Teachers say 14 year old is too quiet in class

One of my DS teacher has set him a target to ask or respond to a question at least once in any of his lessons

Oh dear, the extrovert-bias strikes again. I was told this all the time during school and it stressed me out - I was an adult when I heard about introversion / extroversion - it all clicked! Introverts need time to think about their responses and don't just blurt out first thing that comes into their head. Teachers really need to start understanding that & value the strengths of all pupils in a class.

My son used to get this but now he won't shut up!

One of the best techniques was used by his English teacher who rather than asking people to put their hands up would randomly chose people to answer questions. She had a list which she checked off to ensure fair distribution of questions and also categorised questions into simple, medium and hard so they were also divided up but ensuring the hardest were never asked of the less able students but were given to the top half of the class.

This was the less able were able to answer the questions put to them and their confidence in speaking out grew.

This was my 20something at 14 one teacher actually gave us the wrong child on parents night he had no clue dd was there . You can't make children speak out and you can't force anything on a 14yr old ime, if he is shy the teachers shouldn't be penalising him for it.

I had to tutor a university arts student who was not able to take part in dscussions about other students work....eith her agreement we worked out one possible question per week...it helped her a lot.

This is hard for the school to support really. All teachers will have a variety of techniques to encourage everyone to join in - you want everyone to speak out in lesson at the very least once a week, I'd say, but if a student flat out won't engage, you can't make them speak. The only way to go then is punishment which as a teacher seems harsh. They could maybe give him a positive report, so he gets positive comments when he contributes in class. But a quiet y9 is unlikely to actually care that much about it. Maybe worth a try with reinforcement/rewards at home.