How to Increase Student Engagement in Five Times?

Student engagement is to what degree the students are involved in the learning process. For example, if a student is actively listening to some kind of discussion and simultaneously writing down some key points, then we can say that the student is engaged. There are five levels of student engagement identified by researchers:

●     Authentic engagement: In this, the student is immersed in the work having a clear meaning and has an immediate value such as reading book based on the topic which is of personal interest to the student.

●     Ritual compliance: In ritual compliance, the work involved has very little or no direct significance to students, but still there is some kind of extrinsic outcomes that keep the student engaged, for example earning credits or grades which are necessary for getting accepted to the college.

●     Passive compliance: Some of the task that the students are not directly associated or related to but they give their full attention and effort to complete the task in order to avoid negative penalties and consequences such as they does not want to stay back in recess time to complete the task.

●     Retreatism: In retreatism, the students are not attached from the assigned work and they somehow are not making any attempt to accomplish the task but they are not even disrupting others to learn in the process.

●     Rebellion: In this, as the name suggests, students are not willing and they refuse to perform the assigned task, they act disruptive and they also make an attempt to substitute any alternate activities.

There are seven ways by which one can increase the student engagement. This is required because students who are involved in the task learn things more efficiently and they grasp the things they are learning in a better way. Also, students who are engaged in learning task tend to be more passionate. Some of the suggestions by which students engagement can increase are:

●     Use 10:2 method: In this, after every 10 minutes of instruction the teacher should let students process, grasp and respond to the instruction for 2 minutes. This can be done by letting them write about what they understood and what they learned, any query and question they have or they can also discuss the content they learned with their fellow classmate.

●     The teacher can include movement in the lessons: In this, the students are required to answer the question asked but by moving from his place to some spot in the classroom such as writing on the whiteboard or standing or even sitting in some other place, etc.

●     The teacher should pick up the pace of teaching: There is a misconception that teacher should go slow and let student really understand and get engaged in a lesson learned. But there are studies reporting that when the teacher is at a brisk pace of instruction, students get more opportunities to get engaged, respond and also move to next concept.

●     The teacher should provide frequent feedback and it should be effective so that the student can have a clear understanding of the lesson.

●     When the teacher asks any question she should give at least 5 to 7 seconds of thinking time to the students to answer the question.