This semester our teaching tips are gleaned from Dr. Elizabeth Barkley’s text, Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (Jossey-Bass, 2010). The author will be our guest at the Teaching and Creativity Center’s June 15 event, and a copy of her book is available in each of the TCC rooms (5-091 at DCC and 12-201 at Brighton).
Dr. Barkley suggests this definition of student engagement in the context of a college classroom: “Student engagement is a process and a product that is experienced on a continuum and results from the synergistic interaction between motivation and active learning.”
Our first teaching tip is a student engagement technique that can be used at any point in the semester to encourage creative thinking, collaboration, and reflection.
ARTIFACTS --SET 2 (Student Engagement Technique)
Since images and objects can evoke different responses than written text, this activity uses visual representations and handheld objects to arouse curiosity, stimulate ideas, and focus attention. The teacher provides groups of students with photos, specimens, charts, graphs, drawings, or objects that represent key ideas about a topic. Students discuss these in relation to prompts the teacher has designed.
Directions:
1. Identify a concept that you want students to understand and discuss and that lends itself to visual imagery or physical representation. For example, a professor who wants the students to discuss math anxiety may offer postcards of tightrope walkers, a cartoon of a person looking overwhelmed next to a stack of books, a picture of someone floating on a raft, and a picture of Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream.
2. Collect or duplicate the items you collected so that you have a set for each group of 4-5 students.
3. Create the prompts you want to use to guide the students and put these on handouts, slides, posters, or transparencies. A professor who wanted the students to understand how medieval Christian architects used symbols and design elements might give pictures of different churches and ask students, following a lecture, to identify and describe uses of religious symbolism in the architecture of churches.
4. Decide how you want the students to report findings.
5. Form the groups, explain the purpose and directions for the activity, and distribute the items to the students.
I borrowed from Student Engagement Techniques for this. For more examples of how professors in different disciplines used it and/or for variations and extensions, look at pp. 161-63.
Dr. Barkley’s resource for this is Dodge, J. (2005). Differentiation in Action. New York: Scholastic pp. 37-39.
Julie Damerell
Transitional Studies
01/24/2012 |