engage launch 17 October 2017
Dr Catherine Bovill, Senior Lecturer in Student Engagement, IAD
10 ways (but certainly not the only ways) to enhance student engagement in learning and teaching
Create a sense of smaller groups in a large class
1)Use small group work in lectures – e.g. Computing Science at Glasgow
2)Tutorials within a larger class – e.g. Physics at Edinburgh
Encourage students to read in an atmosphere of shared responsibility
3)The Doughnut round (Fleizner et al 1997)
4)The Jigsaw classroom (Aronson & Patnow 2010)
Give students greater responsibility
5)Invite students to design their own essay titles – Classics at Reading
6)Part build a curriculum, let students fill the gaps – Entrepreneurship at St Andrews
Create a sense of community in class and in between classes
7)Create groups that work online and in class together – Geography at UCD
8)Use student work within the curriculum – Geography at NUI, Mayneuth
Build student-staff relationships
9)Make yourself available in large classes - arrive early, pack slowly
10)Create a programme hashtag on Twitter – MSc Digital Education, Edinburgh
For more information about some of these ideas and for further suggestions see
Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C. and Felten, P. (2014) Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: a guide for faculty. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Chapter 3.
References
Aronson, E. and Patnow, S. (2010) Cooperation in the classroom: the jigsaw method. London: Pinter & Martin Ltd
Fleiszer, D., Fleiszer, T. and Russell, R. (1997) Doughnut rounds: a self-directed learning approach to teaching critical care in surgery. Medical Teacher 19 (3) 190-193.
…and some more ways to enhance engagement – suggestions, responses, adaptations and ideas co-created by the participants at the engage launch
N.B. Where there is a number between 1-10 alongside the suggestion, the numbers refer to the examples above and are suggested adaptations to the first 10 suggested ways to enhance engagement.
11)4 Jigsaw example: Groups given papers. Each individual reads paper. Comes back to group. Group comes back to whole class with three items of what they’ve taken from papers understanding from different perspectives (from sports psychology)
Split into groups, eg in 3. Each group given papers. Each individual given different “role” – student, lecturer, practitioner – come back to the group with what you take from this as Student (what you’ve learned), Lecturer (What you hope student learns) and Practitioner (how would you use in your practice?)
12)
7 Employ Ed interns – curriculum projects (need staff available)
13)
Example 7 Use of online group-formation as a precursor to physical “Group Work”
14)
Example 7 Use of later year students to design “stuff” for early year students but what is the incentive?
15)
7/8 Integrate student created quizzes with peer support groups
16)
(8) Ask a previous cohort of students to contribute to opening and/or closing session of the same course in the next session – i.e. use student experience within the curriculum
17)
(9) Book separate room for short post-lecture warm-down session – not necessarily weekly
18)
9/10 Inviting external speakers and encouraging both staff and students to attend and discuss afterwards > happens in LLC with Friday seminars (This allows academic discussion without the teacher/student dynamic)
19)
9/10 With more students using tech in class (and maybe being distracted) start the conversation of what is acceptable in the classroom.
20)
9/10 ‘Humanise’ online teaching staff profiles – beyond academic and research history.
21)
#10 Important to provide spaces not to Co-opt. student spaces (e.g. twitter hashtag may not be accessible to students whose twitter is very personal)
22)
Availability Time, Lecture quicker, waffle less, finish earlier
23)
Get older (3rd, 4th and postgrad students) involved in teaching and tutoring more – ideally these will have done the course in the past.
24)
Get students working collaboratively in groups from year 1
25)
Hashtagging distracting during lectures. Shouldn’t Uni have own tools?One measure of lecturer engagement
26)
At the end of the lecture, ask students to write questions on a piece of paper and submit these questions to a box. Then, publish answers to the most frequently asked or most interesting questions.
27)
Ask students to take pictures of relevant to course content. Later, use these pictures as a prompt for class discussion and/or written responses.
28)
Proposal: Use a ‘side space’ e.g. a collaborative document (OneNote) for students to annotate lectures/tutorials in real time together
29)
Use of Tophat (???) targeted at groups to initiate group activity (online or physical) outside class
30)
Piazza as a student question focussed discussion platform (see Maths)
31)
Use name stickers. Get students to write own name on sticker, makes chatting easier with class
32)
I quite like working with autonomous learning groups where students get together in small (engineered by the leads) groups between classes to prepare: they discuss the set readings and have a go at answering the questions set for the next session. Thus they get much more out of the whole class seminars (variant of 3 + 4)
33)
To brighten up the learning and make it inclusive of all types of learners - invite upload picture from placement and 1 sentence on A, B, C, D online share to create community of invite comments from peers
34)
Creating sense of community in class and between classes
Setting up staff-student lunch club where 1 member of staff meets with 5/6 students to discuss topics informally or just get to know one another.
35)
Using padlet or reflective blogs to let students share thoughts/experiences in visual or written form leading to online and class discussions about similarities/differences.
36)
Students undertake a “camera safari” in groups to explore the idea of community around a nursery school: photos taken are used in presentation to other student groups
37)
Funding for Student-led initiatives such as events or conferences they organise or go to with societies e.g. which are relevant to subject
38)
Involve more visual stimuli – pictures, photos in the class curriculum
39)
“Who’s Who” in the school or programme: students approach staff and collect their profiles (photo or video and brief bio) for school or programme. Instagram account… and then even create school/programme organisational chart using profiles.
40)
Final lecture slot devoted to “question time panel” all lecturers turn up and respond to questions from the floor related to course content
41)
Speed debating
42)
Go around the group and have everyone share something personal in relation to the topic (doesn’t require preparation)
43)
Write personal responses in advance to the class: get shy students to show what they have done.
44)
Building student-staff relationships
Sharing own experiences of learning about a topic: “Penny-Drop” as well as “stuck” moments
45)
Creating sense of Community
Pre-Class ‘Padlet’ where students respond to a prompt e.g. “what does x mean to you” where x is a concept important to the video clips/quotes/images as well as course.
8 Good idea. Is there a good platform for sharing images?
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