Student engagement in education refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion students show when they are learning or being taught.
How to engage students in class?
Finding out activities to engage students in class can be a difficult task. Various techniques can be used as creative ways to engage students in the classroom. Let's discuss some of the best practices for student engagement below:
- Assumption making- To engage students in the class, teachers can indulge in activities like asking students to make assumptions about the real world. This helps the students to develop their critical thinking skills and analyze the things going around them.
- Brain sketching- Brain sketching is one of the best practices for student engagement. To solve a specific problem, students make sketches and then pass evolving sketches to their neighbors. This can be practiced in class by making a group of 6-8 students and each student privately makes one or more sketches and passes the sketch to the person on the right when it is finished or when a set of time has passed.
- Brainstorming- Brainstorming serves as a tool to develop creative solutions to a problem, and is an innovative thinking process by which students are required to develop ideas or thoughts that may seem crazy or shocking at first. It is one of the best practices for student engagement and can be used to define an issue, diagnose a problem, or possible solutions and resistance to proposed solutions.
- Concept mapping- Concept mapping is one of the most creative ways to engage students. Concept maps portray knowledge in graphic form. Concept maps help in generating ideas, designing complex structures, or communicating complex ideas as they make explicit the integration of old and new knowledge concept maps can help instructors assess students’ understanding.
- Exaggeration- Exaggeration means to maximize. It is a useful process to build ideas for solutions. This process includes defining a problem to be addressed or an idea to develop, listing all the parts of the idea, or if a problem, its objectives and constraints.
- Laddering- The process of laddering is another method of how to engage students in class. Laddering can help students understand how an expert categorizes concepts into classes and can help clarify concepts and their relationships. It is a process that involves the creation, reviewing, and modification of knowledge.
- Role-playingis- This exercise for student engagement involves assigning roles to the students. In most role-playing exercises, each student takes the role of a person affected by an issue and studies an issue or events from the perspective of that person. Roles should be allocated to the students as per what they have studied in the class and their interests.
- Storyboarding- Storyboarding is one of the most used creative ways to engage students. This step involves the interchange of thoughts between students on a topic. This activity includes planning, and sharing of ideas, and enables communication in the classroom.
- Post-up - This is one of the most effective activities to engage students. Post-up can gather ideas from large groups, numbering from the dozens to the hundreds. Students are given slips of paper (or Post-it notes) and asked to write down ideas which are later discussed in the classroom.
The above-mentioned information is about how to improve student engagement. It tells us about various activities to engage students in the classroom. There's no point in teaching if the students are not attentive in the classroom. Therefore, teachers must use creative ways to engage students.
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How to improve student engagement?
Apart from using the above-mentioned techniques, teachers can also increase student engagement by motivating the students. This can be done in two ways.
Firstly, teachers can reward the students for paying attention. This is a very effective method of increasing student engagement. The second way is by appreciating the students, this boosts their confidence and motivates them to participate more in the classroom. How to improve student engagement is a concerning question and every teacher must know the solution to it. Increased student engagement is the key to better overall results for the institution.
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