Second Edition
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FIRST EDITION
This book is dedicated to K. Patricia Cross, who has been not only an inspiration and mentor to us both personally but also a thought leader whose influence on higher education has been profound.
TEACHERS IN INSTITUTIONS across the country tell us that teaching today can be tough. The “twitch speed” pace and multilayered delivery of modern media can make a lecture feel so incredibly slow and boring, one student reported all the blood had left his head and he feared he'd pass out (El-Shamy, 2004, p. 24). Globalization and open-door access have filled our classrooms with learners reflecting such a dizzying array of backgrounds and academic preparedness that teachers are often hard-pressed to find a collective starting point or the commonalities that create a sense of community. Abundant information that can be accessed at split-second speed has redefined what students should be learning and created unprecedented opportunities for academic dishonesty. A panoply of pressures make some classrooms a crucible of tensions that can erupt in incivility ranging from simple lack of consideration to overt aggression. For many of us teaching today, competing for the attention of our students and engaging them in meaningful learning is a profound and ongoing challenge.
But, there is a flipside. Even if college teachers did have the performance skills and production support to put on a show that matches the level of sheer sensory stimulation supplied by today's video and computer games, music videos, films, and television shows, it wouldn't matter—engaging students doesn't mean entertaining them. It means they are thinking and investing emotional and mental energy in their work. Although the diversity of today's students can be a challenge, it also means students are bringing a rich array of experiences, insights, and ideas to their learning. The information and communication revolution can make our roles much more interesting than being mere dispensers of information. And finally, perhaps we can teach students—particularly those with short fuses—how to resolve conflicts in ways that can contribute to a happier, safer future.
This handbook was written for teachers like us who work in the trenches of academe. Our primary purpose is to offer teaching colleagues, current and aspiring, a wide variety of tips, strategies, and techniques so that they can transform what could be a daunting task into one that is stimulating and rewarding. We have striven to create a compendium of useful, practical ideas that readers will find enhances the classroom experience for teachers and students alike. We hope it will also be useful to faculty developers, instructional designers, department chairs, and other academic administrators interested in promoting teaching and improving learning.
As it was in the original book, the second edition of this handbook is divided into three parts. In Part One: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Student Engagement, we discuss a theoretical model for defining student engagement in the college classroom as the synergistic interaction between motivation and active learning. Part Two: Tips and Strategies offers 50 specific suggestions on topics such as how to increase motivation, promote active learning, build community, help students learn holistically, and ensure students are appropriately challenged. Part Three:Student Engagement Techniques (SETs) includes step-by-step directions for 50 learning activities that can be used across many types of disciplines. The techniques are organized into categories based on learning goals ranging from helping students acquire basic knowledge, skills, and understanding to developing attitudes, values, and self-awareness. Each technique includes purpose and description, step-by-step directions, examples of the implementation of that technique in specific academic disciplines, online implementation ideas, variations and extensions, observations and advice, and key resources. Rather than reading this book in a linear fashion, readers are encouraged to thumb through it or start at the point that is most useful and appealing to them.
We have also made several important changes in the second edition of the book. In Part One, for example, we have included a more extended discussion of what student engagement is, drawing upon literature that has been published since the first edition. We have also described the process of student engagement. In Part Two, we have provided additional strategies for engaging students. Since technology has advanced significantly in the past decade, we have added information in Part Three about how to implement more of the techniques in the online learning environment. In addition, we have taken care to describe how these techniques are used in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.
“Student engagement” is really about effective teaching, and the literature on how to teach well is huge. Neither of us are educational psychologists, so especially in the conceptual framework that constitutes Part One, we relied on Brophy's (2004), Svinicki's (2004), and Wlodkowski's (2008) excellent syntheses of the research and literature on student motivation and on Sousa's (2006) informative and accessible work on how the brain learns. Readers who are interested in learning more about motivation or the brain are encouraged to go to these original sources. For Part Two and Part Three, we pulled from any source that had a good idea: books, journals, teaching and learning newsletters, corporate training manuals, websites, and even workshop handouts. Some ideas come from our own experiences in the classroom; others come from manuscript reviewers, colleagues, and students. We also pulled from the literature on good teaching as well as upon the expertise of teachers in colleges and universities around the country. We have tried to attribute accurately, preferably to published sources, but some information came to us without attribution. Teaching ideas and techniques are often disseminated by word-of-mouth and become part of general lore and practice. The result of our extensive searching and compiling information is that very little in this handbook is new. Our contribution is to pull it together into a single resource and cast it in a format accessible to discipline-oriented faculty. We have done our best to widely cite and acknowledge sources when possible.
WE ARE DEEPLY indebted to Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross for their seminal work in creating the prototype for this handbook with Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (Jossey-Bass 1993). Through the years, we have worked with K. Patricia Cross, and we used the classroom assessment techniques (CATs) structure for our books in the college teaching techniques series. Pat's writing and thinking have left an indelible imprint throughout this current work. Our decision to dedicate the book to her is rooted in immense gratitude for her inspirational guidance.
For the first edition of this book, numerous people gave support, insightful comments, and constructive criticism, including David Brightman, Jessica Egbert, and Aneesa Davenport at Jossey-Bass. Others, from a variety of affiliations, included James Rhem, Jillian Kinzie, Kay McClenney, L. Dee Fink, Judith Ouimet, Robert Smallwood, Maryellen Weimer, and members of Elizabeth's Instructional Team—Robert Hartwell, Milissa Carey, and Baomi Watson.
In this second edition, Elizabeth invited Claire to collaborate, as we have done with three other books in Wiley's Jossey-Bass College Teaching Techniques Series: Collaborative Learning Techniques, Learning Assessment Techniques, and Interactive Lecturing Techniques. For the second edition of this book, we offer our thanks to Robyn Hammontree for her excellent contributions on how to implement these techniques online. We also thank Liz Johnson, for sharing her knowledge of STEM and providing us with her insights about how these techniques are used in this increasingly important area. And we thank Matt Fifolt for his suggestions for the manuscript. Finally, to our husbands, Eric and Ted, we offer our deepest, heartfelt gratitude for their ongoing support and understanding.