Student Engagement

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve observed an effective technique of engagement.  I teach a cooking class that meets once a week.  This class, and about 9 other extracurricular classes, need to present a project for a project fair in a month or so.  They are in the process of planning, and they actually presented what they had planned so far last week to another extracurricular class project group.  During the presentation, one of the students started out with a story of how we were in the kitchen cooking fried rice when a teacher walked in and told us we need to start planning for the project fair.  Starting out the presentation like this kept me engaged; I really wanted to know what he was going to say next in his story. 

Then, last Friday we had a teacher meeting.  During this meeting, a few videos of our teachers giving ‘hooks’ was played.  As I was watching these clips, I saw that these teachers were starting their lesson with some type of engaging story, just as my cooking class student had.  Starting out with a story is a very simple, yet very engaging technique to begin a lesson.

This coming week, I have created a few stories to keep students engaged.  For example, on Tuesday, I am teaching students how chromosomes, genes, DNA, nucleotides, and the nucleus are all connected.  I am going to start this lesson by talking about The Human Genome Project.  I am going to explain the purpose of this project, a little background of how long it took and how much money it cost, and hopefully by the end of this explanation, students will have an idea of how these terms connect together. 

My lessons should go beyond rote memorization of facts because 1^st, rote memorization is not very effective in actually understanding how something works, and 2^nd, rote memorization may just cause students to dread science rather than seeing how fun and interesting it can truly be.  I have been trying to keep students engaged by having them teach the class because they seem to really love this activity.  For example, I had a worksheet that had a certain number of questions on it.  I divided the students into groups and told them to focus on specific questions that they were then going to explain to the class.  Usually, when students need to answer questions on worksheets, they don’t look very enthused.  However, when I set students up to work as a group and teach the class, I can see students get into groups and lively discuss what the correct answer is and how they should explain it.  For the sake of student’s interest and motivation, class should be engaging and reflective rather than just focused on memorization of facts.