Strategies for engaging students

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Strategies for Engaging Students

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Thursday, March 10, 2016 Post 233

I am an ELT instructor mostly working with students who are majoring in English Language Teaching (ELT). I currently teach various types of courses, mostly on literature and technology for education, on a hybrid modality. For the nature of these courses, I work with different teaching focuses to deal with diverse instructional objectives and outcomes in which I take into account student learning preferences.

As a very simple teaching strategy, at the beginning of each course I tell my students –based on the course outline- what I expect of them in our hybrid modality of learning always linked to Bloom’s taxonomy, which allows me to see a measurable behavior. At the beginning of the course, as if it were some sort of previewing exercise for me, I try to find out how much students know to foresee which areas need to be strengthened or developed more to achieve learning outcomes. And to guarantee success, I like to spend some 20 minutes of each

class making sure what the class needs to have accomplished by the time online assignments are submitted.

My pupils will always find a sketch of every single piece of a project they must develop in my class, which somehow synthetize what needs to be learned, mastered, and graded. I have created my own instructional tools to comply with course outline requisites. However, it is interesting when I have my learners work hand-on on something right there in the classroom, whether that is in situ or perhaps prepared in advanced. In any case, when they are made responsible for their own learning, it is when I get to realize what my students are made of and ready to perform to demonstrate that my explanations have not been delivered only to the classroom’s walls.

In terms of formative and summative assessment, my exercises –I guess I should call them learning tasks- are broken into different segments to see the evolution of the process and how students handle it. I am not into partial or final examinations any more, and for that reason I break down those percentages to have more fulfilling learning tasks to verify that students are understanding and that there is a change in their behavior as future teaching professionals. I would rather see my students perform badly once than to see them failing because of an exam. Learning projects are much more rewarding for my students, who get a sense of accomplishment, and for me the instructor, who can see their development throughout the process.

At certain key moments of the course, especially after certain big tasks, I like to have a feedback session with the whole class. I like to give my feedback to my students as well as to listen to what they have to say. If there is something that can be improved, I will try to take care of it to maximize student learning. If it cannot be done during the term, I keep that information to make a different kind

of planning the next time I teach the course. Reflective teaching with student feedback is a great way to achieve one’s professional development.