Student engagement

Student Engagement How can one tell they are not engaged?

When taking an online course with Laureate Education back in 2014 on Higher Education, we participants were prompted with three questions to somehow measure student engagement in our courses. As a simple though realistic exercise, as an instructor one gets to reflect on how much one’s learners are taking a course seriously.

The prompting questions are the following, for anyone who also wants to question the amount of learner engagement students are experiencing in a course.

1. Consider one of the lessons you are interested in; what is its learning goal?

2. Reflect on your student performance and identify how you can tell that your learners are not engaged in this lesson.

3. How can you explain the your students are not engaged with your lesson?

For this particular reflective exercise I took into consideration my Introduction to Drama class, which at the time of the reflecting task was a bit sidetracked, and students were not getting at a very realistic deep learning of the concepts being studied in the course: from Classical Greek Theater to Contemporary Theater. The following chart summarizes my observations and reflections regarding my lesson.

Lesson to focus on

Learning goal

Summarizing the evolution of theater After providing Ss with the tools to produce their presentations, Drama Ss will produce a graphic summary for the class with good visuals and design.

Ss are a bit down in terms of energy at this point

Lack of engagement

of the term and they need to be reenergized somehow and this could be the chance

Reasons for lack of engagement

Additional strategies

Length of the course and amount of critical reviews they have to produce Have them work on http://www.powtoons.com to produce more engaging critical reviews that they can eventually use in their courses 1. Students enrolled in this class with prereflective thinking skills, and that needs to be modified.

2. Students start moving into quasi-reflecting thinking skills by understanding how this class connects to the overall ELT program and how

Stages of learning

they will use this knowledge in their future or current teaching.

3. Students towards the end of the course become reflective thinkers when they have learned the basics and start creating their own arguments and building their long-lasting knowledge.

As a conclusion, and after revising this information provided in the chart above, it is highly recommendable that all teachers question a bit their lessons from time to time to find evidence of what seems to be going on with student engagement. It is wise to go over the questions/statements provided at the very beginning of this blog entry to find yourself consider how you can measure learner engagement in your courses and in very specific lessons. One is bound to discover a bit of how one’s teaching practices can affect student deep learning.