Engaging and Reengaging
Midterm grades are posted and for some students this can be a discouraging event. How do you encourage and re-engage the student who has lost his/her motivation to go on?
Share victories
- Engaging students in their progress can work on two fronts. Help students focus by defining their short and long-term goals, while taking a moment to share in students’ small (or big!) victories. Studies verify what may seem obvious; people are more motivated when they are succeeding. A few enthusiastic words go a long way. Regarding enthusiasm, students prefer courses with passionate teachers. Make your passion evident about the course and the students you are teaching, and your students will respond in kind.
Ignite passions
- Reengaging the discouraged student(s) whose grades are low is crucial. This is the time to reconnect with the student and discuss what steps can be taken to improve. Meeting with or emailing the student shows your support and empathy. It is also the time to reinforce what the student is doing well. Tell students that making mistakes is part of the learning process and that great ideas can come out of failure. Giving the student direction and encouragement will help him/her to see mistakes as stepping-stones to a stronger result.
Engage your students
If students are just listening to a lecture, their attention can wander after the first five minutes and stray even further around the eight-minute mark (just about the same time we’ve come to expect commercial breaks on TV). Students’ attention is at its weakest after 15 or 20 minutes. Use these time-honored strategies to re-engage your students:
- For instruction-heavy demonstrations such as in a computer lab, stop after five minutes and allow students to test their skill before moving on.
- For lecture-based material, stop after 15 minutes and let students interact with the new information through a short activity or discussion.
- Employ pop quizzes, small-group work tasks, or a combination of the two, such as an “open-book collaborative quiz.”
- Move about the room as you speak.
Success oriented homework
- Assign homework every week to keep your students engaged. This is especially helpful when assigning long-term projects because many first year and International students are not always used to these kinds of assignments. To help keep the students on track for any long-term projects, each weekly assignment should be a building block for the project. By collecting these weekly assignments, you and the students can pinpoint and clarify any areas of misunderstanding before they move on to the next stage. This kind of assignment “stacking” yields stronger projects because misunderstandings are flagged and reworked early on.
- Assign and discuss the homework in class. This gives the students opportunities to ask questions and seek clarification in person.
- Allow homework time in the classroom. Giving students a chance to begin their homework in class gives you a chance to circulate and make sure the students are on target.
Resources
Mixing It Up After Midterms
The "Change-up" - Re-engaging Students
Recommended reading
Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive And Others Die. New York: Random House, 2007.
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