Gendered Participation

Over the course of the year I began to notice that a group of five boys would dominate every discussion. It felt really gendered to me, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to address it. Previously, I’d allowed students to call on each other. However, this resulted in the same five boys just calling on one another and no one else participating. So, before this discussion started, I told the class that I was going to be calling on students instead of them calling on each other. 

After some initial pushback from the five boys, many students were raising their hands and wanting to share. I called on a few of them to share their thoughts - this was part of my desire to encourage student voice and maintain positive relationships with them. Then, one of the five boys said "can we go back to calling on each other, we’ll let the smaller people talk." I am not sure to what degree the term “smaller people” was intended to be gendered, but I responded to it as a gendered comment. Given the gender dynamics of the class, it was impossible to ignore the potential impact of this statement on my hesitant, quiet, female-identifying and non-binary students. Until this moment, I wasn’t sure how aware my students were of the gendered patterns of participation across the classroom. This demonstrated that they were aware of the dynamic and grouped their peers into different categories based on their level of participation. Do I ignore the comment and move the discussion forward? Or should I call out the comment and discuss the implications of using this potentially gendered language?