 | ||
| 2:32 | 7 | ||
| 2:32 | 4 | ||
| 2:33 | 8 | ||
| 2:34 | 2 | ||
| 2:36 | 4 | ||
| 2:36 | 3 | ||
This is a fascinating breakdown of the week’s “discussion.” It looks like Tuesday’s class had much more participation. The next step is to figure out why. Was it simply that we had a guest speaker for about 20 minutes on Thursday, and this limited our discussion time? Or was there something compelling about Tuesday’s reading that brought more people into the discussion? Or something else entirely?