This document provides tips and strategies for promoting engaged learning in the classroom. It discusses the importance of student motivation and active learning techniques. Challenges to student engagement are outlined, such as a lack of intrinsic motivation from grades alone. Effective strategies include role playing, debates, response systems, and authentic assessments. The document emphasizes creating a learning-centered environment where students take an active role in constructing knowledge.

1. Engaged Learning
Tips and Strategies for Promoting
Engaged Learning in Your Classroom
CTLE Brownbag Series
October 30, 2012

2. Objectives
• Become familiar with the theory of student
engagement and its components
(student motivation and active learning)
• Leave today’s session with ideas to try out in your
courses

4. Challenges to Engaging Students
Think for a moment about a class you
have taught or observed, where some of
the students were not engaged.
What are some of the
challenges we are seeing
to engage our students?

5. Cognitive View of Learning
Students actively construct knowledge, and
therefore must be cognitively ―engaged‖ to
learn.
-Richard Mayer
Learning is a dynamic process that
consists of making sense and
meaning out of new information and
connecting it to what is already
known.

6. Elizabeth Barkley on Student Engagement
To learn well and deeply, students need to be active participants
in the learning process.
This typically involves doing something—
for example, thinking, reading, discussing,
problem-solving or reflecting.

7. DNA of Student Engagement
Motivation
Active Learning

8. Motivation
―the level of enthusiasm and
the degree to which students
invest attention and effort in
learning‖
-Brophy (2010)

9. Motivation by rewards or punishments (Grades)
• According to Ken Bain, students who are motivated by
extrinsic rewards, lose their interest in a subject shortly after
the extrinsic reward has been removed.
• They become ―surface‖ or ―strategic‖ learners‖
as opposed to ―deep learners‖

10. How the Best College Teachers Motivate
1. Avoided extrinsic motivators and fostered intrinsic ones.
2. Gave students as much control over their own education as possible.
3. Displayed a strong interest in their learning and faith in their abilities.
4. Offered nonjudgmental feedback on students’ work, stressed
opportunities to improve, and constantly looked for ways to stimulate.
5. Rather than pitting people against each other, they encouraged
cooperation and collaboration.
6. In general, they avoided grading on the curve, and instead gave
everyone the opportunity to achieve the highest standard and grades.
“They invite, rather than command,
and often display the attributes of someone inviting colleagues to dinner,
rather than the demeanor of a bailiff summoning someone to court.”
-Ken Bain
What the Best College Teachers Do

11. Motivating Students
• Think back to one or the subjects or classes you
took as a student. What motivated you to learn
more about it?
• How do you know when your students are
motivated?
• What has worked in your courses to motivate
students?

12. Engaging and Motivating Students
Faculty are discussing online and blended
environments, but much of the ideas apply equally to
traditional classrooms.
Video
http://youtu.be/DvJuzE-g7OM

13. Reflection on Lessons
Write on an index card:
Think about a time when you were in the classroom and you knew that a
lesson was going badly. What were you (or the instructor) doing, or what was
happening in the class?
Then think about a time when you became aware that your teaching was
going very well. It was a moment that confirmed you were in the right calling.
Now write on an index card: What were you teaching and what specifically
happened that made you sense that you were in the flow?
Begin with this phrase: ―As I looked at the students I realized…‖

14. Discussion
Turn to someone nearby, discuss what you wrote.
Then, after listening to each other, answer the
question:
What characteristics are present when a
lesson is going well, and when a lesson is
going poorly?

15. DNA of Student Engagement
Motivation
Active Learning

16. Active Learning
"Active Learning is, in short, anything that
students do in a classroom other than merely
passively listening to an instructor's lecture.‖
Paulson & Faust
Active Learning for the College Classroom
http://www.calstatela.edu/dept/chem/chem2/Active

17. Fink’s Holistic Active Learning
Acquiring Information & Ideas
• Reading Primary Texts and Textbooks
• Listening to Lecture
• Accessing information/ideas in class, out of
class, online
Interactive Learning (Experience)
• Doing, Discussing
• Experiential, Inquiry, Problem solving
• Actual, Simulated
• Usually Social
Reflective Learning (Reflective Dialogue)
• Minute Papers
• Free-Writing
• Portfolios
• Journals
• Usually Solitary
Fink (2004)
http://trc.virginia.edu/Workshops/2004/Fink_Designing_Courses_2004.pdf

18. Active Learning & ―Rich‖ Learning Experiences
• Think/Pair/Share • Debates
• Role Playing • Self- and Peer-Review
• Simulations • Games
• Group Presentations • Online Discussions
• Classroom Assessment • Journals
Techniques • Collaborative Learning
• Classroom Response Systems • Service Learning
• Interviews • Situational Observations
• Panel Discussions • Authentic Projects
For the next few minutes, form groups with colleagues from your
college and make a list of successful active learning strategies
that have worked with your students, or ones that you would like
to try out.

19. Engaging Students in Argument
FRAMcorp is coming to town. This multinational conglomerate makes headlines for its innovative technological
products but has drawn criticism for causing pollution, increasing traffic in rural areas, and driving local
competitors out of business. FRAMcorp wants to establish a plant that will employ about 500 people in the town
of Homeland Square. Restaurants and retail stores will also surely follow, increasing employment opportunities.
However, some citizens, fearing the plant’s disruption of their way of life, have formed the Homeland Square
Neighborhood Association (HSNA) to make their concerns public. In a show of goodwill, FRAMcorp agrees to
debate the HSNA and leave the fate of the plant in the hands of Homeland Square’s townspeople. If they veto
the plant, it will be built elsewhere.
• Group 1 represents FRAMcorp.
• Group 2 represents the HSNA.
• Group 3 represents the townspeople.
• Groups 1 and 2 spend several minutes discussing among themselves how best to present their cases to
the voters. The two groups then face each other and debate the issue for at least 20 minutes. Group 3 is
free to ask questions of either side.
• The outcome is not as important as the process of arguing and counter-arguing. By projecting themselves
into imaginary roles, students often emerge from the exercise with a deeper appreciation of the pros and
cons of controversial issues.
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/engaging-students-in-argument

20. Role Playing
How might role playing be used in your classroom to
engage students?
• American Government – Mock legislature.
• History, World War I – Students assumed roles of nations and had to
negotiate alliances.
• Teen Court
• Accounting: Small Business Simulation
• Ethics in Engineering?
Video
http://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/forum_2012spring/7

21. Classroom Response Systems
• Poll Everywhere - works with non-smartphones, too
– http://www.polleverywhere.com/
– summary: http://suefrantz.com/2010/10/09/poll-everywhere/
• ―Low-Tech‖ Classroom Response Systems
– Flash Cards (Ed Prather, Anthropology, UofA)
– Fingers
– Small White Boards – Paradigms in Physics
• SWBQ - http://www.physics.oregonstate.edu/portfolioswiki/swbq:swbq
• Shiny white shower board stuff -
http://www.physics.oregonstate.edu/portfolioswiki/props:start
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/low-tech-alternatives-to-clickers/34184

22. Active Learning Classrooms
The University of Minnesota
Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfT_hoiuY8w

23. Active Learning with Dr. Richard Felder
Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J1URbdisYE

24. The Minute Paper
• What idea(s) struck you as things you might try or
could or put into practice?
• How could today’s session or your learning
experience have been improved?

25. Engaged Learning
Tips and Strategies for Promoting
Engaged Learning in Your Classroom
CTLE Brownbag Series
October 30, 2012

26. Tips and Strategies for Promoting Active Learning
• Be clear on your learning goals
• Clarify your role (teacher, facilitator or coach?)
• Orient students to their new roles
• Help students develop learning strategies
• Activate prior learning
• Limit and chunk information
• Provide opportunities for guided practice
and rehearsal
• Organize lectures in ways that promote active learning
• Use reverse or inverted classroom organization
• Use rubrics to give learners frequent and useful feedback

27. Authentic/Learning-Centered Assessments
• Observations • Rubrics
• Essays • Self-Evaluations
• Interviews • Peer-Evaluations
• Performance Tasks • Graded Discussions
• Exhibitions
• Demonstrations
• ePortfolios
• Journals
• Student-created test items

28. Learning Activities for Holistic, Active Learning
Fink (2004)
http://trc.virginia.edu/Workshops/2004/Fink_Designing_Courses_2004.pdf

29. Sources
• Elizabeth Barkley, NISOD Annual Conference, 5/31/10
• Dawn Deming: Improving Learning
http://www.slideshare.net/dawndeming/powerpoint-summary-of-inquiry-based-teachingfinkel
• ―What the Best College Teachers Do‖ by Ken Bain
• ―Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College
Faculty‖ by Elizabeth Barkley
• Designing Courses for Significant Learning
L. Dee Fink (2004)
http://trc.virginia.edu/Workshops/2004/Fink_Designing_Courses_2004.pdf