Golden Rules to Keep Students Engaged in Learning Activities

 

Golden Rules to Keep Students Engaged in Learning Activities

When we talk about student engagement in learning activities, we need to consider students’ behavior, feelings, and thinking towards the given activity as it affects their level of engagement.

 

Research shows that taking into consideration the following interrelated elements while developing and implementing learning activities may increase student engagement behaviorally, emotionally (their feelings), and cognitively (their thinking), resulting in a positive effect on student learning and achievement.

 

Make it Meaningful

 

To get full student engagement, they need to perceive learning activities as meaningful.

 

Research suggests that if students don’t find a learning activity worthy of their time and effort, they may not engage on a satisfactory level or may even disengage completely in response.

 

There are many ways in which a learning activity can be made meaningful to students. For example, the activity can be connected to their acquired knowledge and experiences, or the personal relevance of the activity can be highlighted to the students. Also, an adult or expert can demonstrate why an activity is worth pursuing along with its use cases in real life.

 

Developing a Sense of Competence

 

The concept of competence may be understood as a student’s continuous personal evaluation to determine whether he/she can succeed in a learning activity or challenge.

 

• To strengthen students’ sense of competence, the learning activities assigned could:
• Be only slightly above the students’ current level of expertise
• Encourage students to demonstrate understanding throughout the activity
• Display peer coping models of the students who struggle but eventually succeed and peer mastery models of the students who try and succeed
• Incorporate feedback from other students and teachers to help them make progress

 

It was found in research that effectively performing in activity can positively impact student engagement.

 

Provide Autonomy Support

 

Autonomy support can be understood as providing students’ sense of control over their behavior and goals.

 

Autonomy support can be implemented in the following ways:

 

• Welcoming students’ opinions and ideas in the activity
• Using informational, inspirational, influential, non-controlling language with students
• Displaying patience when it comes to students’ understanding of the activity
• Giving students the time to indulge in activity by themselves

 

When teachers refrain from providing directives and commands and give up control without losing their power of influence, the students’ engagement levels are more likely to surge.

 

Adopt Collaborative Learning

 

Collaborative learning is another powerful facilitator that boosts student engagement in learning activities. It is widely observed that when students work effectively with others, their engagement amplifies as a result. This may be because they experience a sense of connection to others during the activities.

 

To get better productivity from a group of students, it is important to formulate strategies that can be implemented to let students know how to behave and communicate in a group setting.

 

Teacher modeling is another method that comes under collaborative learning in which the teacher demonstrates how collaboration within a group is done.

 

This way homogeneous groups and grouping by ability can be avoided which result fosters individual accountability through different roles assigned to students within a group. This also helps in evaluating both the student and the group performance.

 

Build Positive Teacher-Student Relationships

 

Quality relationships between teacher and students are another crucial factor in deciding student engagement, especially when it comes to difficult students and students from a lower socioeconomic section of the society.

 

Teacher-student relationships can be facilitated by:

 

• Taking care of students’ social and emotional needs
• Showing a positive attitude and enthusiasm
• Giving more time to one-on-one sessions with students
• Treating all the students equally and fairly
• Avoiding deception or promise-breaking

 

When students will feel free and comfortable with their teachers, they get to fulfill their developmental need for a connection with others and a sense of belongingness in society.

 

Encourage Mastery Orientations

 

At last, it is students’ perspective of learning activities that impact their level of engagement.

 

When students pursue an activity with the aim of learning and understanding (i.e. mastery orientations) instead of pleasing their parents, getting good grades, or outperforming peers (i.e. performance orientations), they tend to show full and thorough engagement during the activity.

 

To encourage this type of mastery orientation mindset in the students, various approaches can be considered like framing success in terms of learning rather than performing or emphasizing individual progress by recognizing student improvement and effort.

 

In the end, it is all about your own approaches to how you would like to keep your students engaged in a learning activity. All you need to remember that it is not about making them learn, it is about developing the sense of learning in them.

 

Dolphins Group of School follows the above-mentioned golden rules which led them to become one of the Top CBSE schools in Jaipur.