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 this is that cued response is only the most superficial level of engagement — engagement with the teacher. Ideally, you want your students engaged with you, with the content, with their peers, and with the process. The challenge to the designer is how to foster that level of engagement.
Historically, teacher-prompt has been the touchstone of teacher-student interaction. The teacher asks and the student answers. That goes for simple in-class practice to more elaborate writing, quiz, and testing. Some of those practices — for example, the “research paper” — are intended primarily to contribute to engagement with the content, but they serve teacher-student engagement as well. Unfortunately that’s rather a one-dimensional level of engagement. By maintaining only surface level engagement, the teacher cannot take advantage of deeper levels of engagement.
In this class, for example, while I use the teacher-prompt strategy to engage you, my goal is to ask you questions that challenge your thinking processes and not just your knowledge. I set up situations that make you uncertain. I am trying to engage your system of thinking in such a way that what was an orderly process of thought — a stable system of beliefs — becomes less stable. While this may seem unnecessarily cruel, the reality is that I’m working toward a goal of leaving you at the end of the semester with a stable but reshaped system of beliefs which will guide your practice long after the course is over. That goal requires a certain level of destabilization because stable systems cannot be changed. They’re stable because they successfully resist change. As a result, simple teacher-prompt doesn’t really cut it as an engagement strategy. I’m required to put you into situations and to propose problems that require you to face discrepancies between what you think and what you see, then getting you to resolve those discrepancies.
The upside of this strategy of teaching through cognitive dissonance is that I’m usually able to get engagement with content, peers, and process directly from the simple “strategy of aggravation” as students frantically search content sources, consult with their peers, and embrace new technologies in an effort to deal with the discord. The downside is the hyperventilation. It’s axiomatic that students (and teachers) want to “feel safe” when they learn. Teachers are trained to wrap students in cotton batting. They’re instructed in the best ways to make students feel secure in their environments and to make sure they understand exactly what’s expected of them to cut down the amount of dissonance they experience in the classroom.
The problem with this axiom is that it makes learning difficult by taking away the incentive to learn. Out in the world, there’s usually some incentive to learn that goes beyond the comfort. In fact, there’s usually some pain that learning can alleviate. Whether it’s learning about buying a house, or learning to ride a bicycle. You learn because you want to be able to do something well enough that it doesn’t hurt any more. In the classroom, grades are the primary — and arbitrary — pain we inflict on students to get them to “learn” but grades just doen’t last. That usually only lasts until the final exam. To get real learning, we have to make the pain personal by challenging self-image, by promoting professional competence, or by demonstrating an inadequacy.
Now, please, don’t get all deSade on me. I’m not advocating hurting students in the physical sense — or from any notion of self-gratification or -aggrandizement. What I am advocating is something more akin to equivalency theory where what we endeavor to accomplish in education (classroom and/or online) is more like equivalency to the ‘school of hard knocks’ without the direst consequences often meted out in what passes for Real Life. As teachers we do have an obligation to make sure our students are not harmed.
But that does not necessarily mean we have to make them so comfortable that they have no incentive to get beyond the grade.
October 1st, 2006 at 12:16 pm
The biggest challenge as an online instructor is getting the students engaged. One tactic is to raise their motivation levels. Begin your course by providing “Icebreakers”. Try to make their learning experience enjoyable.
Engaging activities can include group discussions, synchronized chat sessions, open forum discussions, self-introductions, and interacting with other classmates.
I require that my students post to the initial discussion and reply to at least 3 of their classmates postings.
Group projects are a great source for student engagement.
September 27th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
[...] Last year I wrote about the difficulties teachers have in getting students engaged: Fostering Engagement ne 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. [...]
September 28th, 2007 at 8:39 am
I agree, we sometimes baby our students too much. I feel like in our new “feel good society” that we are attempting to make our students feel at home and take their emotional and physical needs too much. We happened to the school of hard knocks. The world really isn’t a cushy, cushy place. It is a world of both the good and the bad, and the sooner we show our students that the world is competitive the better they will be. I know that we are coming to a new place within the education spectrum where engagement is just an afterthought, because all administrators care about are test scores and basketball (at our school).
Engagement is ongoing and evolving, I think that is why it is so difficult to do well. It changes with every grade and class. But it is a challenge worth pursuing.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:29 am
I completely agree with forcing students out of their comfort zones to make them think better. I thoroughly enjoy arguing about things. No matter what my true beliefs are about something I like to argue both sides of an issue. This type of discourse in the classroom will definitely make students use their heads more because it becomes more personal.
But how do we assess this?
September 29th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
I see what you mean about this and the safety zone. This is how we are told to structure our classrooms. Our students are to know exactly what we expect them to learn from each class and exactly what we expect frm them. I would really need to think of a way to get this in my subject area since they can’t do much except the very basics. If we could have discussions or debates it may be possible to get them thinking out of the comfort zone. And like Tippi said, How would we assess this?
February 7th, 2008 at 10:20 am
[...] Fostering Engagement came as part of the design and development portion of the course wherein I explained how I was demonstrating engagement in the course and practicing what I preached. [...]
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:56 am
[...] 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 [...]
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I do not think that a teacher can judge engagement by simply getting students to speak up in class. If my kids are still asking questions and talking to each other or myself long after the lesson is over, that’s when I know that I got them hooked. I did a place value lesson last week and the students had to use units (1′s) and strips (10s) to show me the value of numbers. One of the numbers they used their manipulatives with was the number 54. After they showed me the typical answer of 5 strips and 4 units I asked them to show me another way to show 54. Based on their reaction you would have thought that I had asked them to do something horrible. They did not want to think outside of the box. I can tell they are a group of kids that have been spoon fed and it really made some of them mad. They wanted me to just tell them another way. I even had a parent call because her child said that I refused to tell them the answer. Anyway…that lesson was last Thursday and yesterday and today I still have kids randomly showing me other ways to make 54. They are now fascinated that they can do it more than one way.
I think that engagement is very important in all classes, but it may mean different things for different students. I do not think that one method is going to get all students engaged. I guess I “punished” my students last week and I really punished the girl who talked to her mom about math that day, but at least I got her attention and maybe got her mom a little more involved in the process. The child turned in homework for the first time yesterday. I think that one way to encourage engagement is to let students do a little inquiry. It makes them think and when they think they will learn something. They will actively use their minds instead of just getting fed information.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Huh. Who’d have thought it?
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Cued response versus engagement…major issue in my classroom. I teach 3 subjects to 2 different grade levels. I have exactly 40 minutes to teach science, exactly 60 minutes to teach math sandwiched between humanities, lunch, recess, orchestra, spanish. I have a two inch binder full of content I am required to cover for each grade level. Heaven forbid that a student ask a question ‘outside the box’ that demonstrates they are actually thinking in depth about the content. I settle for cued response way too often! Technology enhanced instruction, if used to its full potential should increase engagement. I’m thinking kids need time to research, question, and synthesize information gathered from online resources….can’t really manage to give them time to actually do active learning activities – too busy delivering content…..
September 24th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
I find that for some students grades are not engagement. They do not care if they get an A or B for a grade. So engagment has to be found in different ways. I agree that sometimes we can make it to comfortable for students and they take advantage of that. I took those classes in high school that I knew would keep me in a comfortable environment. I need to find different ways to keep my students going. Monica has a good point about time and teaching content. When students think out of the box is great, but we are always watching that clock and checking off what is taught before testing.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I think you meant grades as motivation, Amy. And you’re right. My daughters are – sadly – not motivated by the D’s and F’s they’re getting. But they will turn every stone to learn something they want to know.
But engagement takes time and – as Monica points out as well – time is something sorely lacking in the K-12 classroom these days.