Prensky uses the phrase “Engage or Enrage” in his talks, but a lot of what passes for engagement is only cued response. I wrote this piece to help explain:
Fostering Engagement.
One of the initial problems a distance designer faces is how to get students engaged. The reason that this is such a problem is that people who are new to the process assume engagement while designing instead of building engagement into the design. It’s natural. When you teach in a classroom, you have an assumption that you can get the wallflowers to speak up. In the classroom, a teacher equates cued response with engagement and they transfer that assumption into distance delivery.
The problem with my approach is that many people find the introduction to this course to be off-putting. It’s a violation of expectation. It’s like expecting “Romper Room” and getting “Paper Chase.” The reality is that this course is designed to be experienced, not merely endured. All experiential learning has the same issue. In order to be effective, there has to be something there to experience.
What do you think about engagement? How can it be encouraged? What are the factors that must be accounted for?
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:00 am
I think that we sometimes “spoon feed” our students too much today. I am not saying that we shouldn’t let them know what is expected of them because we should. However, we should push them a little beyond what is expected. This will get them thinking differently than they are used to. This will encourage thinking more creatively, which will follow along with Bloom’s Taxonomy. For example, we could give our students “food for thought” assignments that go along with our content. Something they might have to google is helpful to develop their thought process and helps them learn how to research ideas. In one social studies class I observed, the teacher was discussing totem poles. Along with their regular assignment, they were to tell what the phrase “low man on the totem pole” means. Most all of them had heard of the phrase but were uncertain the meaning. This is the kind of extra thing that I think will help engage students.
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:48 pm
I agree with what Kim said about spoon feeding our children too much. We have to have high expectations for all of our students and we must encourage them to thank for themselves. I encourage my students to find different ways to solve the same problem and at first they hate this because they want me to tell them how to find the answer.
September 24th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I agree that a huge part of teaching is high expectations. I have an accelerated class that knows that sometimes their assignments are different than their peers and they know what I expect of them, they don’t even question it. Always challenging students to go a step beyond always encourages engagement. Starting a class by giving them a question to answer gets students minds going. I have found that the more challenging the lesson is, the more engaged students become. A prime example is the introduction to this course. Due to the expectations of this class, I put my other class on the back burner in the beginning and became very engaged in completing the assignments.