Welcome back to another semester. This year on the blog we are going to have several posts about the topic of student engagement, written by CSUSM faculty. Student Engagement was the theme of the 2014 CSUSM Summer Teaching institute. Participants were encouraged to incorporate any ideas or techniques they learned into their Fall semester courses. After incorporating these ideas, faculty were encouraged to share their feeling and experiences with the process. We encouraged them to be frank and focus as much on the process as the outcome, since the audience for this blog are other faculty. First up is Tricia Lantzy talking about using tools like collaborative learning with first-year students... |
Attending the 2014 Faculty Center Summer Teaching Institute was an amazing opportunity to connect with my peers and to reflect on how I foster student engagement in the classroom. As a librarian at the Kellogg Library, I teach library instruction sessions for a variety of courses, from general education courses such as General Education Lifelong Learning (GEL), GE Writing, and GE Oral Communication, to courses in the health sciences. At the institute, my focus was increasing student engagement in my 2-week library research module for GEL.
During the research module, librarians take first-year students through the entire college research process, from choosing a topic to collecting evidence from scholarly sources. Along the way, we highlight the evaluation of information and differences between source types (scholarly research articles, authoritative websites, popular websites, etc.). After teaching this module fifteen times between fall 2013 and spring 2014, I was ready to revitalize the course and get my first-year students more engaged in the topics at hand. I learned numerous techniques for increasing student engagement during the teaching institute, and implemented three for the fall 2014 semester: low stakes quizzes, shortened lecture segments, and reduced time for group tasks in the classroom.
Time is always a factor when planning my classes because I do not have the entire semester to work with students. Anything that can free up class time for more active learning and group discussion is a plus. During the institute, we discussed low stakes quizzes as a useful way to free up time for these kinds of activities. By replacing recaps of the readings with a 5-minute quiz, students had more motivation to actually do the readings and no time was lost by re-teaching concepts in class. This change also made it easier to break down my lectures into 10 to 15 minute segments and insert active learning between major concepts. This gave students the opportunity to practice the material and engage in conversations with their peers immediately following the presentation of new information. After making these changes to the structure of my lessons, my classes felt much more lively. Students quickly learned they wouldn’t be sitting back and taking notes for 75 minutes, which increased the energy in the class and reduced the number of tired and bored faces.
Before attending the institute, I was already aware of the benefits of in-class group collaboration and used it whenever I could. Based on my experiences, I knew a peril of group work during class was the inevitable conversation about weekend plans or funny videos on Facebook. I found a great solution to this problem at the Summer Teaching Institute that worked really well in my fall classes. Rather than giving students ample time to complete in-class assignments, I reduced time allotted for these assignments in the hopes students would be more motivated to stay on task. Any group that didn’t complete the task within the class period would need to complete it together for homework. I found this to be an excellent way to motivate students to stay focused, and I often prepared the students ahead of time by announcing they could reduce their homework load by finishing this assignment in class. While a small number of groups still struggled to stay on task, I noticed far fewer weekend plan discussions taking place in my sections.
I made these changes to improve student engagement in the GEL library module, and I saw a marked improvement in the majority of my classes. There was more participation in discussion and less drifting off topic during group work. But some unexpected changes accompanied the improved engagement. Groups worked better and more effectively outside of the classroom as well as in the classroom. I received only two complaints about individuals who did not fulfill their role in the final group project (out of twelve sections) in comparison with the eight complaints I received the previous year. Students also made use of the cougar course discussion forums to communicate with one another and build their projects, all without my prompting or direction. I would like to think this is in part a result of students being more engaged in the classroom. It seems to me that more opportunities to interact with each other in class coupled with strong motivation to stay on task not only improved student engagement, it also improved the results of group work created outside the classroom.
While the GEL library research module has always included active learning and discussion, the Summer Teaching Institute helped me resolve some issues that were getting in the way of student engagement. I look forward to continuing to develop and improve my classes based on the valuable ideas presented by speakers and shared by other attendees at the institute.
Photo by Richard Wilkes CC BY
During the research module, librarians take first-year students through the entire college research process, from choosing a topic to collecting evidence from scholarly sources. Along the way, we highlight the evaluation of information and differences between source types (scholarly research articles, authoritative websites, popular websites, etc.). After teaching this module fifteen times between fall 2013 and spring 2014, I was ready to revitalize the course and get my first-year students more engaged in the topics at hand. I learned numerous techniques for increasing student engagement during the teaching institute, and implemented three for the fall 2014 semester: low stakes quizzes, shortened lecture segments, and reduced time for group tasks in the classroom.
Time is always a factor when planning my classes because I do not have the entire semester to work with students. Anything that can free up class time for more active learning and group discussion is a plus. During the institute, we discussed low stakes quizzes as a useful way to free up time for these kinds of activities. By replacing recaps of the readings with a 5-minute quiz, students had more motivation to actually do the readings and no time was lost by re-teaching concepts in class. This change also made it easier to break down my lectures into 10 to 15 minute segments and insert active learning between major concepts. This gave students the opportunity to practice the material and engage in conversations with their peers immediately following the presentation of new information. After making these changes to the structure of my lessons, my classes felt much more lively. Students quickly learned they wouldn’t be sitting back and taking notes for 75 minutes, which increased the energy in the class and reduced the number of tired and bored faces.
Before attending the institute, I was already aware of the benefits of in-class group collaboration and used it whenever I could. Based on my experiences, I knew a peril of group work during class was the inevitable conversation about weekend plans or funny videos on Facebook. I found a great solution to this problem at the Summer Teaching Institute that worked really well in my fall classes. Rather than giving students ample time to complete in-class assignments, I reduced time allotted for these assignments in the hopes students would be more motivated to stay on task. Any group that didn’t complete the task within the class period would need to complete it together for homework. I found this to be an excellent way to motivate students to stay focused, and I often prepared the students ahead of time by announcing they could reduce their homework load by finishing this assignment in class. While a small number of groups still struggled to stay on task, I noticed far fewer weekend plan discussions taking place in my sections.
I made these changes to improve student engagement in the GEL library module, and I saw a marked improvement in the majority of my classes. There was more participation in discussion and less drifting off topic during group work. But some unexpected changes accompanied the improved engagement. Groups worked better and more effectively outside of the classroom as well as in the classroom. I received only two complaints about individuals who did not fulfill their role in the final group project (out of twelve sections) in comparison with the eight complaints I received the previous year. Students also made use of the cougar course discussion forums to communicate with one another and build their projects, all without my prompting or direction. I would like to think this is in part a result of students being more engaged in the classroom. It seems to me that more opportunities to interact with each other in class coupled with strong motivation to stay on task not only improved student engagement, it also improved the results of group work created outside the classroom.
While the GEL library research module has always included active learning and discussion, the Summer Teaching Institute helped me resolve some issues that were getting in the way of student engagement. I look forward to continuing to develop and improve my classes based on the valuable ideas presented by speakers and shared by other attendees at the institute.
Photo by Richard Wilkes CC BY