Engaging Today’s Students in Active Learning (Part 5)

In Parts 1-3 of this series, barriers to active learning were discussed: various causes that affected students’ ability or willingness to learn. In Part 4, we discuss strategies for engaging students and engaging them in their own learning. In Part 5, the final article in this series, we will discuss final strategies for engaging your students.

Building trust: Beyond the mechanics of the classroom, beyond the curriculum, the technology used and the external tickets, lies the core of motivation: relationships. Many students, both today and throughout time, yearn for someone to trust. Most of the time, they burn out in search of it. Teachers backtrack too. Legality and politics stifle the desire to put your heart and soul into teaching. Too involved and a teacher can be accused of abuse; Too distant and a teacher loses communication of anything valuable to students.

There are degrees of trust: eliminating mistrust is a completely different concept than building trust. Distrust is the absence of trust, the belief that people are actively trying to hurt you. Trust is basically the belief and assurance that people will keep their promises and that they have the ability to do so. However, building trust is an active process by which people allow themselves to be transparent to others and therefore vulnerable. Building trust involves risks. As such, it appears that building trust is a cyclical process; that once an individual takes the risk of trusting and anticipates that the results have been achieved, the ability to trust that instance is deepened and risk is reduced with respect to future actions.

The strength and transparency of the student / teacher relationship contributes to a stronger learning experience for the student. The positive relationship allows students to identify with their teacher and feel a sense of belonging.

Teachers who reveal themselves to their students, who allow students to come to know who they are, are more successful in building relationships with students. It is important for teachers to show their personal feelings, emotions, difficulties, and successes. By modeling transparency, students learn to build trust and relationships … a skill that will serve them for the rest of their lives both personally and professionally.

Another important aspect of building trust with students is the ability of teachers to laugh at themselves when they make mistakes. Distrust develops at a much higher rate when teachers make excuses or try to overlook their own mistakes and, conversely, students’ trust and respect increase when teachers allow themselves to be exposed, openly accept responsibility for their own mistakes. mistakes and move on.

Problem solving skills involve figuring out how to bounce back from mistakes, an integral part of students’ success in their future careers. Actually, building time into lesson plans to deal with mistakes is considered a worthwhile process. Projects or assignments that contain flaws allow students the opportunity to solve problems through critical thinking. Students learn to respond effectively to miscalculations or faulty materials, a skill that corporations find to increase employability. Discovering that there are several ways to remedy a given situation helps students develop acceptance and tolerance for many solutions or opinions that differ from their own, helping them understand the concept of more than one correct answer.

Students need to know how to identify their strengths and integrate their skills into class assignments. Most students demonstrate a basic need for self-esteem; that they have something to contribute to the whole.

Cheer up: Using the example of mentoring from the corporate world, and equally important, reverse mentoring, students learn the value of helping each other. Rather than viewing the learning process as a competition (in which one student must fail for another to succeed), education must be viewed as a collaborative effort. Encouraging students to help each other learn, without experiencing negative consequences for their own grades or personal achievement, improves student behavior. Most students are familiar with working in study groups or teams, especially in class projects; however, many students do not experience true positive interdependence. Unfortunately, in an often confusing and forced process, students are grouped randomly and are expected to work together on a common goal with no guidance on group interaction skills. Positive group experiences are more likely when team members’ grades include additional credit points for participating in a group, a percentage of the grade for group members is based on the evaluation of teammates and students feel They have a responsibility to educate their peers during presentations rather than just being graded on a data dump.

Another powerful aspect of encouragement and motivation involves students’ awareness of school value. Students are more encouraged to participate when they understand exactly how the classroom material applies to their lives and, specifically, to their future. They need the balanced guidance of educators who understand and can honestly explain what to expect from the world of work. Understanding the strong connection between scholasticism and life application helps reinforce the importance of education and engages students better in learning. Since no two students respond to the same stimulus in the same way, variety is imperative.

Typically, American students are offered so many options that freedom ultimately limits them, a concept known as choice overload. Although students may initially desire a free and open choice without any limitation, the reality of such a concept turns out to be so overwhelming that students actually experience demotivation. However, completing tasks in a monotonous way leads to complacency … on the part of teachers and students alike. The imagination developed in planning and presentation through student participation increases the level of student participation and increases their interest in the outcome. It also contributes to a greater perception of students of the responsibility to learn and contribute to the learning process, motivating students to participate in active learning.

We have examined the barriers that prevent teachers from effectively engaging students in the learning process in a classroom setting. These barriers include home life challenges, feelings of not belonging or not identifying with schoolmates, disrupted sleep patterns, and different learning styles. We know that these challenges contribute to the decline in the average high school student’s motivation to learn. Hopefully, you will have gotten a glimpse of the current education crisis and some strategies to intervene and improve the system.