We are all familiar with the student who never speaks up in class. They are painfully quiet. They are the student whose name we learn last at the start of the academic year, but perhaps they will turn out to be the one student we worry about the most.
It would be wrong to call our quiet students introverts. Yes some genuinely are introverted (as I was at school – how I ever became a teacher is anyone’s guess) but others are more a ‘think before I speak kind of student’. On occasions, where we are short of time to fit in that plenary, the ‘think before I speak’ students just don’t receive ‘thinking’ time they need, so as a result they don’t speak.