Engaging Students: What it could look like.

What does it take to engage students?

Challenging activities, Interaction, Conducive room, Resources, a Willing Teacher

How does it benefit the students?

Shared knowledge, Development of communicative skills, Support learning, Promote responsibility over own learning, Allow for peer evaluation

How does it help the teacher?

Opportunity to actively interact within small groups and meet the specific needs of the learners, Develop a deeper understanding of the learners, Create a rich learning experience

My lessons included a considerable amount of time spent in groups or in pairs. My purpose in involving students in discussion is to engage them in active participation, to enhance the learning experience and encourage collaborative learning. I feel that as they talk amongst themselves and exchange their views on the topic, they are able to build on one another’s knowledge and possibly learn new strategies and gain valuable insight on the topic.

What I enjoy from such an exchange is to observe the knowledge and understanding that seems to be constructed as students talk and explore the material. Sometimes, it leads to clarification among the students. Other times, something new is discovered as in the incident illustrated earlier. Apart from encouraging students to learn from one another, I am convinced that providing these opportunities also prevents the teacher (myself) from limiting what students can or will uncover on their own. I can even recall a number of times when I had learnt something new.

Debates generally occur when the students differ in their opinions on an issue such as during a discussion comparing the gender roles depicted in a play and in today’s society. As the students began to talk to one another, a number of thought-provoking issues were raised such as the influence of religion, culture, and politics in perpetuating gender stereotypes. Through this exercise, students were given the opportunity to relate what they had been analyzing within the classroom to what was relevant outside in the real world.

On a separate occasion, a few students also brought in their laptops while we were looking into the historical context of a particular play. Information was truly just a click away. When new questions began to surface, the students quickly searched for relevant information and shared them with the class.

Though we are still a far cry from the Active Learning classrooms set up at the University of Minnesota, efforts should still be made to engage our students with whatever available resource we have.

Below are excerpts reflecting my students' feedback on my strength as a teacher and significant lessons that had stood out for them:

‘Her class interactional/group activity help us to progress and (make) an improvement (in) our grades’

‘A lesson whereby my group of friends and I had to give opinions on ‘Childhood’, a poem’

‘When we discussed about Streetcar Named Desire. The discussion opened my eyes more.’

These responses share my view of the benefits of engaging students.
They remember the lesson and the discussions and somewhere along the line, they discover something new, something different.