Student Engagement Techniques - Elizabeth F. Barkley

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completion of a task play a critical role in successful learning in college and university courses.

      Metacognitive strategies require activity on the part of the learner, not for grading purposes but for the pedagogical purpose of actively monitoring and controlling the learning processes. Teachers can help students develop the metacognitive strategies that enable them to exert more control over the quality of their learning. After all, in the final analysis, the learners themselves are in the best position to determine whether or not they are learning at their optimal level of challenge.

      Empowering Students as Partners in theLearning Process

      Because optimal challenge zones are determined by an individual student's unique needs, it helps if students are empowered partners in the learning process. When students have the power to make decisions regarding their own learning, they can take steps to ensure they are working in their optimal challenge zone. Weimer (2002) identifies sharing power with students as the first of five key changes required to shift to learner-centered teaching. Her chapter on the balance of power opens with this paragraph:

       How would you characterize today's college students? Empowered, confident, self-motivated learners? That is not how I would describe mine. The ones in my classes are hopeful but generally anxious and tentative. They want all classes to be easy but expect that most will be hard. They wish their major (whatever it might be) did not require math, science, or English courses. A good number will not speak in class unless called on. Most like, want, indeed need, teachers who tell them exactly what to do. Education is something done unto them. It frequently involves stress, anxiety, and other forms of discomfort. (p. 23)

      Weimer's description evokes a wonderfully clear and instantly recognizable image of disengaged students. She discusses power sharing from many perspectives, including summarizing the major themes in the writings of radical, critical pedagogues such as Freire and Hooks, noting the emphasis they give to the influence of power on the motivation to learn and on learning outcomes themselves. She also observes, “teacher authority is so taken for granted that most of us are no longer aware of the extent to which we direct student learning” (p. 23) and provides ample evidence of the power differential between teacher and students in typical college classes.

      In Weimer's own teaching, she observes that when it becomes clear that she is not going to tell students what to do, they begin to exercise their power tentatively and anxiously, wanting feedback and needing reinforcement in order to move forward with a bit more confidence. She then shares:

       It is difficult to say precisely when it happens, but one day, quite unexpectedly, the students are engaged and involved with the course and its content. There is an energy about the class, a kind of enthusiasm. Instructional nirvana does not descend. Not everybody is involved and engaged, and some activities and assignments still bomb. But student response to my efforts to share power has been the most eloquent evidence to me that learner-centered teaching is a powerful pedagogy. (pp. 30–31)

      Empowering students to be active partners in their learning requires a subtle but thorough shift in focus away from what the teacher is teaching to what and how the student is learning.

      Providing students with high-quality assessment and feedback, helping students to develop metacognitive skills, and empowering students as partners in the learning process are three approaches to helping students work in their optimal challenge zone. These strategies also help create synergy by connecting active learning (students are “stretching” to learn something that is at the edge of their current understanding) and motivation (this challenge is stimulating and positive both because it is new and because it is within reach).

      As college professors, we flourish in the “thinking” world. When we consider college-level learning, we readily understand and value the acquisition, synthesis, and evaluation of knowledge that characterizes abstract thought. Bloom's taxonomy of the cognitive domain, which classifies behaviors such as these into a series of hierarchical levels, has served as a guide to faculty in all kinds of institutions as they design and develop their courses. But learning involves more than rational thinking. Even the definition of cognition itself moves beyond pure intellectual reasoning to include processes such as intuition and perception. Furthermore, new models of “intelligence”—such as Gardner's “multiple intelligences” (which contains a bodily-kinesthetic component) and Goleman's “emotional intelligence” (which emphasizes the ability to monitor one's own and other's feelings)—challenge us to embrace a concept of learning that extends beyond logical thinking.

      This broader, more inclusive perspective is also supported by neuroscience. Harvard clinical psychologist John Ratey (2002) observes that the “new view” is that brain and body systems are distributed over the whole person and that we cannot separate emotion, cognition, and the physical body. In fact, separating these functions “is rapidly coming to be seen as ridiculous” (p. 223). Thus, despite higher education's historical emphasis on the purely intellectual, many educators today recognize that the body, heart, and mind are all involved in learning, and that all three make contributions to engagement. Some individuals, such as McTighe and Wiggins (1999a), Shulman (2002), and Fink (2003), are suggesting new taxonomies that integrate multiple domains.

      The Affective Domain

      How students feel—about life, about themselves, about what teachers are trying to teach them—plays a critical role in how they learn. Many educators believe motivation, sometimes defined as the feeling of interest or enthusiasm that makes somebody want to do something, is at the heart of student engagement. As Wlodkowski (2008) points out, “To put it quite simply, when there is no motivation to learn, there is no learning … people motivated to learn are more likely to do things they believe will help them learn” (pp. 5–6). Sharing Wlodkowski's emphasis on the importance of motivation, Lee Shulman (2002) pairs motivation with engagement and identifies the two as the first stage in his table of learning (p. 2). Yet students' emotions have been the least studied and most overlooked aspect of classroom teaching.

      Affect is the emotion associated with an idea or action, thus the affective domain includes our feelings, values, enthusiasms, and attitudes. We discussed the function of neurons and neuronal networks from primarily a cognitive perspective (see Chapter 3), so let us take a moment to explore their role in affect. From a neuroscientific perspective, affect is just as much a part of the brain's neuronal network as cognition. Although scientists used to think emotion was centered in the specific limbic area of the brain, Ratey (2002) observes that now research demonstrates “Emotion is not the conveniently isolated brain function that once we were taught. Emotion is messy, complicated, primitive, and undefined because it's all over the place, intertwined with cognition and physiology” (pp. 223–224). Even though our emotional responses are distributed throughout the brain and body, scientists are starting to figure out how the different components are interacting.

      Affect and Memory

      At the center of the brain, sandwiched between the two temporal lobes, is the limbic region, an area that consists of a group of structures that regulate our emotions and our memory. Two of these—the hippocampus and the amygdala—perform essential roles in learning. The hippocampus plays a major role in consolidating learning and in controlling how memories are stored. Memories are not stored as a whole in one place; they are distributed throughout the brain in a dynamic, interactive system

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