Module II: The Benefits of Student Engagement

Module Objective

Learners will be able to:

Describe the benefits of incorporating student engagement in your instructional designs
Describe how student engagement affects your classroom community
Analyze strategies to use student engagement to develop student-teacher relationships and create a positive classroom community
Examine key instructional strategies for student engagement

Reflect

Before we begin the module today, please watch this TEDx Talk on student engagement and how this one teacher was able to make a difference for her students and her school by noticing and implementing what her students enjoyed. After you are done watching, please write about what you noticed as it relates to student engagement in the Google Doc.

https://youtu.be/rbTylVjogiI

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jrmqBw9f_C1hciuDKWB3D3A0FqB8AkVZp7JiSC8Hbk0/edit?usp=sharing

The Benefits of Student Engagement

There are many significant benefits to fostering student engagement in your classroom. One of the most important benefits to stress is the academic excellence of your students when they are engaged. According to Parsons et al. (2014), student engagement is the predictor of student learning, grades, achievement, test scores, comprehension, and graduation. The student's engagement has the largest correlation to whether or not they will develop the necessary learning skills that make students successful inside and outside of school.

To name several other benefits, some of these include:

Learning and developing leadership skills
Learning essential life skills
Developing skills around teamwork and group collaboration which also develops advanced social skills
Enhancing the overall learning experience
Higher grades and academic success
Students who are more engaged in their learning are also less likely to drop out of school
See an improvement in academic achievement and confidence
Greater change to persevere and problem-solve academic struggles
Having fun with your learning
Social and interpersonal engagement can also lead to developing students' social-cultural connections that can result in them maintaining engagement throughout their academic lives.

While talking about the benefits of engaging your students, here are some reasons why students being disengaged can be detrimental to their learning:

Delays and lowers cognitive abilities and performance
Is more likely to result in disruptive, distracting, and difficult behaviors during class time
Less engagement leads to significantly less motivation to succeed or even complete assignments
A lack of value in their learning
Causes emotional, behavioral, learning, and social problems
Can result in frequent absences and a higher dropout rate

Watch this video: Be a Mr. Jensen and then reflect in the Google doc on how this video is strongly correlated to student engagement and what happened to this student and his learning after one teacher made a difference. How does this video also relate to the benefits of engagement and the struggles of disengagement?

Student Engagement and Building a Class Community

Being engaged in your learning is more than just being present in class. Engagement means being interested, focused, connected, and motivated to succeed. To achieve this kind of meaningful engagement, students need to have meaningful connections with their peers, the instructors, and the material. Creating these relationships is an essential step to developing these connections because these types of meaningful relationships are linked to being strong motivators for students in the learning process.

For starters, you can make a good first impression on your students by setting clear expectations and standards that help foster a safe community. Sharing ideas, experiences, and interpretations can be scary sometimes for students for many reasons including a belief that their peers will judge them, or that what they have to say will be incorrect. To help limit these fears, set a clear standard from the start of the class on respecting other people's experiences and beliefs, and have discussions where we can question other ideas and ask our peers to elaborate instead of debate and argue. As an educator, you can be aware of the kind of language you use when a student answers. If the answer they give is not the one you were looking for, maybe say something along the lines of "That's a really great idea/interpretation that I did not think about, I like where your mind is going. Does anyone else have any ideas?" or "Close, but you are on the right track". If a student answers incorrectly and you say "No that's wrong" or something along those lines, they will most likely feel embarrassed or judged by everyone in the class. Showing students that their participation is more important than getting the correct answer goes a long way in engaging them in the class. The more often students participate, the more engaged they are in the material, and the higher their academic success will be. This is not something that happens overnight, but little by little your students will begin to open up and feel respected and safe enough to participate and share ideas and experiences.

Strategies for Student Engagement

Different Types of Strategies:

There are a number of strategies that you can incorporate into your instructional designs to help foster student engagement. Here are several examples from Prodigy Education to reference and take note of.

Educational Technology

Technology is a resource in our lives that will only continue to develop. Utilizing technology in the classroom is a vital component of student engagement because technology is typically the modality of choice when it comes to learning. Students today are going up in a more technology-reliant world than the generations before them and using technology is all they know. Incorporating educational technology into your classrooms is a great way to boost student engagement by giving them the choice to use the modality of their choice. However, some students still prefer writing and paperback books so make sure to give them the option of which source they would rather use when possible.

Classroom Management

How you can manage and control your classroom is more involved in student engagement than you may realize. As educators, it is our duty to build productive and structured environments that help our students thrive. Following these three suggestions below for classroom management will help limit distractions and increase student engagement

Create classroom rules and set clear expectations from the start: Allow students to come up with their own rules at the beginning of the school year and then pool the ideas together to create a classroom set of rules. The students will feel more compelled to abide by these rules because they see more value and ownership since they were the ones who made them.
Build routines that bring the attention back to you: A very popular one that schools use is the "*school*, *school*, *I*like*school*" claps where the students will hear that and know they have to repeat your claps and then stop talking. This gets students to focus on you which can help with their engagement.
Create a safe environment with a clear set of standards for all students to follow: Students will feel much safer and willing to participate if they know that any language that dismisses them or talks down to them will not be tolerated. Set those clear standards where students know that open discussions are a time to share opinions and not put each other down and that it is okay to not know the correct answer.

Quick Writes

Instructing the students to write down their thoughts, opinions, questions they have, and information they’ve learned is a great way to engage them in a thoughtful learning process. Challenge students to complete a quick write of your choice (content related or outside of school-related) and then ask them to write a paragraph or two about thoughts that they have. Quick writes are also a great way to do checkpoints with your students to see where they are at with the curriculum.

For example: (In social studies classroom) How did the content make you feel? How do you think this historical event has affected our lives today?

Reciprocal Reading

Reciprocal reading is a great way to develop students' reading comprehension and engagement while they read. This strategy involves four key components:

Predicting the next outcome
Questioning what you're reading (use the 5 W's & H: who, what, where, when, why, and how)
Clarify the textual material and identify concepts you do not understand and any words that you do not know
Summarize the text into the most important aspects that stuck out to you

Classroom Participation

Classroom participation has a huge factor in your students' engagement levels because participation can be linked to the success of a student. If there are only a few students answering your questions in class, the other students can lag behind and it becomes evident that they are not as invested in the material. Maybe to try and make up for this, you decide to call your students out. Whereas this may be an okay idea on some occasions, more often than not it can put students on the spot and really freak them out. How can you get other students to participate without intentionally putting your students on the spot? Here are some ideas to get you started:

Popsicle sticks: This method is used throughout any grade level K-12 because it is so easy to use and easy to understand. Whenever you need an answer, use the popsicle sticks first before calling on students.
Wheel of names: A wheel of names is a really fun way to get students to participate. It is the same concept as the popsicle sticks, but there is a level of excitement in "Who's the wheel going to land on?" and with the theatrics of the wheel, students can get really into it. Use this link to access a great online Wheel of Names.
Think-pair-share: Think-pair-shares are a great way to get students involved in the lesson because they can eliminate the fear of participating and being incorrect. In a think-pair-share, have the students think about their answers, opinions, and responses, and then have them pair up with someone close by to share what their ideas were. After sharing, the students more often than not will feel more confident in responding because they have a greater trust in their answers.

Flexible Seating

The concept of flexible seating is more up-and-coming nowadays because educators are starting to realize that traditional desks and chairs can be too uncomfortable for students to sit in all day long. Flexible seating gives students a more comfortable environment that can suit multiple learning needs. If a student needs to fidget with things to help stay focused, an exercise ball would be a great tool for them to sit on because they can fidget on the ball and limit any potential distractions. Other flexible seating choices include couches, standing desks, stools, bean bag chairs, mats, seat cushions, and wobbling chairs.

Project-Based Learning

Project-based learning is an incredibly powerful learning tool that many schools today are beginning to solely focus on. When implementing this learning style, it is important for educators to remember that project-based learning is not the same thing as project assessments. Projects are a way for students to show their skills and understanding of the content that can be done quickly in class or at home. Project-based learning is essentially learning by doing; they focus on the learning process itself instead of the final result. Students primarily take control of their learning with PBLs and develop essential critical thinking, collaborative and problem-solving skills that help keep them engaged in the learning process. When using a PBL it's important to remember that the overall question must be open-ended so students can explore and interpret the content as they need, encourage them to integrate the necessary skills they have and are learning, and gives students the opportunity to take their own approach to figure out the problem and come up with a final solution.

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Sometimes in education, we miss essential opportunities to represent and learn about other cultures and backgrounds in our curriculums. When students can see their cultures and experiences reflected in lesson plans, they instantly become more engaged because it is something that matters to them and is a part of their lives. They may also be more adept to participate and share their experiences with the class to teach their peers about their culture. Some ways we can incorporate culturally responsive teaching in our classrooms are:

Bringing in guest speakers from the community: Students are often more engaged if the person teaching them shares a common background. Diverse speakers give students the opportunity to relate to other people's experiences and cultures or have an opportunity to learn about how diverse the world actually is.
Discuss relevant world issues: Incorporate what is going on in the world in your lessons. This is a great way to get students to expand their minds, and learn about unfamiliar places in the world and what their experiences are.
Differentiate the learning: Incorporate different learning styles and student interests into your classroom to give students an opportunity to learn in ways that are comfortable to them about content that is valuable to them.
Diversify the learning materials: Do some research and incorporate learning materials from multiple different schools about groups and topics that are essential but not talked about enough.

These were only a few of the suggested strategies suggested on Prodigy Education. If you'd like to check out the other strategies listed, click here.

Activities

Read and summarize the articles on student engagement.
Summarize the benefits of student engagement and how those benefits will affect your instructional design.
Describe the learning strategy that interested you the most and why. As a student, which of those strategies do you wish you had seen more of in the classroom?
Create an outline of a potential instructional design you would use to increase student engagement.

Complete all of this in your google doc link here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jrmqBw9f_C1hciuDKWB3D3A0FqB8AkVZp7JiSC8Hbk0/edit?usp=sharing

Proceed to the Next Module

Now that you have all the information you need on what student engagement is and what strategies you can use to better your student's learning, it's now time to learn how you can put it all together in your own instructional design.

Find out how here: Module III: Creating an Instructional Design for Student Engagement

Course Navigation

Engagement Strategies for Student Success

Module I: Introduction to Student Engagement

Module II: The Benefits of Student Engagement

Module III: Creating an Instructional Design for Student Engagement

Module IV: The Product

References

Barnard College. (2017). Student engagement and community-building. Barnard Center for Engaged Pedagogy. Accessed from: https://cep.barnard.edu/student-engagement-and-community-building

California State University. (n.d.). Benefits of engagement. CSUSB. Accessed from: https://www.csusb.edu/student-leadership-engagement/benefits-engagement

Carini, R. M., Kuh, G. D., & Klein, S. P. (2006). Student Engagement and Student Learning: Testing the Linkages. Research in Higher Education. Vol 47(1), pp. 1–32. Accessed from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40185882

Finley, T. (2015). Engage kids with 7 times the effect. Edutopia. Accessed from: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/engage-with-7x-the-effect-todd-finley

Game, P. (2020). 17 best student engagement strategies. Prodigy Education. Accessed from: https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/blog/student-engagement-strategies/

Lawson, M. A., & Lawson, H. A. (2013). New Conceptual Frameworks for Student Engagement Research, Policy, and Practice. Review of Educational Research, 83(3), 432–479. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24434165