Using Student Voice to Increase Engagement
Warm-up
For this course, it can be beneficial to keep a digital journal for your thoughts and reflections. You may choose a Word doc, a Google doc, or even paper and pen.
In your previous schooling years, what made a lesson engaging for you?
Introduction
In this unit, we delve into empowering students to become active contributors to their educational journey. This unit builds upon our previous exploration of the barriers that can hinder student engagement, acknowledging the challenges such as distractions, disinterest, and external pressures that educators often encounter. As we embark on this unit, we recognize that one key strategy to overcome these barriers is to embrace student voice and encourage their active participation in the learning process. By tapping into the insights, experiences, and perspectives of our students, we can create inclusive learning environments that cater to diverse styles, needs, and backgrounds.
Outcomes
- Address the importance of inclusivity and diversity in promoting learner engagement.
- Explore strategies for accommodating various learning styles, needs, and backgrounds
Why is Student Voice Important?
Please watch these two short clips on why student voice is important.
Ways to Use Student Voice to Guide Instruction
- Ask students what they know about a topic before instruction: Background-knowledge probes are useful because they can help instructors decide what to cover in a limited time, ensuring that subsequent meetings of the course will better engage students, and can even generate discussion in the moment.
- Have students model or explain to other students: When students begin to grasp a concept in a difficult lecture for the first time, they may feel like a light bulb has just turned on, bringing clarity to their understanding of a topic. This is a great opportunity to ask these students to explain it to the rest of the class and take other people’s questions, interrupting only to correct or clarify information.
- Encourage students to take more active roles in collaborative learning and teaching: Many studies underscore the effectiveness of learning techniques that utilize student experts or require students to practice teaching what they learn. These philosophies can be integrated into course activities through a variety of methods.
- Incorporate student discussion time into activities: Instead of having students solve an example problem on their own, consider asking students to form small groups or try activities such as think-pair-share to work through it. In addition to boosting engagement, group discussions allow students to explain to others their reasoning and problem-solving processes, which helps promote metacognition. Small groups work equally well for discussing open-ended questions and problems with explicit solutions.
- Ask open-ended questions: Questions that ask students to justify an opinion or interpret a reading are more likely to elicit responses even from those who do not know exactly how to define a term or derive a formula because there is no risk of “failing” the question. Because open-ended questions can have multiple correct answers or valid perspectives, they can also generate more interesting discussions. Engagement-based questions can require students to be more diligent in their readings and homework as these questions require a deeper understanding than simply knowing a correct answer.
- You can combine multiple types of questions to both generate discussion and check for student comprehension. For example, consider starting off with a more open-ended question to invite engagement. Then, ask more “fact-finding” follow-up questions to help refine, contextualize, and nuance those responses to ensure students understand the material.
- Encourage students to reflect upon the learning process: Metacognition is useful for student learning and mastery as well as building and sustaining a motivation to learn. Consider providing students with feedback on key assignments as well as creating activities in which students can conduct self-assessments with a variety of different techniques. The Canvas Commons has an Exit Ticket module with several examples you can build into your course.
Reflection
What were some of the ways you unintentionally silenced your students? What might you take away from this unit that you might use in your future lessons?
Unit 1: Understanding the Concept of Learner Engagement
Unit 2: Ideal Design Qualities