If we think that our students are being overly shy or non-communicative, just think that it could be us sitting there – when we ourselves were the same age as our current students – in fear of being called upon to “show up” in class. I don’t know about you, but I was no more ready to sit up and square up my shoulders and make eye contact and interact with a teacher than I was ready to fly to the moon.
The same is true for the self reflection taxonomy work many of us plan on using with our students next year under the “metacognition” rubric. We can’t expect kids who haven’t ever been trained to talk about how they learn than we ourselves could have been expected to do when we were that age. We are going to maybe have to train up a bit over the summer. Do some work on Socratic circles, stuff like that. It’ll be worth it.