Some of the most satisfying moments in teaching are when your students are engaged, when they are deeply absorbed in the material and they are contributing thoughtfully; however, this type of deep student engagement is hard to achieve.
“I dread the moments when I look out into a classroom and see a collection of blank stares or thumbs clicking on tiny keypads: a pool of disengaged students, despite what I thought was a student-centered activity. Recently, I have been considering how teachers (me specifically) undermine our own efforts to engage students. We do that by putting certain educational goals above getting and keeping students involved. If I sense a lack of energy and involvement on the part of students, right then, I may need to adjust my teaching methods, even if that means sacrificing some other laudable goals.”
This ability to adjust and foster better student engagement is something that often requires research and strategy. The following guide offers articles, free reports, seminars, and programs on an array of student engagement strategies from emotional and cognitive engagement to behavioral engagement. No matter what type of student engagement you’re looking for, whether it’s behavioral, emotional, or cognitive, and whether it’s online or face-to-face, the following student engagement strategies will offer insight on strategies you can start utilizing today.
Student Engagement Strategies
As an instructor, it can be hard to light the fire for student engagement, and it can be even more difficult to keep the fire burning when student apathy and boredom creep into your classroom. Not only is student engagement difficult to achieve in the classroom, it’s just as hard to achieve online. Student engagement has become a focus of higher education— online education in particular— over the past few years. The wide range of interactive methods now available on the web provides instructors with a multitude of ways to insert engagement into their courses. But while we hear about engagement from instructors and software companies, students themselves have been a somewhat silent voice in the discussions. Whether you’re hoping to spark engaging discussions online or in the classroom, the following student engagement strategies will help keep your students awake and mitigate those glazed over looks.
Free articles
- How to Improve and Promote Student Engagement in the Online Classroom
- Student Engagement Strategies for the Online Learning Environment
- Building Student Engagement: The Syllabus
- 10 Ways to Promote Student Engagement
- Graphic Novels, Innovative Teaching, and Student Engagement in the Classroom
- Increasing Student Engagement During Synchronous Online Classes
- Free report: Building Student Engagement: 15 Strategies for the College Classroom
- Free report: Tools and Strategies for Engaging Online Students
Teaching Professor articles (requires paid subscription)
- How to Add Student Engagement to Your Online Courses
- Increasing Reading Comprehension and Student Engagement, Face-to-Face and Online
- What Is Student Engagement in Learning?
- Student Engagement: Does It Always Improve Learning?
- Enhancing Student Engagement with PlayPosit
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Behavioral Engagement and Emotional Engagement
Igniting an emotional connection to content inside the classroom can be a powerful tool for student retention and student engagement. Sometimes we may think that we should leave emotions out of our teaching and learning processes, that academics should be a cold and rational pursuit of knowledge. But emotions can really impact our students and deepen learning. So how can you deliberately introduce emotional processes and capture the emotional attention of your students in order to inspire them, motivate them, and encourage them to engage and learn the content? The following strategies introduce how behavioral engagement and emotional engagement can foster and encourage your students to interact, learn, and engage with both their peers and the content.
Free articles
- What Does Student Engagement Look Like?
- How to Use Technology to Harness the Power of Student Emotion
- Emotions in Online Teaching: A Powerful Tool for Helping Online Students Engage, Persist, and Succeed
- How to Structure You Online Class for Inclusion: Two Principles for Fostering Engagement
- Leading Our Class Through Times of Crisis with Engagement and PEACE
Teaching Professor articles (requires paid subscription)
- Finding a Path with a Heart
- Small Online Teaching Strategies That Engage Students and Improve Learning
- Questions That Promote Student Engagement
- Deeper Thinking about Engagement
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Cognitive Engagement
You may have heard the term, but what exactly is cognitive engagement? First, let’s take one step back and start with, What is cognitive psychology and how does it impact active learning and student engagement? According to cognitive psychology, active learning involves the development of cognition, which is achieved by acquiring “organized knowledge structures” and “strategies for remembering, understanding, and solving problems.” (This particular definition is from a cognitive psychology text edited by Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, School.) Additionally, active learning entails a process of interpretation, whereby new knowledge is related to prior knowledge and stored in a manner that emphasizes the elaborated meaning of these relationships.
Faculty interested in promoting this cognitively oriented understanding of learning can do so by familiarizing their students with such cognitive active learning and student engagement strategies as activating prior knowledge, chunking, and practicing metacognitive awareness. The following offers cognitive engagement strategies, what cognitive engagement looks like, and how you can implement this into your own course.
Free articles
- Getting Students to Discuss by Channeling the Affective Domain
- Student Engagement Strategies for the Online Classroom
- How Can We Amplify Student Learning? The ANSWER from Cognitive Psychology
- An Update on Learning Styles/Cognitive Styles Research
- What Does Student Engagement Look Like?
- Building Student Engagement in Online Courses
Teaching Professor articles (requires paid subscription)
- Active Learning: A Perspective from Cognitive Psychology
- Giving the Gift of Self-Directed Learning through Cognitive Wrappers
- What Does Student Engagement Look Like?
- Lectures and Prior Knowledge: Helping Students Make Sense of New Material
