Increasing Student Engagement

Cindy Riedl
Jan 09, 2012

How Can Teachers Decrease Boredom and Increase Student Engagement?

Every nine seconds we lose a student due to dropping out (Essential tools: Increasing rates of school completion, Lehr, Johnson, Bremer, Cosio and Thompson, 2004). Although the reasons given by students vary, the number one cause appears to be boredom. Therefore, we need to examine how and when to actively involve students because high engagement is a key factor in helping students stay in school and be successful. Potential drop outs hide behind their peers who participate in class, act out in class to seek attention, and often feel that detention is a form of being rewarded.
Implementing the exemplary strategies and practices recommended in the LEARNING-FOCUSED Model will have a direct effect on preventing many of the causes of why students drop out or fail to meet their academic potential. It is not difficult for you to undertake this challenge and actively engage all students with the recommended strategies and practices from this model.

How you use questioning is paramount for engaging the minds of students in your activities. For example, questions with higher levels of thinking require students to think beyond simple engagement and regurgitation to deep thinking. For at-risk students, it is really important to provide scaffolding and/or Acceleration in order to keep them from shutting down during higher level questioning. Student interaction increases as the types of questions being asked move through the three levels of learning (Acquisition - Extending Thinking - Authentic Learning). The LEARNING-FOCUSED Strategies for Questioning flipchart is an indispensable resource that every teacher should possess. It provides you with a tool for planning and asking effective questions. Planning your questions is critical because it is nearly impossible to ask higher level questions otherwise. This flipchart will become a valuable tool for planning and implementing questions that are focused on the purpose and the intent is at a high level. For example, on-going reading comprehension questions focus on visualization such as,"How can you make a 'movie in your mind'?" Other types of comprehension questions focus on generalizations, metacognition, summarizing or making person connections, which hook student interest because the question relates to their world.

Given that Extending Thinking is the number one strategy for increasing achievement, asking Extending Thinking questions are critical because they provide guidance and support as students think at higher levels and meet high academic standards. Furthermore, it is important to know your students well in order to determine when to ask questions that build self-confidence and when to challenge. When asking questions that involve the application of a higher level of thinking, prompts may be required to scaffold student thinking. For example, instead of asking, "How is analyzing perspectives used to get a better understanding of an issue?" you prompt with, "Why is it important to understand other people's point of view?"

Collaborative questions are structured for students to ask each other to reflect and summarize their learning. You can prepare reflection cards that have these questions readily available for students to ask each other after they have read, viewed or heard the information, such as:

* Explain what is meant by _________.
* What connections to your life can your make?
* What does this remind you of?
* Why do you think the author used this illustration?
* What are the pros and cons of ______________?
* What mistakes might someone make with this information?

Collaborative questions can become self-monitoring questions, but powerful results occur when collaborative pairs work together to explore the content. Since learning is a social activity, you can take advantage of this effective interactive strategy for engaging students. Numbered Heads are highly recommended (rather than simple shoulder buddies) simply because each student has a specific responsibility to the other and therefore builds accountability.

Questions that increase depth of knowledge are questions that start at a low level and build according to your students' abilities. The questions are asked in a sequence that help students learn the content deeper and at a high level. Examine the example below and think about how you presently question to increase depth of knowledge.
Example:

1. What are the steps in the process? (Students answer the question.)
2. What happens at the beginning, middle, and the end? (Students arrange the steps.)
3. How could you visualize these steps? (Students use visualization.)
4. What would happen if the steps got out of order? (Students use Error Analysis Extending Thinking Strategy.)
5. What connections could be made with these steps? (Students make connections and generalize.)