Part IV: A Wrap-Up
Engagement—critical for success, not so easy to build. As you may recall, I started this dialogue out by drawing attention to how as ELT educators we are bridge builders. We build bridges not only between people and their goals, but also between people. We help make connections, and this has been challenged like never before in our COVID world. Engaging students who don’t have cameras on or aren’t sitting in the classroom with your other students, or who may be in a time zone that generally warrants sleep rather than learning, isn’t easy. However, with thoughtful consideration, and a wide variety of tools in your teaching toolkit, it’s doable.
First, it is important to recognize the three levels of engagement that we need to build: emotional, behavioral and cognitive. Each one comes with its’ unique characteristics and effective strategies.
Emotional engagement is all about lowering a student’s affective filter or building their comfort with taking risks and trying out new content. As we saw, there are many advantages to building emotional engagement in an online or digital environment. Students often feel freer to take risks and engage. The pressure of making a mistake sitting next to their peers often dissipates. Using a tool like Nearpod can really help students overcome the fears they may have of making a mistake. If you are launching a live session, you can hide student names, or you can launch a student-paced lesson.
Strategies such as building a community of learners, holding a coffee or tea hour, using collaborative tools within your delivery systems and utilizing think-pair-share via Zoom breakout rooms or other functions within a conferencing platform are all effective strategies in lowering that affective filter, and building emotional engagement.
How about behavioral engagement? This is often a challenging one within our classroom walls and can become even more challenging in a Zoom or digital environment where you can’t always ‘see’ a student’s engagement.
Well, the key here is to make learning active. Regardless of if your class meets face-to-face, online, or live online, it is important that your students are active participants and not just recipients of language. Selecting the right tools and using them at the right time are critical.
As we saw earlier, microlearning, or learning in small chunks works best in building and fostering both behavioral and cognitive engagement.
Always consider asking your students to do after a mini lesson. Additionally, varying the types of tasks you are using in the class is just as important. Students tend to become more passive if the same type of activities come their way again and again. As the examples here illustrate, consider using a collaborative or discussion board, then after the next lesson, have students use an interactive activity such as Draw It! in Nearpod, or an activity where they have to do something. When you appeal to different learning styles, you are able to reach all students, and scaffold learning.
Lastly, we have cognitive engagement. While cognitive engagement appears to be the most obvious, it is often presents the greatest challenge because of all we often feel we need to accomplish.
As we saw in the third blog post, it is about moving students up Bloom’s taxonomy in a thoughtful, deliberate manner. We need to build up to creating rather than ask students to create after simple remembering and understanding tasks. Consider the teaching of paragraph organization. We may have students first identify the parts of a paragraph with a model text. Then, we may have students fill in missing gaps of a model paragraph. Next, we can have students unscramble sentences to organize them into a paragraph—all before we ask students to go and create their own paragraphs. Without proper scaffolding, students are being asked to jump across wide rivers without a bridge. It puts a strain on their cognitive load, and often creates obstacles in learning.
Now, with the pressures that many of us feel to ‘get things done’ this can be taxing. However, really working your students up Bloom’s can improve the quality of learning. In other words, it will stay with them longer. Research tells us that students who are cognitively engaged during a lesson perform better on assessments.
While this is not too surprising, it is important to frequently stop and assess students’ level of engagement. Consider again microlearning, with checkpoints that stop and immediately assess what they have just learned. As you see in this screenshot, after teaching the pronunciation of –ed endings, students receive a short formative assessment on what they just heard. When students know they will be immediately assessed, they tend to be more on task and engaged, regardless of where they may be sitting.
Overall, engagement is closely aligned with achievement. Students are able to achieve their own linguistic goals, as well as your course and programs, when they are engaged. And, when we think of engagement, we can’t simply think of how we can make the lesson more fun, but rather how we can build and foster emotional, behavioral, and cognitive engagement.
Christina Cavage is the Curriculum and Assessment Manager at University of Central Florida. She has trained numerous teachers all over the world in using digital technologies to enhance and extend learning. She has authored over a dozen ELT textbooks, including University Success, Oral Communication, Transition Level, Advanced Level, Intermediate Level and A2. Recently, Ms. Cavage completed grammar and academic vocabulary curriculum for the new Pearson English Content Library Powered by Nearpod, which is now available. Learn more here.
