Posts Tagged ‘Student Engagement’

June 28 - Student Engagement Tips from Teaching Professor Conference Attendees

By: in Effective Teaching Strategies

During the opening keynote at The Teaching Professor Conference, Elizabeth F. Barkley, a professor at Foothill College and author of Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (Jossey-Bass, 2010) presented on a topic she titled Terms of Engagement: Understanding and Promoting Student Engagement in Today’s College Classroom.


April 8 - Standards and Pedagogies of Student Engagement

By: in Teaching Professor Blog

A colleague raised a very interesting point in response to the February 17 post on evidence-based teaching. That entry explored some of the reasons instructional practice is not better informed by research findings.


March 4 - Recognizing the Importance of Student Engagement

By: in Academic Leadership

Institutions are beginning to create jobs that recognize by name the importance of student engagement in and out of the classroom. These positions are based on the idea that students who contribute actively to their learning environments—through experiences such as learning communities, service-learning, first-year seminars, and undergraduate research—are more likely to succeed in college.


December 20 - Helping Students See Correlation Between Effort and Performance

By: in Teaching and Learning

One of the student engagement techniques described in Elizabeth F. Barkley’s Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty has students predicting and reflecting on their exam preparation and performance. It’s a technique that helps students see the correlation between their efforts and their exam scores, as well as one that helps them assess the effectiveness of the study strategies they use.


October 12 - Students and Reading: Another Good Idea

By: in Faculty Development, Teaching Professor Blog

The quest to get students doing assigned reading and engaging with that material is one of those ongoing challenges faced by university and college teachers today. Simply assigning the reading, telling students to do it and making threats about what will happen if they don’t is rarely enough to get most of today’s students interacting


September 30 - Simulations Deliver Real Benefits

By: in Teaching and Learning, Teaching Professor Blog

Simulations can be powerful active learning experiences. In the social sciences and humanities they can provide a kind of “lab-like” experience, often not a part of these courses. Finding good simulation exercises is a challenge in some fields and integrating them into the content and objectives of the course requires careful planning and execution. However, this extra work is justified given what a good simulation can accomplish in class. Check out these benefits listed in an excellent article on simulations.


August 31 - Five Minutes and Five Techniques

By: in Faculty Development, Teaching Professor Blog

I was traveling again last week and dining by myself in a local restaurant. I had forgotten to bring something to read, but the restaurant, named the The Library, had stacks of old books decorating the short walls between different sections of the dining room. In the stack near my table I found Teacher Education


June 17 - Student Engagement: Trade-offs and Payoffs

By: in Effective Classroom Management

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.


April 27 - Transforming Your Teaching Style: A Student-Centered Approach

By: in Philosophy of Teaching

When I started teaching 27 years ago, like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz I believed that just having a brain would make me successful. And so each class session I would literally “take the stage” on a raised platform to deliver what was in my head and on my papers. Even though there were 60 students in the class, there could just as well have been none because I basically ignored the students. They were objects, sponges whose task was to absorb course content.


April 19 - Good Courses and Good Papers

By: in Faculty Development, Teaching Professor Blog

I’m always on the lookout for new teaching metaphors and I found a good one this weekend.

“What magic is it that removes the barrier—that allows teachers to converse with, rather than to talk at, our students? It’s my private theory that the solution is analogous to writing itself: that good classes, like good papers need a thesis, a plan, a problem, and, finally, a sense of larger significance.” (p. 38)