Student Engagement 1 [1 of 2]
EDUCATION
Without student engagement, there is little hope that students will retain and successfully apply newly learned content. Student engagement has evolved over recent years and even more so with the sudden demand for remote and more digital learning. So how do we know students are engaged? What does that look like?
Student Engagement
“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” (Dewey, 1916)
What is Student Engagement?
“The degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning and being taught,” (The Glossary of Education Reform, Great Schools Partnership)
Evidence of Student Engagement
Without student engagement, there is little hope that students will retain and successfully apply newly learned content. Student engagement has evolved over recent years and even more so with the sudden demand for remote and more digital learning. So how do we know students are engaged? What does that look like? This post will showcase key strategies to increase student engagement with evidence. Using these tools and strategies, lecturers can be confident students are learning new material with a deeper understanding.
Dimensions of Engagement
Behavioural Engagement – This covers students’ participation in lessons, such as attendance and concentration levels, as well as their involvement in social aspects of learning, and whether or not they engage with extracurricular activities.
Emotional Engagement – This covers students’ feelings, especially towards the subject or course they are studying, their lecturer, their peers, their overall academic experience, and whether they feel the lessons actually have value.
Cognitive Engagement – This covers students’ motivation and investment in their own education. It also includes the extent to which they take ownership of their own learning, can self-regulate, and wish to pursue personal educational goals. (Fredericks, et al., 2004)
Importance of Relationships to Student Engagement
Relationships play an integral role in student engagement and can have a significant impact on the overall learning experience. Students need to feel connected to the people around them to develop a sense of belonging and build meaningful relationships. When students feel connected to their peers, educators, and other adults, they are more likely to be engaged in their learning and take ownership of it.
Relationships can provide students with the support and guidance needed to become successful learners. A supportive relationship between a student and a lecturer can help nurture a positive learning environment and encourage students to take risks and explore their interests. This can lead to increased motivation and engagement in the classroom. Strong relationships between students can also help create a sense of community and promote collaboration. This helps students work together to solve problems and develop their skills. This leads to increased engagement and better academic performance. It is important for educators to foster positive and supportive environments in which students can develop meaningful relationships and be encouraged to take ownership of their own learning.
Engagement during Lecturer-Led Instruction
Engagement during Lecturer Led-Instruction - Engagement during whole group / lecturer-led instruction must be more than students looking at you or having their camera on. We must remember that even if we are in a virtual classroom, it is still of utmost importance to keep learners involved in the class activity.
Think about what strategies are currently being used to engage learners during whole group or lecturer-led instruction. In what dimensions of engagement would those be categorized?
1. Chat (Teams) - Whether you are teaching virtually or in a hybrid situation, encourage students to use the chat feature during the Teams meeting. This allows students both in class and online to still collaborate and connect in the same workspace.
2. Polls (Forms) - Throughout the lesson use the polling feature within the meeting or even in a channel to capture learners’ thoughts, understanding, and feelings about the content. Allow students to guide the pace with these results. Lecturers can pre-prepare the questions in a notepad file (for quick copy and paste) or set up a Forms poll that can be inserted in seconds.
How to create a quick poll in Microsoft Teams [2021) (link) (Tholfsen, 2021)
To identify the methods of the best online teachers you should regularly “gather student feedback on various aspects of...online courses” to identify “what was working or not.” (Kumar, et al., 2019)
3. Whiteboard - the Microsoft Whiteboard will allow either collaboration or added visuals during instruction / teaching. "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn."
7 High-Impact, Evidence-Based Tips for Online Teaching (link) (Terada, 2020)
4. OneNote – Tables, stickers, feedback (audio and video), icons / emojis, Windows keyboard, personalised sticky notes
Engagement during Independent / Small Group Learning
Knowing students can collaborate in a seamless environment means you can assign more collaborative projects and provide more opportunities for student engagement and ultimately, deeper learning.
Consider what strategies are currently used to engage learners during whole group or teacher led instruction.
1. Posts and praise - encourage collaboration within the channels as students work. Participating in collaborative learning promotes engagement by nature. Promote the collaboration and engagement with the built in Praise feature.
2. Breakout Rooms / Private Channels - Allow learners the autonomy (or feeling of) to work privately within a small group. Using private channels (or breakout rooms during a Teams meeting) to give learners a little more freedom to share and give input without the entire group looking / listening.
3. Insights - Use the Insights tab to ensure all students are active and to what level. This is a good indicator but should be followed up on to confirm your learners are, indeed, engaged.
Learning Tool Availability
Providing a personalized and engaging learning experience is always important, but particularly when learning is happening remotely. Moving forward, many students will need additional support in remote learning scenarios, and Microsoft is committed to helping schools, teachers, parents, and students get what they need (McDaniel, 2020)
There are many students that require additional support, and the student engagement topic is not complete without consideration of these students. To encourage and engage as wide a range and as large a number of students as possible, Microsoft have published the Learning Tools. Learning Tools offer students with additional needs a method (or methods) by which they can optimise their online and computing experience. The range of products available and on which platform, is too large to list here, but the Digital Tools web site is available at [this link]. I strongly encourage everyone to review the availability of the different tools because, strangely enough, they are not just for students with additional support requirements.
Learning Accelerators
Microsoft has developed a new category of tools called Learning Accelerators [link] which are widely available for all Microsoft 365 Education accounts. These tools are all found in Microsoft Teams for Education and have been created to empower educators to help students gain critical foundational and workplace skills (Microsoft Corporation, 2023)
Learning Accelerators help educators deliver a more equitable education through:
• Foundational math, literacy, and well-being skills
• Classroom-to-career skills like information literacy and public speaking
• Actionable data to inform instructional decision making
• Inclusive by design tools to ensure all students can access and engage in learning
• Real-time coaching and individualized feedback
References
Dewey, J., 1916. Democracy and Education. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Fredericks, J. A., Blumenfield, P. C. & Paris, A. H., 2004. Review of Educational Research. [Online]
Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543074001059
[Accessed 23 June 2022].
Kumar, S., Martin, F., Budhrani, K. & Ritzhaupt, A., 2019. Award-winning faculty online teaching practices: Elements of award-winning courses. [Online]
Available at: https://olj.onlinelearningconsortium.org/index.php/olj/article/view/2077/868
[Accessed 30 November 2023].
McDaniel, M., 2020. Creating more inclusive and equitable classrooms with Microsoft’s Immersive Reader. [Online]
[Accessed 23 June 2022].
Microsoft Corporation, 2023. Quick Start Guide: Microsoft 365 Learning Accelerators. [Online]
Available at: https://edudownloads.azureedge.net/msdownloads/Microsoft-Learning-Accelerator-Quick-Start-Guide.pdf
[Accessed 30 November 2023].
Terada, Y., 2020. 7 High-Impact, Evidence-Based Tips for Online Teaching. [Online]
Available at: https://www.edutopia.org/article/7-high-impact-evidence-based-tips-online-teaching
[Accessed 23 June 2022].
Tholfsen, M., 2021. How to create a quick poll in Microsoft Teams [2021). [Online]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE8mHXgOu98
[Accessed 23 June 2022].