The ebook consists of 7 digestible lessons that will help improve student engagement in your classes. If you’re looking to make a few tweaks to your class or even considering revising your whole course this book will help you manage these tasks.

And like any book for teachers, each lesson has short homework to help you work through some of the tips from each lesson.

Click here to download your free ebook!

If you’d rather not download the book, each of the lessons is available through the links provided below:

Lesson 1: Understand Your Students
Lesson 2: How to Create an Interactive Classroom
Lesson 3: Finding Your Voice
Lesson 4: Make Your Classroom Fun
Lesson 5: Leave Students Wanting More
Lesson 6: Take Extra Time to Prepare for Class
Lesson 7: Be Yourself

Remember, this information isn’t only for you. Make sure to let your peers and fellow teachers know about this great resource. Feel free to distribute the ebook as you see fit.

In the meantime you can find all seven entries under the Student Engagement Series tag on the sidebar. Or if you wish to review individual posts in the series just click on the links below.

Lesson 1: Understand Your Students
Lesson 2: How to Create an Interactive Classroom
Lesson 3: Finding Your Voice
Lesson 4: Make Your Classroom Fun
Lesson 5: Leave Students Wanting More
Lesson 6: Take Extra Time to Prepare for Class
Lesson 7: Be Yourself

That’s all for now. Be sure to check back Monday so you can download and share the ebook with other professors, instructors and teachers.

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Be Yourself.

You can engage students in plenty of ways. You don’t need to resort to ideas that aren’t you.

If you are a funny guy, don’t try to be dry. It will come off as fake and not genuine.

Share and Relate

Don’t be afraid to share personal examples and real life experiences of your own success and failures. Students will be able to connect with you because you are authentic.

A professor I had in college was a master at the personal story. In fact he had so many personal stories I am certain he either a) made them up or b) adapted them from other professors. It was those personal stories though that kept the class interested in what he had to say.

Stay on Topic

There’s no reason to throw personal stories into your lecture just for the sake of it. Instead find relevant stories that you can work into your lecture in a way that makes sense.

Homework: For your next 5 lectures think of a story that is both relevant and personal. It doesn’t matter what the story is. Just make sure it is on topic and can create a connection with your students.

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Today’s lesson is a bit of a no-brainer, but because it’s so easy it often gets overlooked.

Making your class engaging and interesting doesn’t happen over night. You absolutely have to take some time to think about and prepare for your class lectures, assignments, tests and other material.

Too many times when I talk to professors I get the distinct impression that they have been using the same material, delivered in the same format for 30 years. Not naming names, but in a course I recently observed the professor was still using overhead transparencies. Really, that’s not a joke.

Some areas to double check

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out exactly what you should look over for your class. After all, you have been teaching it much of your adult life. No need to worry, here are a few steps to get you started. Note: this isn’t a comprehensive list. If you have other material that you are using go ahead and look that over too.

1. Written content: The most obvious is to check for spelling mistakes and make sure the formatting looks correct.
2. Crafting your opening line: First impressions matter. Make sure that whatever you start you’re lecture with will draw students in.
3. The point: Make sure your lectures have a point. Even math courses are working towards a goal. If it seems like your lecture doesn’t have a point you will never get traction with your students.
4. Examples and Word Choice: Believe it or not but there is a generational gap between you and your students. Make sure your examples relate and double check that your word choices don’t have other meanings you aren’t aware of. An odd sexual innuendo can throw off your whole lecture.
5. Length: Make sure you don’t go over time and make sure you use up the allotted lecture time. Students hate it when class runs late and students deserve to get the full lecture time they are paying for.

Homework: Pick one or two lectures for this week and double check each of the five points discussed above. Also check our previous five lessons on engagement to make sure your lecture fits the criteria mentioned in those lessons.

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Mrs. Baker left us wanting more.

No matter your opinion, Soap Opera’s are the best at doing this. There are always feuds, crime, innuendo, family politics, secrets and dramatic cliff hangers that are sure to leave viewers wanting more.

Now Soap Opera’s aren’t always stimulating or great entertainment, but imagine if you could take your good course content and find a way to build anticipation like Soap’s and make your students want more?

5 Ways to Build Anticipation in Your Class

1. Be Anticipated: If you aren’t excited about upcoming lectures then why will your students? You need to have direction for your class and a plan for upcoming lectures. Take a few extra minutes to make the schedule in your syllabus sound little more exciting instead of a plain weekly checklist of topics to cover. This is a great way to communicate that you have control over the class and that each week in the term will be packed with new and interesting activities.
2. Have competitions: Over the course of the semester divide your students into teams and have them compete for a prize. Make sure the reward is actually valuable and unrelated to grades. Students will be excited each week about the progress they make and will be anxious to see who can come out on top.
3. Finish your lectures with a question: If you ask an interesting question students will want to know the answer. If you make them wait for the answer you will be able to create the anticipation you are looking for.
4. Don’t be Too Comprehensive: If you cover every single angle of a topic, students will have no need to ask questions or delve into topics on their own. It’s OK to purposely leave one angle uncovered so that students can figure it out on their own. If your worried about students missing a vital concept – don’t. It’s unlikely that one small stone left unturned will affect your students’ futures.
5. Create video trailers for each lecture and post them online before class: Every movie has a trailer. The quality of the trailer can be the difference between a movie making money and losing money. Since nobody makes trailers for lectures – yours needs to be just mildly interesting and students will eat them up.

Caution!

Too much anticipation can be a bad thing. Like our Soap Opera example, if every point of communication between you and your students ends with a cliffhanger the students will become frustrated wondering if they will ever have the answers.

Build anticipation naturally. Make sure that your lectures still contain good content and interaction and respect your student’s intelligence. If you go overboard with cliffhangers, they’ll be able to tell and it will turn them off.

Homework: Take 15 minutes to revisit your next three or four lectures. See if there are any logical transitions or distinct places where you can build anticipation for an upcoming lecture, project, and field trip or, like lesson #4 in this series, a surprise.

Once you have everything planned, see if you can make your students more excited about your next lecture by building some anticipation.

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Students hate going to class, professors are teaching too many classes. Homework, tests, grading – it all starts to overwhelm and make the learning process kind of a drag.

Here’s the crazy thing: most people cite learning as one of life’s most rewarding activities.

One of the best ways to make your classroom fun is to be surprising. In our last post we talked about experimenting to find your voice. Well one of the benefits of trying new voices is it can wake your students up by providing them with the same old material but in a fresh and different way.

In a sense, when you experiment with your voice you are doing something surprising. This can really reach out and grab your students – especially those who have gone into a coma in the back row of your classroom.

How to be surprising?

It’s often easy to get in a rut doing your same old routine but it’s pretty simple to do something different and surprising.

1. Expand to related topics: Every class has some material that is related to current events so don’t be afraid to talk about industry trends or things in the news. Real life examples have a way of sparking interest. Look for the angle that will make your students say ‘Wow, I had no idea.’
2. Have your lecture somewhere else: Teach outside or at a restaurant. There is something cool about learning outside of an academic building. Things seem more relevant and the conversation seems to flow more freely.
3. Change your voice level: If you’re usually pretty quite – yell. If you’re usually loud – speak softly. This is a trick from musicians. If you change your dynamics you’ll have a much better chance of keeping your audience engaged than if you play at the same level the whole time. Works the same way in the classroom.
4. Use metaphors: Everyone loves a good metaphor. Metaphors can peak a student’s interest because they want to know where it will lead. Students also tend to remember weird and strange metaphors so the more outlandish the metaphor the better.
5. Humor: One of my favorite days of the year is April fool’s day. Students will remember a good April fool’s day joke for years, plus, everyone loves a good prankster. Before you pull out your jokes check them at the door to make sure they relate to your students. A bad joke can really put a damper on things.

Extra Tip – Coming up with fresh and surprising ways to present information can take work but can also be fun if you listen to the crazy ideas you come up with in your head. Often these ideas start out just plain bizarre, but if you can capture them and shape them into reality it will be well worth it.

These kind of surprising moments are the things that get students talking about your class and generate buzz on campus.

Homework: Shut down your computer and go to some place convenient you usually don’t visit. Pull out a pen and some paper and right down a topic you will lecture on in the next week. After you’ve done that, create a mind map of all the crazy ways you can present this information. No idea is too crazy. No idea is too weird. Do this for 15 minutes or so and afterward weed through the ideas and find the ones you can make work and voila! You’ve turned your old lecture material into something new, fresh and interesting – something that is sure to be fun for your students.

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Photo credit: Eole

Credit: Lisa Gagne

Today’s lesson is short and simple, but can be the most difficult to execute.

Have you ever attended a lecture and the lecturer just seems to have ‘it’?

The lecturer has great material, his slides are designed well, the lecture flows, his props are relevant, he’s kind of funny and afterward you can still remember all the main points.

This guy has a voice.

For the rest of us, finding our voice isn’t easy, but with a little experimenting and practice we can deliver a lecture that has ‘it’ too.

How to Find Your Voice

I’ve been in over a thousand lectures in the past five years and have had the opportunity to observe some great lectures as well as some not so great.

The one thing that sets good lecturers apart is their ability to engage students in a variety of different ways. They try PowerPoint, they try video, they try group activities and they try many, many different approaches for communicating with their students until they find one that works.

As they say – ‘Practice makes perfect.’

One of my favorite professors said it took him years to find a voice that works. He spent lecture after lecture testing new ways of presenting material, but to no avail.

After a particularly poor semester he decided to start lecturing in third person. It was weird. It was gimmicky, but more importantly it worked. Students loved it and he’s been doing it ever since.

The important thing is that he never stopped trying to find something that worked. It’s easy to think this whole lecturing thing will be a cinch, but when we find out how hard it is we just settle for the same only boring routine. Consistently pushing past struggles to engage students will make you a better instructor and help you find your voice.

This professor’s experiments lead us to today’s homework.

Homework: Think of how you typically lecture and try something different.

• If you usually try to be funny – stop. Be dry.
• If you typically present facts verbatim, try asking a lot of questions.
• It you usually wear a tie, try ditching it.

The important part is that you make subtle changes in how you present information. Ask a student you trust to let you know if they like the new approach or if it’s a total flop. When you find something that works – stick with it for a while. Don’t be afraid to keep experimenting, tweaking and testing even if you think you’ve found your perfect voice.

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3 Benefits of an Interactive Classroom

There are many benefits to an interactive classroom but here are three that will take your class to the next level.

1. Students are Smart

While you are certainly the expert on your courses’ content, the reality is students often have valuable insight that can enhance the learning environment in your classroom.

For example, many times professors can present a concept to a class that for one reason or another doesn’t quite get communicated to the students. In an interactive classroom, however, there are usually a few students who are exceptional at translating your jargon into something meaningful that the rest of the class can relate to.

If you ignore these students’ abilities the entire class is left to wonder what the point of your lecture was.

2. Energy is Good

Go to a class where the professor lectures period after period using dull PowerPoint slides. I guarantee at least a third of the students are asleep. Now visit a class where students are routinely conversing with the professor and getting hands on learning experiences. These classes have an energy, a buzz about them that make learning fun and exiting. An interactive classroom will engage students.



photo by Orange42

3. Student Investment

When classes are interactive students start to make a personal investment. When a student has a good experience in your class they make it a point to show up for class, turn in homework and put in a little extra effort when studying for your tests.

That’s not to say that interactive classrooms will turn all of your students into A+ students, but an interactive classroom will give your class an added boost.

The Back Row Students

One of the biggest problems professors face is the hoard of students who dwell in the back row texting, surfing the internet, working crosswords and generally ignoring the class.

So how do you build up interaction among this crowd? Here are a few suggestions that might help.

1. Ask Students to Interact

When you ask students to do something (this is in class mind you) they’re much more likely to do it.

This sounds simple but I have been in lecture after lecture where professors just simply put up with students playing video games, surfing the web and working crosswords. A simple way to stop this is to have your students do something.

Some ideas might be:

• Have short in-class assignments
• Have in-class team work
• Use Clickers for credit (this one is tricky because students tend to have their friends click for them when absent)
• More to the extreme: call out students. I had a professor that did this and everyone hated it, but everyone showed up to class and the professor became widely regarded as on of the best in the department.
2. Talking in Class isn’t Everything

Some people are just shy and talking in front of a class isn’t going to happen no matter how much you want. Instead try other forms of interaction.

Other forms of interacting include:

• Polls
• Surveys
• Ongoing email
• Online discussion forums – some people seem to find this easier to talk online than in class
3. Show off Your Students

If you have a student that has done something interesting or even out of the ordinary point it out.

Often students do work that is too good for you to be the only person to see it. Make it a point to show off good work.

Doing this makes your students feel noticed and valued. It also shows other students that you do value good work.

Homework: Alright – so there’s a lot of good theory in here, but nothing will improve if you don’t put something to action.

Your task is to implement one tactic in your classroom. Maybe it’s as simple as using clickers or maybe you’re more adventuresome and want to add more group projects. Whatever it is, experiment, tweak and test to find what works best for you.

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photo by striatic

Welcome to your first lesson in engaging students. Over the next seven weeks our blog will contain seven lessons to help you engage students in your classes.

This seven part series will teach you how to tweak your courses so you can create a more engaging and interactive classroom. After implementing these seven tactics we can guarantee your class will be one that students can’t wait to take.

These lessons are simple, but they take practice. When the course is completed, a PDF checklist including all seven lessons will be posted for download, so you can be sure you’ve covered the important points for every piece of content you create.

The Most Important Lesson

If your computer crashes and you never see the internet again, this one tip alone will separate you from other professors on your campus.

This seems simple, but is definitely not easy. Find out who your students are.

There are two steps in this equation. The first is realizing that not all students are the same. College students are different from high school students. Engineering majors are different from music majors. College campuses can be some of the most diverse places in the nation. It is important to realize that there can be huge differences among any two students on a campus.

If you’re lucky, you teach a small class that is very targeted and all of your students are best friends going into the same field. For the rest of us, this step will take some work.

The second step is making sure to teach to these students by creating a lecture or class style that suits their needs.

Discovering Who Your Students Are

There is one very easy way to find out what makes your students tick – Ask them.

At the beginning of the semester have your students take a survey and ask them anything you think might help. (If you are worried that students won’t take the survey – make the survey a few extra credit points. You’d be amazed what students will do for 0.0000001% points.)

Now, I hear what you’re saying – “This sounds great, but what kind of things should I ask?”  Well, like I said you can ask anything you want, but if you’re still drawing a blank here are some ideas to get you started.

• Why are you taking this class? – Here you want to find out if this class is required for their degree, if it’s an elective or if they are just taking the class for the fun of it. (It also might help to find out if an advisor or past students are recommending the class to other students)
• What do you expect to learn? – This question gives you more insight into what a student wants out of the class. This also gives you the opportunity to steer students who have a misunderstanding of the course material away from the course.
• What other activities are you involved in on campus? – Maybe all your students are in marching band. When you know what your students are involved in it can help you figure out what kind of things students will relate to. It’s possible that some students get your baseball references, but if all your students are in band it’s unlikely that your students are grasping the material quite like you envision.
• What do you watch on television? – Don’t be afraid to ask more intimate questions. If all your students watch The Office then maybe you should watch a few episodes. The more you know the better you will be able to relate.

Note: Keep in mind a survey isn’t the only way to get to know your students. If your class is small and you can take them all out for pizza the first week then by all means go for it.

Teach to These Students

So now you now who your students are and what they are interested in. Make sure all your material is interesting and relevant to these students.

You may be tempted by what previous classes enjoyed or what one particularly excellent student liked. Those students loved it so won’t these new students?

Maybe, but teaching to these students is a mistake. Don’t do it.

Keep yourself laser focused. You’ve done the research. You know exactly what kind of students are taking your class. Don’t sell your work short. If you stick to teaching to this one type of student, your class will become more interesting and engaging.

Rinse, Wash, and Repeat

You now know who your students are, but you aren’t done quite yet. If you teach more than one class odds are you’ll need to do this exercise again.

Remember, colleges are some of the most diverse places in the nation. First-year students in your Introduction to Psychology class will be different than third-year students in your Research Methods class.

It might help to create a photo image of one individual student for each class you teach. This will help you remember exactly who you are teaching to for each course you are an instructor.

Homework: A newsletter for educators wouldn’t be complete without homework. Since school has just started (or for some just getting ready to start) make sure you find out who your students are. Give them a short 10 question survey to help you figure where your students are coming from.

Remember, the more you know about your students the easier it will be to relate to them. The better you relate, the more engaging your class will be to your students.

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