12 How Do I Engage Students?

Craig looked out across the sullen faces of his students, as they slumped in their seats around the classroom. His annoyance and frustration rose as he did so. Why, Craig wondered, did he have so much trouble motivating students? When he would walk by his colleague’s classrooms, Craig could hear and see excited students eagerly engaging their teacher, classmates, and materials. Energy poured out of their classrooms. Yet Craig could hardly spur a spare bit of eagerness or energy from his own stultified students. Craig chalked it up to his subject, although in doing so, he suspected that he was only making excuses. How, he wondered, might he be able to engage students, even if only a little bit more? 

Conventions

Teaching can be relatively easy to approach, design, and implement if all you do is focus on your own conduct. After all, you have nearly complete control over your own conduct, beyond complying with basic institutional requirements. If, for instance, all that your chosen instructional approach requires is to outline and give your lectures, design and display your slide shows, and draft, administer, and score your quizzes, tests, and examinations, then you have clear and manageable tasks. Go for it. You’ll find teaching to be not too challenging and not at all mystifying. Teachers have clearly established conventions for lecturing, presenting, and assessing. Your department and colleagues will give you all the help with those practices that you may need. Students won’t trouble you too much, either, because you’ll be following the familiar conventions for traditional instruction. You’ll live a peaceful life, even if some of your students struggle more than they must, and some who could succeed will instead fail. Teaching conventionally is, well, conventional. Follow conventions if you want to be part of the herd.

Engagement

Teaching becomes much more challenging and meaningful, though, when you shift your focus from your teaching to student learning. And teaching becomes a great challenge and mystery, when you focus on promoting the greatest possible student growth and development in all their wondrous capacities related to your course and subject. Think of that full involvement of your students in their own growth and learning as their engagement. Feeding them knowledge for them to passively consume will produce limited benefits. Engaging them fully and deeply in your subject may by contrast produce remarkable growth and realize rich capacities. When you accept student engagement as your goal, you turn teaching from a pastime to a passion, and from a vocation to a ministry. Yet because students control their engagement, over which you have only limited influence, you also take on a marvelous challenge. 

Motivation

Student motivation is indeed a complex and mysterious subject. You cannot demand student responsibility. The more your teaching does so, the less responsibility your teaching produces. Responsibility is instead by definition something that exists within the individual, not something coerced from outside. You can lead a horse to water but not make it drink. Coercive means may at first somewhat influence student engagement and responsibility. But schools generally limit coercion, which may also soon become grossly counterproductive. You simply cannot force students to do as you believe best for them. Motivation, one could say, must be internal. But does motivation truly exist? Or is it instead simply a way of distinguishing students who behave in helpful ways from students who don’t? Rather than focusing on somehow pouring a magical elixir into students, to coax out an even more imaginary motivation, consider focusing on influencing the behaviors that benefit students. Consider reshaping your teaching resources and environment to produce the student responses that benefit them. Then call them motivated, if you wish. But know that you will have designed a properly influential learning environment. 

Displays

Your slide shows or other fixed and graphic presentations are an example of a teaching method that may either promote or discourage productive student engagement. You may be readily able to produce elaborate, attractive, and entertaining graphic presentations, to go along with your lecture or as resources illustrating various points. Yet the more elaborate your graphic presentations, with an alluring design aesthetic, beautiful images, and plenty of entertaining animation, the more passively you may find your students responding. Your displays may mesmerize, rather than properly engage, your students. Your presentations may distract students from the note taking, processing, questioning, and evaluating in which they need to engage to spur their learning. Tone down your displays. Remove multiple colors in favor of simple black and white. Remove stray images because images require students to use substantially more mental processing than a simple word or two. Leave slides deliberately incomplete, with organizers for students to complete and questions for students to investigate and answer. Don’t entertain. Instead, educate. Design your slide shows and other presentations to increase, not decrease, engagement. 

Resources

The instructional resources that you design and provide through your course-management system can also either invite or discourage student engagement. You may, on the one hand, lard your course’s online resources with complete outlines, polished video demonstrations, and elaborate readings on challenging aspects of your subject. Yet these resources may substitute for, discourage, and distract from student effort and engagement. Your online resources should instead invite students to engage and explore your subject, and test and apply their new knowledge. Your resources might thus instead include outline organizers for students to complete with their own detail, video tutorials that require students to record answers or select options as they proceed, and practice problems for students to complete with automated scoring and answer explanations. Design resources that challenge students to comprehend, organize, recall, analyze, and apply their new knowledge, while expanding their skills. Make resources increase, rather than decrease, engagement. 

Feedback

As just suggested in the prior paragraph, students can benefit from prompt, accurate feedback, which encourages student engagement. When a student knows that a helpful response, whether a confirmation, correction, or elaboration, will follow their action, they tend to engage more frequently and committedly to that action. You could, for instance, offer students practice problems, tests, or essays, in class or outside of class. If you do so without any feedback, or with feedback delayed for days or more, then students may not participate or, if you require participation, may devote only cursory effort. If, on the other hand, you provide prompt feedback, students are likely to complete the exercises with greater effort. You don’t have to take feedback entirely on yourself. You might instead automate scoring and explanations in an electronic format. Alternatively, you might have a scoring rubric that you can make available as soon as students complete the exercise, allowing them to self-score. Or you might instead have students exchange their work for one another to score, engaging one another using their own discernment, followed up by your scoring rubric. To gain greater student engagement, design greater feedback into your instruction, given promptly. 

Collaboration

As the prior paragraph just suggested, student collaborations can spur greater engagement. Not all students benefit from paired or group work. Some students prefer to study alone and may find paired or group work annoying and distracting. Unless your instructional objectives include developing teamwork, communication, and social-interaction skills, hesitate to require substantial paired or group work, as a substitute for other forms of guided engagement. But other students prosper when getting to interact and communicate with others, while leading, following, and expressing themselves. You may thus include student collaborations for brief periods of active engagement in between your lectures, slide shows, demonstrations, and other class activities. For those collaborations, consider using guided worksheets that involve two or more student roles, whether for instance to question, answer, and score, debate in opposing roles, moderate, and score, or lead, follow, and monitor. Collaborations can alternatively include group projects, experiments, and presentations. Don’t let group work bog down your instruction, devolving into aimless wandering and off-topic conversation. Keep a rigorous structure tied to your instructional objectives. But introduce sufficient student collaboration into your teaching to enliven relationships and increase freedom, energy, and engagement. 

Discussion

Class discussion is an instant and relatively easy way of increasing student engagement. Your challenge with class discussion is not to increase student participation. You can, for instance, readily call on students to answer your factual questions and applaud or correct them when they respond. The challenge with class discussion is instead to genuinely increase student engagement toward achieving your instructional objectives. Calling on students can stress, embarrass, and intimidate them, depending on how you handle it. Asking factual questions may also do little more than confirm basic knowledge rather than elaborating, extending, evaluating, and applying it. Discussion may, in other words, not engage students at deeper levels, unless you develop your questioning craft. Move gradually or swiftly, depending on the quality and confidence of student responses, from factual inquiries toward elaborative, generative, and evaluative questions. Support timid respondents to avoid anxiety and embarrassment, while challenging confident respondents to think more deeply and analytically. Using discussion wisely and insightfully can spur student engagement. 

Gamification

The single most-obvious way of increasing engagement, so obvious as to put off some students, is to gamify learning. To gamify means to inject game-like elements into academic exercises. Gamification can be elaborate or simple. Simply adding token awards in mock competitions within academic exercises can add an element of fun, energy, and humor. Your token awards may even mimic items relevant to your instructional unit. Your academic game may, for instance, award the studied cities, territories, or islands to prevailing students studying a geography unit. Likewise, your academic game may award the studied trade items to prevailing students in an economics course. Off-the-shelf electronic applications can increase the complexity and effectiveness of academic games. While gamification can be gimmicky, and not all students may respond to it, gamification can be an effective strategy at all levels. Some of your best learners likely already subtly use elements of gamification, even over such simple rewards as a study break, to increase their energy, concentration, and discipline. 

Optimal

The above discussion should already have highlighted that students do not necessarily benefit from a high degree of energetic but relatively mindless activity. The instructional strategy is not simply to spur energy and activity. It is instead to increase productive student interaction with the subject. Engagement, in other words, has an optimal level and preferred form. Don’t assume that because students are talking, gesturing, scribbling or typing madly, or moving purposefully and actively about the classroom that they are learning. You know better than that. Indeed, student silence can indicate productive reflection, just as blank stares can indicate deep processing. When you design guided paired or group interaction to spur student participation in the classroom, continue to monitor that interaction closely. Listen to what students are saying. Observe closely what they are doing. Guide wandering pairs and groups firmly back to your designed instruction. Pause the exercise to call out to the class especially productive paired or group work, or to correct common misconceptions that you are observing. Let students know that you are still teaching while they engage one another productively. 

Reflection

On a scale from one to ten, how engaging is your instruction? Do you have colleagues who clearly engage their students to a greater degree than you do? If so, what methods do they use to produce that greater engagement, and how effective do you believe those methods are in spurring learning? How motivated do you feel your typical student is? What behaviors do you observe that demonstrate to you that a student is or is not motivated? How can you increase the motivated behaviors while decreasing the unmotivated behaviors? Do your slide shows and other presentations increase or decrease student engagement? Do your online resources increase or decrease student engagement? Do your assignments and voluntary exercises provide prompt feedback in ways that increase student engagement? Do you use in-class or outside-of-class student collaborations to increase engagement? How effective of a questioner and moderator are you for in-class discussions? Can you reshape your moderation practices to enrich the quality of discussions?

Key Points

• Traditional instruction may not sufficiently engage students to learn.

• Spur active engagement with instructional designs around the subject.

• Encourage productive student study behaviors as proper motivation.

• Make your presentations spur engagement rather than entertain.

• Make your resources invite rather than discourage interaction.

• Use prompt feedback to spur greater student engagement in exercises.

• Use collaborations to increase communication and interaction.

• Gamifying learning is an obvious way of increasing engagement.

• Guide class discussions from factual responses to deeper processing.

• Design and monitor instruction for an optimal level of engagement.

Read Chapter 13.