Rumpled worksheets. Interrupted discussions. Sleepyheads. It’s easy to tell that misbehavior is present in your class and students are disengaged.
Photo by Arthur Krijgsman
Students tend to lose interest when the learning process is boring. With disengaged students, learning is dull and the learning environment becomes unproductive. What crucial aspect is missing? Undoubtedly, it’s student engagement! Why is it important to increase student engagement?
On the other hand, students are more likely to increase motivation if we as teachers are really doing our best to make the learning environment engaging and enthusiastic. For students to succeed and learn, they must be actively involved.
But you might wonder, what are the advantages of increased student engagement!
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<<How do you design your behavior management strategies? See their relevance with the following kindergarten behavior management suggestions.
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Why Is It Important to Increase Student Engagement?
It has been found that making students’ learning journeys more engaging results in better grades, greater happiness with their learning experiences, and a higher graduation rate.
Student engagement is the level of enthusiasm and excitement students display when defining the curriculum. Hopefully, the following advantages of increasing student engagement inspire us to help students become more engaged.
1. School drop-outs reduced
As the number of student dropouts continues to rise, what have we done to reduce it? Although there can be other factors that cause student dropout, we should not remove poor student engagement from the equation. And it is one of the critical aspects that we can do something about.
To reduce the number of students who drop out of school, we must adapt to the changing needs of our students. We can’t deny the fact that many students fail to complete their education because they are not actively engaged in learning.
With increased student engagement as a result of sound teaching, pedagogies, and creating a sense of belonging in the classroom, graduation rates greatly increased.
2. Students’ participation in school activities increased
According to research, students’ academic performance, engagement, and personal growth are found to be favorably correlated when they participate in extracurricular activities.
When students actively participate in varied school activities, their values and personal worth improves. They become more optimistic in life in general.
As you can see, student engagement truly affects students’ learning experiences. They tend to be more active if they are involved in their education.
For example, if there will be spelling bee contests or other school activities, students will tend to volunteer their participation once a sense of involvement is already nurtured in the classroom. It gives a sense of fulfillment in participating in different activities.
3. Class disruptions reduced
I have always believed in effective classroom management. Due to its productive implementation in the classroom, student engagement has been raised and classroom disruptions have been prevented.
When a student knows exactly what to do during class discussions and activities, then that particular student genuinely knows the importance of being attentive in class and not disrupting learning activities. In other words, with deep student engagement, students value respect for everyone.
Students know what to say when going out of the classroom while the teacher discusses the lesson. Or they know pretty well how to stay on task and engaged.
Also, with strong student engagement, unwanted behavior decreases so disruptions are avoided. It is duly because their interests and enthusiasm are upheld by the teacher. Pretty clearly, this could be another tip we can embrace so students are more likely to keep on their toes and less likely to get bored and misbehaved.
4. Students’ academic performance improved
When students are deeply involved in learning, they won’t struggle with the activities no matter how challenging they seem to be. Instead, they are enjoying the varied challenging tasks provided for them. And with that, students’ academic performance improved.
If you need to go back and re-teach a certain lesson, do it. It’s all worth it. It is because engaged learners are lifelong learners. Their achievements soar because they are attentive and actively involved in the learning process.
When students participate actively in a Science experiment and just read about hypotheses and theories, learning is lasting. Learning becomes deep and meaningful. Each of us has our own unique strategies or we adopt the best practices of our colleagues to get the attention of our students so they enhance their learning experiences.
5. Interaction and collaboration intensified
If you simply use one strategy and one learning activity for the entire class, then it’s expected that your students will not be engaged and will be more likely to be dead bored! You may not be able to prevent boredom and frustration among your students.
Small group discussions, for example, rather than whole-class discussions, can be very advantageous often. It’s more effective.
When students are interested in learning, they get more excited to collaborate and share their ideas with their partners. It gives them the confidence to have their voices heard.
Make use of instructional strategies that engage students as participants in the learning process. What can be accomplished by students when they feel supported and encouraged is amazingly limitless.
Student Engagement Can Be:
Behavioral – When students are well-behaved and not engaged in disruptive behavior, we can say that they have nurtured behavioral engagement. They work diligently and participate actively in discussions or learning activities.
In other words, behavioral engagement is a term that refers to the act of engaging in a particular behavior that leads to learning engagement. It’s the way students behave in the classroom that may either assist or hinder the learning process.
Emotional – When students are delighted to be in school, particularly in the classroom, we can say that they manifest emotional engagement. These students feel a sense of belonging and they interact positively with their peers.
Emotional engagement is the students’ excitement for education. Evidently, when students have developed emotional engagement, they are more likely to enjoy participating in different school activities.
Cognitive – When students are enthusiastic about learning and have greatly shown improvement in their academic performance, they are said to be intellectually engaged. They think thoroughly about the subject matter. They become inquisitive and curious about things that they intelligently ask thought-provoking questions to finish their assigned tasks.
Cognitive engagement is also known as intellectual engagement. The students’ mental orientation for greater comprehension of the topic and essentially for the mastery of life skills coupled with self-regulation and persistency.
Conclusion
In order to design classes that encourage student participation, we teachers must draw on our own creativity as well as the capabilities of our students.
Student engagement is present when students come to class very excited and participate in different learning activities. Students view learning as fun and productive; hence their performance improves. And they won’t fall asleep in your class. This we can tell that students are interested in learning.
So how does student engagement level up learning in your classroom? Share your amazing experiences in the comment section below.
