Engaged Learning in Our Classrooms

There are strategies which promote significant learning—learning that results in students having a greater understanding and ability to hold onto and intelligently use the knowledge we have spent our professional lives trying to share with them.  And this spring OID will be focusing on some of these pedagogies of engagement that promote deeper learning and make it more likely that students take what they have learned into future classes and their lives after college.

The first On Teaching Seminar of the spring (January 21) will serve as an introduction to some of these engaged pedagogies.  And the OID sponsored workshop, “Creating Significant Learning Through Integrated Course Design” (February 5), will offer all interested faculty a chance to work on a specific course they would like to design or redesign to better align learning goals, teaching and learning activities, and feedback and assessment in a way that creates “significant learning” experiences for students.  This year’s Summer Professorships will also follow the theme of engaged learning.

Many studies affirm that learning correlates strongly with engagement.  The more deeply we involve students with the subject matter, with ourselves, and with their fellow students, the more likely they are to achieve at higher levels.  Good teaching practice in this regard encourages active learning, student-faculty contact, and cooperation among students.  Research shows that if we want to maximize student achievement, especially when they are studying content-dense material and conceptually complex ideas, we need to keep students active in their learning.  

Principles that enhance students’ involvement in their learning can be embodied in many ways, ranging from individual exercises that utilize inquiry and problem-based learning to well-designed team projects that ask students to apply their knowledge to real world situations.  One teacher may get students more actively involved by structuring cooperative interaction into classes, perhaps having students teach material to one another. Another teacher may use case studies to prompt students to dig below superficial levels of understanding.  There are methods and strategies of engagement that fit every course and every learning outcome. 

Our goal is to help you strengthening the quality of learning in your classroom.  So please join us in the spring as we explore various ways to better engage our students.  You can sign up now for the January box lunch and the February course design workshop. Then check the OID website for the summer professorship guidelines, and start thinking about an old or new course you may want to work on this summer.  Or consider taking part in all of these activities, so that ideas from the first session can be further developed at the workshop and then finally built into a class through a summer professorship. Details for these events are found in this issue of On Teaching. We hope to see you there!