In a lucky twist of fate, I happened to be reading Total Participation Techniques by Pérsida Himmele and William Himmele for my TESOL assessments course just as I began to plan for edTPA. I completed my edTPA portfolio in my social studies teaching internship in Baltimore County’s “Personal Finance and Economic Theory” course. Economics as a field has earned its reputation as an abstract and esoteric field, and I was really looking for ways to engage my checked-out 12th graders. Enter Total Participation Techniques (TPT). Of all the methods texts I encountered during my master’s program, this is the one that will have the most impact. A few of my personal take-aways:

• Students pay better attention to a lecture after engaging in an interactive TPT. TPT methods “capture” student attention. So, a short lecture fits best between moments of interaction and accountability.
• Starting a brainstorm in groups is not effective. You get more creativity if you have people think individually first, and then come together to pool ideas.
• If you ask an open-ended, cognitively complex question that students can connect to on a personal level, and if you’ve given students adequate time to process through quick-writes and pair-shares, then you should be able to expect students to respond if you call on them. Cold-calling, if it’s sequentially the last thing you do, shows students you have high expectations for them and holds them accountable for rigorous thinking.