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DQ5: Engaging Students
DQ5: Engaging Students
Focus Statement: The teacher scans the room and notices when students are not paying attention or not cognitively engaged and takes overt action.
Focus Statement: The teacher scans the room and notices when students are not paying attention or not cognitively engaged and takes overt action.
Desired Effect: Students modify their level of engagement as a result of teacher action.
Desired Effect: Students modify their level of engagement as a result of teacher action.
Suggested Technology Strategies
A Couple Notes About "Engagement":
(1) It helps if when a teacher scans the room if they know what engagement looks like. When students are engaged in teacher-directed learning you will see them...
Paying attention (making eye-contact, or at least watching you, nodding, taking notes)
Listening (as opposed to chatting or sleeping)
Asking questions
Responding to questions
Following requests
Reacting (laughing at appropriate humor)
When you notice that a few students are not as engaged as you want them to be, it doesn't always need to shift the entire class and do a different activity. Sometimes you can reengage a student by using proximity, eye-contact, by asking the student who is not engaged a question. When it seems that a large number of students are "somewhere else" you will want to employ a strategy for the entire class.
(2) While the next couple of elements deal with how to more fully engage students, it all starts with using engaging teaching strategies. Obviously, if students are getting straight lecture, then many students are not going to be highly engaged. Teachers can be proactive about student engagement by looking at their lessons to see if they have planned activities that require higher levels of engagement. Look at a lesson that you recently taught or are about to teach. Look at the Engagement Wheel (see below) from the blog "Reflections of a High School Math Teacher" and count the number of activities/strategies you used in that lesson. If you used 4 or more, then your students were probably highly engaged in your lesson. If you are using fewer than 3 then your students may not be as engaged as you want them to be.
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