Engaging Students in Learning- Open Forum Notes

From the lists below, check off the things you already do. Highlight a couple things that you might try to incorporate into your teaching practice in the next semester.

Ensuring Student Involvement

Possible Actions:

Maintain a passion for the topic because this enthusiasm is contagious.

Make expectations for involvement that is clear, reasonable, and achievable.

Use a variety of teaching and learning strategies to appeal to a variety of learning styles. This involves acknowledging the existence of different learning styles, and developing a variety of teaching strategies.

Realize that you can’t be all things to all people.

Set up tasks and assignments so students have to take some responsibility for their own learning.

Don’t expect to connect with every student every time. Strive to connect with more students more of the time.

Try different teaching and learning strategies with the expectation that there will be both successful and unsuccessful experiments. Remember that classroom dynamics are complex.

Recognize that “involvement” looks different for different people.

Ask students for input on optional topics or issues to cover.

Have students “teach” as part of an assignment.

Ask students for input on the styles and strategies they prefer.

Motivating Students to Attend Class

Possible Actions:

Have pop quizzes (unannounced) in class that are worth a certain percentage of the course mark. Consider the possibility of making some of these group tests.

Post lecture notes, but with blanks that will be addressed in class.

Relate in-class activities to evaluation of some kind.

Have students formulate some of the test questions themselves during class periods.

Communicate importance and value of attendance to students. Explain how accountability is also a workplace expectation.

Make classroom learning relevant to real-life experiences.

Ensure that evaluation draws on classroom learning, not just textbook and web site materials.

Use peer evaluations of presentations that are handed in to the teacher and assigned a mark to encourage attendance for presentations.

Use case study assignments in class for evaluation.

Give marks for in-class assignments.

Accept that not every student is going to love and/or be 100% motivated in every class.

Keep attendance records, not for marks, but to use when students question or challenge marks.

Negotiate some timing issues with the class (i.e. eliminate break and start a bit later or end a bit earlier; blended delivery of course).

Start and/or end classes at tough times of the day with something you know students like.

Try to determine if there are legitimate problems and discuss them with students.

Engage students: start classes in an interesting way (i.e. visuals, humour, safe and success orientated lead-in activities).

Prepare for the low times by having some extra active learning strategies in your “toolkit.”

Poll students to find out what students need from you to make this work.

Keep students actively involved. Incorporate games and short energizers.

Have students identify what grade they are working towards and help them articulate what they need to do to achieve that.

Making Learning Fun

Possible Actions

Use case studies, projects.

Sell “value of learning” by telling stories about self or those who haven’t learned it.

Use coercion to force them to practice what they learn. The fun comes in realizing you have gained new skills.

Develop creative assignments which enable students to demonstrate learning outcomes in a way that is relevant to them.

Link “fun” experiences or stories directly back to learning goals for the course.

Be careful not to take yourself or your course too seriously. Remember that students have lots going on in their lives.

Additional Info from Article on Faculty Practice by David G. Brown.

(Syllabus Magazine, July 2003)

Respond to students’ questions in a timely manner (i.e. email, discussion board, office hours, and voice mail).

Use short quizzes during class.

Create a discussion area where students can post questions and support each other in the learning process.

Send out e-mail through Blackboard to “keep in touch with students” on an individual basis.

Have students write questions on a post-it note before break or before the end of class. Take time at some point to address certain questions.

Allow thinking time when you ask a question. Do not answer your own questions.

Wait for students to respond, and if they don’t after a minute ask a different/simpler question.

Learn students’ names so you can address them by name.

Ask students for “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” indication of whether they think they have it and are ready to move on.

Engaging Students in Learning-Open Forum Notes - Online Module by Georgian College: Centre for Teaching and Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.