Keeping Us Engaged (ePub)

This book offers faculty practicalstrategies to engage students that are research-grounded and endorsed bystudents themselves. Through student stories, a signature featureof this book, readers will discover why professor actions result in changedattitudes, stronger connections to others and the course material, andincreased learning.Structured to cover the key momentsand opportunities to increase student engagement, Christine Harrington coversthe all-important first day of class where first impressions can determinestudents' attitudes for the duration of the course, through to insights for rethinkingassignments and enlivening teaching strategies, to ways of providing feedbackthat build students' confidence and spur them to greater immersion in their studies,providing the underlying rationale for the strategies she presents. The studentnarratives not only validate these practices, offering their perspectives aslearners, but constitute a trove of ideas and practices that readers will beinspired to adapt for their particular needs.Conscious of the changingdemographics of today's undergraduate and graduate students - racially morediverse, older, and many employed - Harrington highlights the need toengage all students and shares numerous strategies on how to do so. While many of the ideas presented were usedby faculty teaching face to face classes, a number were developed by facultyteaching online, and the majority can be adapted to virtually any teachingenvironment. Based on student-centered activelearning principles, structured to allow readers to quickly identify practices thatthey may need in particular instances or to infuse in a course as a whole, andpresented without jargon, this book is a springboard for all faculty lookingfor ideas that will engage their students at any level and in any course.