 | Barkley, E. F . (2010). Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty.
San Francisco, Jossey‐Bass Wiley. |
Keeping students involved, motivated, and actively learning is challenging educators across the country,yet good advice on how to accomplish this has not been readily available. Student Engagement Techniques is a comprehensive resource that offers college teachers a dynamic model for engaging students and includes over one hundred tips, strategies, and techniques that have been proven to help teachers from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions motivate and connect with their students.
The seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education are based upon a review of over fifty years of educational research. They are a good place to start if you are looking for straightforward ways to improve/enhance your teaching.
Covington, M. V. (2000). Goal Theory, Motivation and School Achievement: An Integrative Review. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 171-200.
The purpose of this review is to document the directions and recent progress in our understanding of the motivational dynamics of school achievement. Based on the accumulating research it is concluded that the quality of student learning as well as the will to continue learning depends closely on an interaction between the kinds of social and academic goals students bring to the classroom, the motivating properties of these goals and prevailing classroom reward structures. Implications for school reform that follow uniquely from a motivational and goal-theory perspective are also explored.
This article draws on the Rourke article (see below) to discuss effective instructor presence for online teaching. Although the article deals with online teaching, the ideas will be useful for face-to-face teaching. However, we would recommend reading Rourke's original article for an understanding of the community of inquiry model.
This article uses the concept of constructive alignment to ensure the purposeful use of technologies in teaching.
This article draws on the work of Knowles to talk about the characteristics of adult learners. However, it is not straightforwardly obvious that adult learners do in fact exhbit these qualities and the article should be read with a critical eye.
 | Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75 - 86. |
This is a very useful article looking at the evidence base for the efficacy of constructivist and instructional approaches to teaching and learning. The authors draw on cognitive theory to argue that constructivist approaches to learning are not suitable for novice / intermediate learners. Definitely worth a read to understand how these theories might be applied in practice.
This article clearly grounds the use technologies in teaching and learning challenges/opportunities and talks about research that can follow from innovating with technologies.
Research findings in recent years provide compelling evidence of the importance of encouraging student control over the learning process as a whole. The socially based tools and technologies of the Web 2.0 movement are capable of supporting informal conversation, reflexive dialogue and collaborative content generation, enabling access to a wide raft of ideas and representations. Used appropriately, these tools can shift control to the learner, through promoting learner agency, autonomy and engagement in social networks that straddle multiple real and virtual learning spaces independent of physical, geographic, institutional and organisational boundaries. As argued in this article, however, in order for self-regulated learning to come to fruition, students need not only to be able to choose and personalise what tools and content are available, but also to have access to the necessary scaffolding to support their learning.
The twenty-first century demands not only that we learn new forms of social engagement but also that we unlearn habits that have been useful in the past but may no longer be valuable to the future. Teachers have 'un-learned' the role of Sage-on-the-stage as the dominent model of teaching, and the shift to Guide-on-the-side has served an important function in changing the focus of pedagogy from the teacher to the learner. However, Guide-on-the-side is no longer sufficient for our times. This paper argues the importance of a further shift to Meddler-in-the-middle. Meddler-in-the middle positions the teacher and student as mutually involved in assembling and dis-assembling cultural products. It re-positions teacher and student as co-directors and co-editors of their social world. Meddler-in-the-middle challenges more long-term notions of 'good' teaching in a number of ways. Specifically, it means: (1) less time giving instructions and more time spent being a usefully ignorant co-worker in the thick of the action; (2) less time spent being a custodial risk minimiser and more time spent being an experimenter and risk-taker; (3) less time spent being a forensic classroom auditor and more time spent being a designer, editor and assembler; (4) less time spent being a counsellor and 'best buddy' and more time spent being a collaborative critic and authentic evaluator.
A summary of the five patterns or perspectives of teaching which form the basis of the Teaching Perspectives Inventory: transmission; apprentice; developmental; nurturing; social reform. A great place to start considering your own perspective and how that aligns with meeting your students' learning needs and the fit with the teaching and learning environment.
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