1. Nurture student motivation

Poor motivation in learning is a more serious problem at the high school level than in earlier grades. Many studies show that as students progress from elementary to middle school and on to high school, motivation and academic engagement steadily decline (National Center for Education Statistics, 2000; Stipek, 2002).

Low motivation implies that students are inattentive, uninvolved in the class, or show little effort and feel bored. This can result in disruptive behaviour, skipping classes, truancy, quitting school, or being removed because of their problematic behaviour.

So, motivation affects students’ engagement and so learning achievement.

However, research evidence shows that even when students are working hard, their main focus is to obtain good grades or “do school” rather than to learn or master academic material (Pope, 2000).

Students need to be intrinsically motivated to get deeply engaged in their learning, invest in their learning, and make efforts to understand and master the necessary knowledge and skills.

Therefore, try to create the necessary conditions to enhance students’ intrinsic motivation. To achieve this successfully in practice read: 4 Ways to Build Intrinsic Motivation in Students

2. Promote active and challenging learning

Engagement does not occur if students are not motivated and actively learning. So, besides fostering motivation, it is necessary to promote active learning.

Because when students are involved in active learning, they are busy doing something:  thinking, connecting the new information to what they already know, discussing, collaborating, problem-solving, reflecting, etc.

Indeed, active learning offers opportunities for students to reflect on how and why they are learning, not just what they have learned. As a result, learning becomes more meaningful, relevant, and connected to their learning needs and career goals.

So, within active learning students are more likely to get engaged in the classroom because they see the value of contributing to their learning.

Further, to keep students engaged integrate active learning tasks that have a particular intellectual challenge, or learning ‘stretch.

Students tend to find very easy tasks boring, while too difficult or challenging ones will make them lose self-confidence and misbehave in the classroom.

Tasks that are challenging but achievable are essential.

Therefore, selecting tasks with the appropriate intellectual challenge level is necessary to trigger students’ interest and keep them engaged.

However, what is new and challenging for one student might not offer any learning ‘stretch’ to another. This implies that some degree of personalization is needed. Scaffolding is also necessary to provide help with complex learning.

Thus, to keep students engaged in the classroom integrate active and challenging learning.

You don’t need any fancy gadgets or tools to accomplish this. Instead, consider creating more engaging tasks with the materials you already have to encourage your students to think.

Here are some tips that help:

• Be clear about what you want students to learn

This will help you make better decisions and choices about the kinds of tasks that will best promote active and challenging learning.

• Recognize your role

To help students construct knowledge you must be more than a dispenser of information. You are a facilitator who arranges the learning environment to encourage self-directed learning. So, opportunities are to be offered for students to make choices, reflect on their learnings and make decisions to improve.

• Teach students active learning skills

Engage students in thought-provoking tasks such as applying concepts, solving problems, and discussing issues that tease out their understanding, make it explicit and help them create new knowledge.

Yet, be sure to demonstrate the importance of active learning to students before engaging them in such tasks to keep them engaged.

To learn about the essential active learning strategies and tasks, check out this post: Active Learning

• Help students develop learning strategies

Students need to use strategies or tactics to learn different types of information or skills (for example, previewing, summarizing, paraphrasing, creating analogies, note-taking, and outlining).

This helps them become more capable of directing and managing their learning and so more engaged.

To this end, consider incorporating those learning strategies into content-based learning activities. That is, integrating them into your syllabus content while providing explanations and modelling for students on how to develop them.

• Trigger students’ interest

Students won’t engage actively in learning and cope with challenging tasks unless they are interested in doing so. So, we should always focus on triggering their interest in learning.

To achieve this aim, use lesson hooks (materials, tasks, tips) that trigger students’ interest, and meaningfully link learning to their life experiences and to issues that concern them (a switch). Also, don’t forget to ensure that all students interact safely and enjoyably with each other.

3. Keep students’ attention

We cannot keep students engaged in learning if they are not attentive enough in class. This may not be easy as students’ attention wanders over the course of a class period.

So, to extend students’ attention spans and keep them engaged, try the following techniques:

• Provide opportunities for students to use the information, to do something instead of listening and writing most of the time;
• avoid overloading them with much cognitive content; make it simple, and focused, with clear language;
• use a variety of instructional approaches with a change of pace. Don’t spend too much time on an activity. Offer students choices and differentiate instructions;
• pause to allow students to think, answer a question, breath, and relax, etc.
• include learning activities that involve physical movement;
• use surprise and the unexpected to attract their curiosity and have their attention.

 

 4. Build community

Psychologically comfortable environments are necessary for many students to get engaged in learning. Indeed, many correlational studies have shown that students who report caring and supportive interpersonal relationships in school have more positive academic attitudes and values and are more satisfied with school (Ryan and Deci, 2000).

They are also more engaged in academic work (Connell and Wellborn, 1991) and they attend school more and learn more (Bryk, Lee, and Holland, 1993).

Also, experimental studies with college students found that feeling a sense of belonging is crucial to cognitive engagement (Baumeister et al., 2002).

This means that when students identify with the values and goals of schooling and feel connected to others in the school (both students and teachers), they are more likely to value learning and become constructively engaged.

So, the learning context matters to keep students engaged.

To create conditions that build a sense of community in the classroom, here are 14 Ideas to build a Positive Classroom Community.

To conclude, keeping students engaged is about creating certain circumstances in which they take pleasure in learning and find the information and skills they are being asked to learn important or meaningful for them and worth their effort. This involves nurturing their intrinsic motivation, integrating active and challenging learning, keeping their attention, and building a community. It is worth doing in any class.

References

Angelo, T. A., and Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers (2nd ed). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Baumeister, R., Twenge, J., and Nuss, C. (2002). Effects of social exclusion on cognitive processes: Anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 817-827.

Bryk, A.S., Lee, V.E., and Holland, P.B. (1993). Catholic schools and the common good. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Connell, J., and Wellborn, J. (1991). Competence, autonomy, and relatedness: A motivational analysis of self-system processes. In M. Gunnar and L. Sroufe (Eds.), Self processes in development: Minnesota symposium on child psychology, volume 23 (pp. 43-77). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2000). Dropout rates in the United States: 1999. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

National Research Council. (2004). Engaging Schools: Fostering high school students’ motivation to learn. USA: The National Academies Press.

Pope, D.C. (2000). Caught in the grade trap: What students say about doing school. (ERIC No. RIEFEB2001). New Orleans, LA: ERIC.

Ryan, R., and Deci, E. (2000a). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55, 68-78.

Stipek, D. (2002). Motivation to learn: Integrating theory and practice 4th edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.