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What are the myths and facts about adult learners?

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What are the myths and facts about adult learners?

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Here is a scholarly article with references about some of the most common myths and some very interesting facts!

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Adult education is the practice of educating adults, particularly in an organized, educational setting. Adult learning is the adult student's comprehension of the task set forth by the facilitator in this setting. Both are different. Adult education concerns itself with challenging adults to undertake systematic learning activities for the purpose of bringing about change in knowledge and skills. Learning can only occur when the student is willingly and actively engaged in the task. It can occur incidentally as well as in planned educational activities, but in these planned activities the learner is being educated. So, while learning can occur both incidentally and in planned educational activities, it is only the planned activities that we call adult education.

Adult learning is also referred to as andragogy. It is also associated with workplace education, although the learning there is mainly skills based. Adult learning can also take place in colleges, libraries, online, etc. However, these are institutions concerned with learning outcomes and the process of learning. Pedagogy is mentioned but should be noted as being different than andragogy. Public pedagogy is a new term also being introduced, since the internet boom has created an influx of learning possibilities in all ages.

Andragogy is the science and practice of teaching adults. Teaching strategies are formed to engage adult learners on a unique level in order to motivate and encourage them in an educational setting. Malcolm Knowles is the leading pioneer of bringing andragogy to the masses. It is not to be confused with pedagogy, which is the science and art of education and skills acquisition. Pedagogy refers to the institutional practices of education, from childhood on; andragogy refers to the specific, individual practices of adult learning. From these two tenets of adult education come various "alternatives" to adult learning. Public pedagogy is a new design that extends adult learning. It dictates how, in today's internet-driven climate, much of adult learning takes place among social media rather than simply an educational setting.[2] "Living room learning" is a growing suggestion which states that the adult learns best on his/her own time, in an atmosphere of his/her own choosing, and at a self-directed pace that doesn't adhere to the conventions set down by facilitators or educational institutions. [3]

With the internet dominating the education market, the amount of options available for any student to learn has multiplied exponentially. Sometimes referred to as "Living Room Learning," public pedagogy refers to learning outside the realm of educational institutions. Pop culture and public venues offer learning advantages that traditional educational settings do not. Informal cultural institutions draws its teachings from a society's culture and transfers it to the willing learner. Sometimes, religious values and languages act as a foundation. Through a variety of sources granted via the internet, television, informal educational settings, public spaces, and even the workplace, the learner can become fully engaged in a topic from numerous sources. Henry Giroux is the leading founder of public pedagogy after witnessing how a global culture can affect social media, which in turn has the ability to engage an individual on an intellectual level that cannot be achieved in the classroom.

However, to this day, public pedagogy is not recognized as a viable source of source learning but merely as a secondary, or tertiary, source.

Adult education and learning brings to mind an educated, professional and experienced facilitator who imparts knowledge unto his/her adult learners. In today's social climate, that gap is being filled and often times the student knows just as much on a topic. This also feeds into a myth that the teacher knows more than the student. In andragogy, as well as most adult educational settings, the student and the teacher learn from each other. The facilitator's role is to encourage learning in the adult. Other myths include [4]

1. The focus should be on the instructor.

2. Adults learn best when listening.

3. A variety in learning is distracting.

4. There is only one best way to learn, and that is through paying attention to your instructor.

5. There is only one best way to teach.

If the adult has no motivation, then the facilitator must guide him. This creates a new chain of myths, such as [5]

Even Knowles changed his position on andragogy and pedagogy after realizing that sometimes adults and children need to switch their learning habits with one another.[6]

According to Jeff Hurt[4] and Gray Herriman [5], the facts behind the aforementioned lists are as follows.

1. The focus should be on the learners, and how they learn, and how they hope to incorporate their new knowledge into their lives.

2. Adults learn best not just through listening, but through participation as well.

3. A variety in learning helps to increase the success of transferal of knowledge between learner and facilitator.

4. Every adult learns differently.

5. Not all instructors instruct in the same manner.

6. Adult learning is not always fun, but if the adult is motivated, it can be.

7. Not all adults are motivated.

8. Not all of the learners' needs are fulfilled upon completion of an instruction.

9. Many adults need guidance and direction to help get started.

10. There is no one way to learn, and there is no one "best" way to teach.

Why are these facts instead of myths? Due to the changing nature of andragogy, these are the facts that have remained consistent over the years. The focus should always be on the learner. What that learner hopes to achieve is up to them. This includes the motivation necessary to be engaged in the material.

The field of psychology that studies the measurement of human abilities such as intelligence is psychometrics. It is where intelligence is measured and studied, along with abilities, skills, etc. Until the 1960s, it was believed that a person's intelligence declined. But, beginning around the 1960s, evidence from longitudinal studies began showing that adult intelligence remained stable until the age of 50. [7] The decline is not as sharp as many have led to believe, and environmental and health factors play the largest role in determining the rate of decline in a subject's brainpower.

Crystallized intelligence is a component of a person's IQ score that measures the effects of education and experience. It's the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience learned while growing up. Crystallized abilities are usually measured by vocabulary and verbal comprehension; Psychologist Timoty Salthouse (2004) found that crystallized memory ability has been shown to increase with age, and has remained fairly stable into the 80s. Intelligence, therefore, declines slower than experts thought.

A 2010 study held at the University of Berkshire tested a theory that adults go through several stages of reflection before viewing themselves as students in a higher education setting. [8] A struggle with identity was a concurring theme as adults, having already established an identity in their personal lives, now began facing struggles with incorporating a new facet (being, a returning student). In the COR model, the adult goes through stages of readiness. First, the adult self-evaluates their abilities to succeed at higher education with confidence. If the adult is 'failure-threatened', then he or she may not make it to the next stage, which is a comparison of concepts involving education. The educational system today is different than it was in the adult's earlier years, and an understanding must be met before moving to the next stage, which is the adult's personal judgment of readiness. This is a stage where the adult collects data from his or life and decides if re-entering school is right. If so, then the last stage---motivation and the ability to maintain interest---remains in effect until the adult spends an adequate amount of time in a higher education setting that it becomes an integrated part of his or her lifestyle.

The results of this study proved inconclusive, as not enough data was collected to warrant a unique, specific answer. Several participants never made it past the "fear of failure" stage and several became integrated into the student role almost immediately. Likewise, when the study was concluded, a majority of the subjects answered "No" when asked if they felt like they were students. There was a "negative flavour" toward the educational setting they were in, and this was in direct relation to the other factors in their lives. If anything, this study concluded that adult learners are different from the conventional college student, and that no matter how they may try to fit in to the student stereotype, the socioeconomic factor will likely win out and produce a background of fear and doubt throughout the course of their learning, thus rendering them reluctant when it comes to accepting the "student" label.

is one of the leading pioneers of creating strategies to teach adult learners. After forty years of teaching, she learned that adults learn differently than young adults and that instructional methods needed to be tailored to their specific needs. A leading misconception of adult education is that one can simply supplement secondary educational training in its place and hope to have the same affect. While this is true, Dr. Vella recognized the adult's needs to be engaged and motivated in learning and has introduced several principles of teaching. Her most notable approach is dialogue education and The Four I's.[9]

The Four I's model is as such:

1. Inductive work---a learning task that connects learners with what they already know.

2. Input---a learning task which invites learners to examine new concepts, skills, etc.

3. Implementation---a learning task that gets learners to experiment with their new content.

4. Integration---a learning task which fully integrates this new learning into their lives.

Adults learn best when they approach the material with an attitude that this will change their livelihood in some way, however big or small. Unlike in secondary grades, adults are required to become hands-on and engaged in the practice of their learning in order to succeed. Needs need to be assessed by the facilitator in order to determine how best to approach the adult learner. Goals and objectives need to be developed uniquely, rather than the idea that one instructional design given years prior will succeed now. The adult learner must be consistently evaluated. These are all categories found in the instructional guide for adult learners, Designing Instruction for Adult Learners.[10]

A diagram of instruction is necessary in order to instruct adults. While a learning plan is usually the case in secondary education, it is easy to to believe that one can be carried over into adult education. A learning plan, however, doesn't include critical analysis or leave room for the possibility of an instruction overhaul midway through the course.

When you design an instruction for the adult, the following listed is true and, at the same time, the foundation for many myths as well.

Assessments are believed to be undertaken only at the beginning of a course. According to the guidebook, assessments should be made at regular intervals, with developing content knowledge concurring. Once the contexts of the learners are repeatedly understand can the facilitator maintain a positive role in the teaching environment. And although the technical aspects of a design model are see negatively, the goal is to improve existing instructional activities.

1. Merriam, S. B., & Brockett, R. G. (1997). The profession and practice of adult education: An introduction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

2. Sandlin, J., Wright, R., & Clark, C. (2011). Reexamining Theories of Adult Learning and Adult Development Through the Lenses of Public Pedagogy. Adult Education Quarterly, 63(1).

3. McLean, S. (2012). Education for Freedom? Living Room Learning and the Liberal Arts of Government. American Education Quarterly, 62(2), 159-179. Retrieved from 001:10.1177/0741713611400305.

4. Busted: Ten Conference Adult Learning Myths | Helping improve your annual meetings, conferences & education [Web log post]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://jeffhurtblog.com/2010/01/20/busted-ten-conference-adult-learning-myths/.

5. The Adult Educator Blog: Adult Learning Myths [Web log post]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://grayharriman.com/alblogger/2005/03/adult-learning-myths.html

6. Merriam, Sharran B.; Caffarella, Rosemary; Baumgartner, Lisa (2007). Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

7. Bee, H. L., & Bjorklund, B. R. (2008). The Journey of Adulthood (6th ed.). New York:Macmillan.

8. Blair, E., Cline, T., & Wallis, J. (2010). When do adults entering higher education begin to identify themselves as students? The threshold-of-induction model. Studies In Continuing Education, 32(2), 133-146. doi:10.1080/0158037X.2010.488355

9. Vella, J. K. (2000). Taking learning to task: Creative strategies for teaching adults. San Francisco, Calif: Jossey-Bass.

10. Dean, G. J. (1994). Designing instruction for adult learners. Malabar, Fla: Krieger Pub. Co.

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Adult learning is also referred to as andragogy. It is also associated with workplace education, although the learning there is mainly skills based. Adult learning can also take place in colleges, libraries, online, etc. However, these are institutions concerned with learning outcomes and the process of learning.

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by Susan Verner 35,306 views

Adults are often self-motivated to learn. They know that they will make the biggest difference when it comes to their progress in English. They have a purpose for learning, and they are willing to apply themselves to achieve their goals. But adult learners can be challenging at times, too. They can become bored with lessons younger language learners enjoy. They sometimes feel as though the materials in your curriculum are too young for them, uninteresting. So how to you keep adult students engaged? By choosing activities that suit them where they are. Here are 7 listening activities that do just that.

7 Super Fun Listening Activities for Adult Learners

1. In the News

Most adults are interested in current events, what is happening in the world. Appeal to this interest in your students by showing them all or part of a news program. News programs are good for ESL students for several reason. One is that newscasters generally have a very neutral accent. That's why national news programs don't sound like they were made for people in just one area of the United States with one particular accent. Another is that some news programs talk about events throughout the world, and internationals will likely be interested in hearing about events near their homes. You can find news programs on television every day, but you can also find several news segments online. Play a segment for your students and have them take notes as they listen. Then challenge them to take the information they heard in the news broadcast and put it into a newspaper article. The article should answer the key questions who, what, where, when, why, and how about the event and should be short and to the point.

2. Music for the Soul

Everybody likes music, and western music is often popular the world through. Bring a little of contemporary American culture into your classroom with one of today's hit songs. You can do lots of activities with songs. Give your students a cloze exercise in which every fifth word of the lyrics is replaced with a blank. Play the song for your students and see how many of the blanks they can fill in correctly as they listen. When the song is over talk about what words actually complete the blanks. You can then review any unfamiliar vocabulary with your students, take some time to talk about rhythm and rhyme, and even give students an opportunity to write their own parody of the song.

3. Did you read what I read?

See how well your students listen to each other with this pairs activity. Put your students in groups of two, and give each person a list of complex sentences that include grammar and vocabulary you are currently studying as well as some minimal pairs. You should have two different versions of the same sentences, each version with different words replaced by blanks. Each person in the pair gets one of the two sheets, and students must read their sentences to each other. Students will then have to listen closely to determine which words complete the blanks on their page and correctly complete their sentences.

Adult learners are great, but they do take some special planning at times.

These listening activities will engage and entertain your adult learners and make sure their English skills are moving in the right direction without treating them like children.

P.S. If you enjoyed this article, please help spread it by clicking one of those sharing buttons below. And if you are interested in more, you should follow our Facebook page where we share more about creative, non-boring ways to teach English.

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You're Never Too Old to Listen: 7 Super Fun Listening Activities for Adult Learners

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by Susan Verner 35,306 views Adults are often self-motivated to learn. They know that they will make the biggest difference when it comes to their progress in English. They have a purpose for learning, and they are willing to apply themselves to achieve their goals. But adult learners can be challenging at times, too.

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How motivating students helps develop and mange the adult classroom.

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How motivating students helps develop and mange the adult classroom.

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While we may be tempted to look at underperforming students and label them as lazy, research indicates that most students lack motivation because of three fundamental factors:

1. Students do not believe they can succeed even if they try.

2. Students do not feel they have any control over their life choices.

3. Students have a need to avoid failure.

Change Negative Mindsets: Be A Mind Detective

I was teaching high school and working with struggling learners. Many of my students were unmotivated, felt defeated or believed they were stupid. So, I tried a technique I learned from Tamar E. Chansky, Ph.D.

One of Chansky's analogies compares OCD thoughts to junk mail. Chansky suggests teaching youth to examine their thoughts. If their thoughts are negative, then they should label the thoughts as junk mail, or as something else the child could relate to.

Having taught bullying prevention for several years, I taught youth to label negative self-talk as "bullying thoughts." Instead, I encouraged them to look at their thoughts by suggesting that they be a "mind detective."

I explained, "You've got thoughts going through your head. As a detective, determine: Are those thoughts negative? Are they positive? Are they telling you good things or bad things about yourself? If they're telling you bad things, tell them to stop it. You are the one in control of your thoughts."

The best way to combat negative beliefs and behaviors is to use teaching strategies that engage learners and support their experience of success in the classroom.

Teach Students to Learn How They Learn

My son was one of those children who did not want any strategies that were different from what the teachers required and the other children were doing. He used to say, "My teacher says write it out three times in cursive, so that's what I have to do," even though he did not learn effectively that way.

Why should he write it out three times in cursive and fail the test every week? By the fifth week, do you think my son was motivated to write it out three times in cursive? So, I came up with a compromise.

"Okay, how about you write it two times in cursive, just as the teacher wants, and I'll negotiate with your teacher to allow you to draw the word the third time." We printed the word on a flashcard, added a picture that represented the word and color-coded the word. We practiced five cards a day for the week before the test.

Every single time he made flashcards and practiced every day, he aced the test. Every single time he chose not to use the strategy, he failed the test. Eventually, he figured out that he needed to honor the way he learned.

Students who feel they are not capable of more need to get their power back. They need to think about how they learn, and not always try to do things the way somebody else says they should do them.

Academic Strategies that Foster Empowerment and Motivation

A classroom environment which is based on positive social relationships, while encouraging student empowerment, may be the first step toward improving student motivation and achievement. The classroom environment should not only attend to the social and emotional needs of students, but also to learner-centered teaching as a critical factor (Nichols, 2006).

Learner-centered instruction honors how students learn, utilizes teaching models that increase student engagement, and thereby increases motivation and success.

Following are some effective strategies for engaging learners and differentiating instruction.

Strategies That Support Success:

1. Chunk tasks for students. Students who struggle in the classroom are best served by breaking assignments into manageable parts with manageable deadlines that focus on success.

2. Offer choices in academic assignments. No matter how strict your school-district mandates are, you must ask: Are there choices we can offer? Because choices empower, motivate, and foster critical thinking (Brooks & Young, 2011; Flowerday & Schraw, 2000; Simmons & Page, 2010).

3. Ask students what went right. Focus on what the student has learned from an exercise or an assignment as opposed to what went wrong. Most importantly, encourage students to think beyond the grade and to understand that mistakes are an opportunity for learning.

4. Create opportunities for students to exhibit their strengths. For example, when assigning students to five groups in a high school biology class, teachers asked for five volunteers who could draw well. Now, each group had an artist to work with on the project. Students' individual strengths were celebrated so that all had an opportunity to focus on their success and how it contributed to the team.

5. Students need personal goals. Ask students about their goals and frequently show the connection between what they are learning in the classroom to their personal goals. Be ready to answer the question, "Why do I need this?" rather than share careers that may be meaningless to specific students. (Hallenbeck & Fleming, 2011)

6. Energize your class. Infuse your classroom with short musical energy breaks once or twice during a class period. Set a timer for 90 seconds, and crank up some Vivaldi, Mozart, or other Baroque period pieces that play at about 60 beats per minute. Then, have students stand, stretch, move, clap, stomp, or dance to the music. (Brewer, 1995)

7. Teach students how they learn. Allow students opportunities to study the way that they learn instead of the way you learn or way the teacher's manual dictates.

References:
Brewer, C. B. (1995). Music and learning: Integrating music in the classroom. Retrieved April 1, 2013, from http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/strategies/topics/Arts in Education/brewer.htm

Brooks, C. F., & Young, S. L. (2011). Are Choice-Making Opportunities Needed in the Classroom ? Using Self- Determination Theory to Consider Student Motivation and Learner Empowerment. International Journal of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, 23(1), 48-59.

Ellis, A. (2007). Overcoming Resistance: A Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Integrated Approach (2nd ed.). New York, N.Y.: Springer Publishing Company.

Flowerday, T., & Schraw, G. (2000). Teacher beliefs about instructional choice: A phenomenological study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(4), 634-645. http://doi.org/10.1037//0022-0663.92.4.634

Hallenbeck, A., & Fleming, D. (2011). Don't you want to do better?: Implementing a goal-setting intervention in an afterschool program. Afterschool Matters, 38-48.

Hong, Z. R., Lin, H.-S., & Lawrenz, F. P. (2012). Effects of an Integrated Science and Societal Implication Intervention on Promoting Adolescents' Positive Thinking and Emotional Perceptions in Learning Science. International Journal of Science Education. http://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2011.623727

Nichols, J. D. (2006). Empowerment and relationships: A classroom model to enhance student motivation. Learning Environments Research, 9(2), 149-161. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-006-9006-8

Oei, N. Y. L., Everaerd, W. T. A. M., Elzinga, B. M., Van Well, S., & Bermond, B. (2006). Psychosocial stress impairs working memory at high loads: An association with cortisol levels and memory retrieval. Stress (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 9(3), 133-141. http://doi.org/10.1080/10253890600965773

Shohamy, D., & Adcock, R. A. (2010). Dopamine and adaptive memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(10), 464-472. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.08.002

Simmons, A. M., & Page, M. (2010). Motivating Students through Power and Choice. English Journal, 100(1), 65-69.

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author: Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Nancy Akhavan

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Motivating Students to be Engaged Learners | Corwin Connect

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While we may be tempted to look at underperforming students and label them as lazy, research indicates that most students lack motivation because of three fundamental factors: Students do not believe they can succeed even if they try. Students do not feel they have any ...

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How do I create an effective learning environment?

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How do I create an effective learning environment?

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by Terry Heick
For in-person professional development from TeachThought on how to create an effective learning environment in your classroom or school, contact us today.
Wherever we are, we'd all like to think our classrooms are 'intellectually active' places. Progressive learning(like our 21st Century Model, for example) environments. Highly-effective and conducive to student-centered learning.

But what does that mean?

The reality is, there is no single answer because teaching and learning are awkward to consider as single events or individual 'things.' This is all a bunch of rhetoric until we put on our white coats and study it under a microscope, at which point abstractions like curiosity, authenticity, self-knowledge, and affection will be hard to pin down.

So we put together one take on the characteristics of a highly effective classroom. They can act as a kind of criteria to measure your own against-see if you notice a pattern.

10 Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment
1. The students ask the questions-good questions
This is not a feel-good implication, but really crucial for the whole learning process to work.

The role of curiosity has been studied (and perhaps under-studied and under-appreciated), but suffice to say that if a learner enters any learning activity with little to no natural curiosity, prospects for meaningful interaction with texts, media, and specific tasks are bleak. (Interested in how to kill learner curiosity in 12 easy steps?)
2. Questions are valued over answers 3. Ideas come from a divergent sources
Many teachers force students to ask questions at the outset of units or lessons, often to no avail. Cliché questions that reflect little understanding of the content can discourage teachers from 'allowing' them. But the fact remains-if students can't ask great questions-even as young as elementary school-something, somewhere is unplugged.
4. A variety of learning models are used 5. Classroom learning 'empties' into a connected community
Questions are more important than answers. So it makes sense that if good questions should lead the learning, there would be value placed on these questions. And that means adding currency whenever possible-grades (questions as assessment!), credit (give them points-they love points), creative curation (writing as a kind of graffiti on large post-it pages on the classroom walls), or simply praise and honest respect. See if you don't notice a change.

Ideas for lessons, reading, tests, and projects-the fiber of formal learning-should come from a variety of sources. If they all come from narrow slivers of resources, you're at risk of being pulled way off in one direction (that may or may not be good). An alternative? Consider sources like professional and cultural mentors, the community, content experts outside of education, and even the students themselves. Huge shift in credibility.
6. Learning is personalized by a variety of criteria
And when these sources disagree with one another, use that as an endlessly 'teachable moment,' because that's what the real world is like.
7. Assessment is persistent, authentic, transparent, and never punitive
Inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, direct instruction, peer-to-peer learning, school-to-school, eLearning, Mobile learning, the flipped classroom, and on and on-the possibilities are endless. Chances are, none are incredible enough to suit every bit of content, curriculum, and learner diversity in your classroom. A characteristic of a highly-effective classroom, then, is diversity here, which also has the side-effect of improving your long-term capacity as an educator.
8. Criteria for success is balanced and transparent. 9. Learning habits are constantly modeled
In a highly-effective learning environment, learning doesn't need to be radically repackaged to make sense in the 'real world,' but starts and ends there.
10. There are constant opportunities for practice
As great as it sounds for learners to reflect on Shakespeare to better understand their Uncle Eddie-and they might-depending on that kind of radical transfer to happen entirely in the minds of the learners by design may not be the best idea. Plan on this kind of transfer from the beginning.
10 Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment
It has to leave the classroom because they do.

Personalized learning is likely the future, but for now, the onus for routing students is almost entirely on the shoulders of the classroom teacher. This makes personalization-and even consistent differentiation-a challenge. One response is to personalize learning-to whatever extent you plan for-by a variety of criteria-not just assessment results or reading level, but interest, readiness-for-content, and others as well.

Then, as you adjust pace, entry points, and rigor accordingly, you'll have a better chance of having uncovered what the learners truly 'need.'

Assessment is just an (often ham-fisted) attempt to get at what a learner understands. The more infrequent, clinical, murky, or threatening it is, the more you're going to separate the 'good students' from the 'good thinkers.' And the 'clinical' idea has less to do with the format of the test, and more to do with the tone and emotion of the classroom in general. Why are students being tested? What's in it for them, and their future opportunities to improve?

And feedback is quick even when the 'grading' may not be.

Students should not have to guess what 'success' in a highly-effective classroom looks like. It should also not be entirely weighted on 'participation,' assessment results, attitude, or other individual factors, but rather meaningfully melted into a cohesive framework that makes sense-not to you, your colleagues, or the expert book on your shelf, but the students themselves.

Cognitive, meta-cognitive, and behavioral 'good stuff' is constantly modeled. Curiosity, persistence, flexibility, priority, creativity, collaboration, revision, and even the classic Habits of Mind are all great places to start. So often what students learn from those around them is less directly didactic, and more indirect and observational.

Monkey see, monkey do.

Old thinking is revisited. Old errors are reflected on. Complex ideas are re-approached from new angles. Divergent concepts are contrasted. Bloom's taxonomy is constantly traveled up and down, from the simple to the complex in an effort to maximize a student's opportunities to learn-and demonstrate understanding-of content.

For professional development around this or related ideas in education, contact us.

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The Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment

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by Terry Heick For in-person professional development from TeachThought on how to create an effective learning environment in your classroom or school, contact us today. Wherever we are, we'd all like to think our classrooms are 'intellectually active' places. Progressive learning(like our 21st Century Model , for example) environments.

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Stop, Practice, Collaborate: The Cycle Of Reflective Teaching
contributed by Pete Hall and Alisa Simeral
This post has been updated and republished
The more reflective you are, the more effective you are.

This is a phrase that has become synonymous with the work we have done with building teachers' reflective capacity. With a century's worth of research touting the benefits of self-reflection and a slew of tools to help teachers (and the coaches and administrators who support them) strengthen their reflective habits, the causative relationship between the two is growing more evident.

People often ask us, "If self-reflection is a skill that can be developed, how exactly am I supposed to develop it?" Fortunately, with the release of Teach, Reflect, Learn: Building Your Capacity for Success in the Classroom, we have provided hundreds of reflective prompts and dozens of strategies. Here's a cheat-sheet: 3 steps we can all take to build our self-reflective habits.
Stop, Practice, Collaborate: The Cycle Of Reflective Teaching Step 1: Stop
Have you ever heard someone say, "Well, I never really stopped to think about it." More than likely, you've muttered that phrase yourself. We tend to get so caught up in the here and now, busy hustling from task to task, drowning in our to-do lists, that we find ourselves too deep in our routines to see beyond the ruts. We're doing without really thinking about what we're doing.

This is the cause of what we've come to call the doing-thinking gap. As a teacher, you do a thousand things a day - it's high time that you stopped, took stock in what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how it's going. It's a cycle, which means it can be practiced and refined.
Step 2: Practice
Thinking about your work, as an act unto itself, will not singlehandedly make you a more reflective and effective educator. It is a necessary, though not sufficient, activity. How you reflect, and what you reflect about, will provide structure to this thinking strategy. In T, R, L, we share the Reflective Cycle - four key steps that usher you along the path to deeper self-reflection.

If you center your reflective practices on these four, you'll reap the dividends:
1. Awareness
Reflective practitioners are aware of their instructional reality. That means they know their students, their content, and the high-leverage pedagogy that leads to higher levels of learning. So pay attention to everything, pick up the details, look for opportunities to connect the three together.
2. Intentionality
You may have heard some variation of the saying, "Excellence is not happenstansical." Greatness is born from intentionality and planning. Everything a reflective teacher does is selected on purpose, to achieve a certain outcome, and is planned and executed deliberately. Emphasis here addresses the why you are doing things.

If a teacher uses strategy x to accomplish outcome y, then it would make sense for that teacher to determine if it worked. Reflective practitioners assess the results of their work all the time, constantly determining the effectiveness and shortcomings of their efforts. Deeper reflection leads to an analysis of why certain teaching moves worked and others didn't.
4. Responsiveness
Building off the assessment step, reflective teachers take action - if strategy x didn't achieve outcome y to the degree needed, the teacher does something about it. Modifying lesson designs, providing reviews, delivering in-the-moment clarifications, and constructing intervention plans are all examples of how teachers can be responsive to that assessment.
Step 3: Collaborate
This work is far too complex, and far too important, to go it alone. In our first book, Building Teachers' Capacity for Success: A Collaborative Approach for Coaches and School Leaders, we offered a coaching model and tools for administrators to 'talk teaching' with their teachers. Now, we invite teachers to partner with their colleagues, create a network of reflective practitioners, and take the reins of their own reflective professional growth.

It's amazing what we can accomplish when we put our heads together.
Pete Hall (@educationhall) is a veteran school administrator and professional development agent who has dedicated his career to supporting the improvement of our education systems. His is currently a faculty member with ASCD Professional Learning Services. Alisa Simeral (@AlisaSimeral) is a school turnaround specialist and veteran educator who has guided school-based reform efforts as a teacher, dean, and instructional coach. Together, they are co-authors of the new book, Teach, Reflect, Learn: Building Your Capacity for Success in the Classroom (ASCD); The Cycle Of Reflective Teaching

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Stop, Practice, Collaborate: The Cycle Of Reflective Teaching

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Stop, Practice, Collaborate: The Cycle Of Reflective Teaching contributed by Pete Hall and Alisa Simeral This post has been updated and republished The more reflective you are, the more effective you are. This is a phrase that has become synonymous with the work we have done with building teachers' reflective capacity.

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Bloom's Taxonomy: Why, How, & Top Examples

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Welcome to The Chronicle’s guide on how to make your teaching more engaging. This guide is for anyone who wants to introduce energy or enthusiasm to their classrooms using methods that have been tried — and found true — through research and in classrooms.

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Consider a student in an introductory math class - let's call him Alex. Alex had some unpleasant experiences with math in high school. When he got to college, he tested into a math course below the level that would count toward his general-education requirements. He is thus feeling wary about the semester, and resents having to "waste" expensive college credit on a course that he is unlikely to enjoy and that won't get him any closer to his degree.

To have any hope of learning the material, Alex needs to actually involve himself in the course. He needs to direct his attention to the lecture and the problem sets. He must be willing to use his working memory to attempt solutions rather than daydream about his life outside the small windowless room full of equations. He needs to decide the information is important enough to commit to memory and then be motivated to grapple with it later, on his own time, to prepare for the exams.

Alex can do all of that - but he could use your help. As his instructor, you can stimulate his curiosity with an inspiring and energizing presentation style, with activities and assignments that maximize his sense of control over the material, and with expertise that helps him reach just a bit beyond his current abilities.

The psychologist Todd Kashdan writes, "If you want people to be interested, committed, and willing to devote effort to learning, mastering, and using these skills for the long haul, then you can't avoid the initial step of stimulating excitement." In short, if you really want a student like Alex to learn and succeed, something needs to happen first: You need to engage him.

Who Is This Guide for?

Welcome to The Chronicle' s guide on how to make your teaching more engaging. This guide is for anyone who wants to introduce energy or enthusiasm to their classrooms using methods that have been tried - and found true - through research and in classrooms.

Certainly some teachers are naturally compelling and intuitively spark a zest for learning in students. But most of us have to work at it. You can energize your classroom for Alex and every other student by using principles familiar to both emotion scientists and pedagogical experts - principles available to any faculty member willing to investigate and apply them.

Here's what you'll find below:

A brief argument for why academics should care about engagement in the first place, and answers for skeptics who believe that efforts to enliven the college classroom are frivolous and/or doing a disservice to the solemn work of higher education.

An explanation of four key principles of student engagement.

Concrete suggestions on how to actually put each of those principles into practice during face-to-face, online, and blended instruction.

Anecdotal evidence from instructors in a variety of disciplines who have used the principles to teach in creative ways.

First: Why Care About Engaging Students at All?

Let's put an old misunderstanding to rest: "Engagement" is not a synonym for "entertainment."

To care deeply about whether students are actively involved in class and interested in the content does not mean you advocate coddling students or treating the college classroom as a free-for-all fun zone. In fact, anyone who conflates engagement and entertainment is not only mistaken but also quite in conflict with the psychology and neuroscience underlying how human beings learn, which demonstrates that learning requires the motivated application of attention and working memory.

"When educators fail to appreciate the importance of students' emotions, they fail to appreciate a critical force in students' learning," wrote the neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio in the book Emotions, Learning, and the Brain. "One could argue, in fact, that they fail to appreciate the very reason that students learn at all."

Engagement is a necessary first step for learning - which is one reason why efforts to enliven your classroom can't be dismissed as empty entertainment. But beyond that, deep engagement in a course actually requires hard work. "Engagement means setting up challenges for students that are meaningful beyond getting a grade," argues the writer and speaker John Warner, "challenges which encourage risk without unduly punishing failure so they may experience the pleasure of resiliency and be enthused about trying again." It is less work for Alex if he remains unengaged - sitting passively in class not really absorbing the material and only half-heartedly attempting to study.

Engaging Alex using a variety of methods to attract his interest and excitement doesn't mean that you are taking on the work of learning for him, or somehow cheapening your material. Instead, it is an invitation - to take the initiative, to apply effort, to risk the daunting possibility of failure.

It is an open hand.

It is good teaching.

Here's how to do it.

The 4 Principles of Engagement

I have organized some related strategies and research evidence into four core principles that you can use to foster student engagement in your classroom.

Readers will no doubt expect one of the four to be "active learning." This term has been repeated so often in recent years that it has started to lose its meaning. It is pretty much canon now that an engaging classroom is one that incorporates active learning at least some of the time. For that reason, I've threaded active learning throughout each of the four principles rather than having it stand alone.

At its most basic level, active learning means getting your students involved in activities in class rather than just passively listening. Jennifer Gonzalez, editor of the teaching blog Cult of Pedagogy, summed up the concept quite nicely in the title of a blog post: "To Learn, Students Need to DO Something."

It isn't that lectures can't be dynamic and engaging in and of themselves. Some lecturing is always going to be required, especially in fields like the sciences and history. But to engage your students most effectively, you should, wherever possible, try to involve them in their own learning.

Any number of popular techniques will do the job, including:

For instance, Kimberly N. Russell, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, teaches "Evolution of Sex and Gender in Animals." Rather than lecturing on common misunderstandings about sex and gender in nonhuman animals, she divides students into groups and asks them to imagine discovering a new alien species. They must sketch out male and female versions of the alien. After collecting the sketches and examining them together, she and her students discuss the assumptions they made about the evolution of sex in creating the sketches. They also talk about why science-fiction authors often assume that alien species will be mammalian in appearance - for example, giving the female versions breasts, even when they are otherwise fishlike or birdlike species. The students participate in both the activity and the resulting discussion enthusiastically, Russell says, demonstrating more energy and engagement than on other days.

The well-established effectiveness of active-learning strategies is why they are threaded throughout the four principles below.

What It Means

Decades of psychological science have shown that cognitive resources (like attention and working memory) are sharply limited - you have only so much to go around. If you pay selective attention to a complex game of ball passing, the odds are good that you will miss a man in a gorilla costume walking through the scene and thumping his chest. Your ability to maintain focused concentration has its own strict limits. Working memory can handle only the infamous seven (plus or minus two) chunks of information at a time.

All of these cognitive resources are required for effective learning in a classroom. Cognitive load theory argues that in trying to grasp new material, students face several related demands: intrinsic (understanding the task and how it is presented - e.g., reading and following lab instructions), germane (those involved in the process of learning - e.g., acquiring new knowledge and skills in completing a lab assignment), and extraneous (distractions - e.g., your lab partner cracking jokes while you are trying to focus). To help our students learn, we must direct their limited cognitive resources to the tasks at hand rather than to classroom distractions.

One of the best tools we have to achieve that is emotion. We know that emotions evolved in order to motivate behavior - to tag certain things as important either to approach (e.g., tasty food, attractive mates) or to avoid (e.g. venomous spiders, rotten food). Emotional stimuli draw our attention and are more likely to be remembered, much the way an angry face stands out from a crowd of neutral faces.

Liven your course content by connecting it to the emotional lives of your students and they are more likely to dedicate their cognitive resources to their classwork than to the phone buzzing in their pocket or to their anxieties about a calculus exam that afternoon. Present the material in the context of an arousing controversy. Use a quick demonstration or a brief video clip to hook their emotions. With more cognitive resources on deck, their understanding and future recall should benefit.

How to Do It

Chunk your class up into smaller time periods. Each one could be 15 to 30 minutes (depending on the overall class time). Assign each chunk of time a subtopic and introduce it with an "emotional hook." The educational psychologist Kentina Smith describes emotional hooks as "brief lesson content teasers, relevant activities, stories, songs, provocative questions, headlines, current events, images, demonstrations, videos, or case studies designed to stimulate interest, curiosity, and active interaction with information that can be connected to course concepts." Those hooks should not replace the day's lesson, she says, but rather serve as a trailer of sorts for it, to spark student interest and curiosity.

Choose activities and assignments that are clearly relevant to your students. That doesn't mean you have to be an expert on their personal lives or on contemporary pop culture. You can also make class activities relevant to contemporary social movements, to future careers in your major, or to some transcendent purpose. James Hauri teaches an introductory chemistry class for nonmajors at my home institution, Assumption College, and aims to make the entire course relevant to students' daily lives. All of the labs center around chemicals and materials that students interact with regularly. For instance, they evaluate bottled water versus tap water, test both for pH, conductivity, and taste, and then debate why so many people choose bottled over tap. His nonmajors do the same sorts of labs and practice the same skills learned in a traditional chemistry lab, but their curiosity about the material is aroused because of its direct relevance to their lives. Relevance attracts interest and motivates engagement.

Invite students to solve a mystery of your field. Present a persistent puzzle in your discipline. Mysteries, as the writer Ian Leslie put it, "inspire long-term curiosity by keeping us focused on what we don't know. They keep us 'alive and active' even as we work in the darkness." Presenting unsolved mysteries also sends a message that students could have a hand in creating new knowledge in the world.

Interrupt the routine. Especially once you've hit the groove in your semester where everything is running smoothly and students now can anticipate everything that is going to happen in your classroom, shake things up. Keith Johnstone, an actor and teacher, writes of the power of interrupting routines in his book Impro. All storytelling (more on that in a bit) involves describing a routine and then interrupting it. Two families are at war and hate each other - but their children fall in love. A little girl visits her grandmother - who has been replaced by a wolf. It is the interruption of the routine that arrests our attention. If you find that certain successful strategies prove less effective as the semester progresses, try a dramatic shift in routine.

Make it funny. Course-relevant humor is a good way to liven up the classroom, because in order to understand the joke, you have to process material twice - once to understand the frame of the joke, and then again to understand the sudden reversal that triggers the humor. An entire body of research called the "instructional humor processing theory" supports the value of cracking quips in the classroom to improve student learning. So use your own humor if you are naturally funny. And if you're not, use someone else's humor, via memes and videos that are easily found on the web.

Embrace "polysynchronous" teaching. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated shift to remote teaching, a lot of ink was spilled debating the merits of teaching in an asynchronous format (students learn course content at their own pace, via a learning-management system) versus a synchronous one (students log onto a web-conferencing platform like Zoom at the scheduled time, and attend class in real-time as they would in person). As it turns out, both have their advantages, and even instructors who hope to return to in-person classrooms are expressing the desire to keep using some of the strategies and technologies they learned while teaching remotely. For instance, personally I hope to find ways to replicate having an ongoing text chat during an in-person class so that students who prefer to type rather than raise their hand can still contribute to class discussions. (Here is a wonderful to making that happen from the educational developer Sara Fulmer). Perhaps we should all embrace what the educational developer Flower Darby called "polysynchronous" instruction - taking what we like and leaving what we don't from the various approaches to teaching and learning, adapting to student needs and public health and type of content.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Candy, Candy, Candy

Every October, Heather L. Urry, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University, focuses her "Experimental Psychology" course on a topic that is on everyone's mind as Halloween approaches: candy. When discussing research study designs, she has her students evaluate the evidence behind a friend's "Hierarchy of Candy Goodness Model," which organizes types of candy into tiers of deliciousness. Tier 1 has Reese's, Kit Kats, Twix, and Snickers, while way at the bottom on Tier 4 is candy corn and "anything with marzipan."

In a prototypical semester she might have students taste-test Reese's (Tier 1) versus Hershey's (Tier 3) and rate their feelings of enjoyment and gustatory pleasure. Students design a mini-study, collect the data in class, run the statistics, and make conclusions about whether or not their data support the Hierarchy of Candy Goodness. They can also debate theoretical constructs like: Do students' pre-existing biases about candy influence the results? Does knowing the hierarchy ahead of time affect the results?

She has two aims here - to teach students about this type of experimental design and to give them some hands-on practice with it. Her candy activity achieves both. Conveniently for our purposes, it also illustrates an effective use of an emotional hook - students begin immediately debating the merits of the Hierarchy ("How dare they put Almond Joys on Tier 3?") and are eager to find out whether or not their data support the model.

The free chocolate doesn't hurt, either.

What It Means

In a compelling 2016 profile in The Atlantic, Teller - the silent member of the magic act Penn & Teller - shared his insights on teaching, having taught high-school Latin for six years before turning to a life on the stage. He argued that, before anything else, the job of a teacher is to help students fall in love with the subject matter. "That doesn't have to be done by waving your arms and prancing around the classroom," he said in the interview. "There's all sorts of ways to go at it, but no matter what, you are a symbol of the subject in the students' minds."

Teller's ideas about teaching are consistent with scholarship on several fronts:

Research on "emotional contagion" suggests that emotions and moods are likely to spread among members of a social group. That phenomenon is at work in the college classroom, too. For instance, research indicates that your enthusiasm as an instructor is indeed contagious and helps predict variables like student motivation in the course.

An 8-year longitudinal, qualitative study of undergraduates and alumni at Hamilton College found that students quite often reported choosing their major based on taking introductory courses with particularly dynamic professors.

Research studies on various aspects of pedagogy - on teaching evaluations, on student learning outcomes, and on student "reactance" (defensive, negative reactions to a course that can spread from student to student) - all show that one of the best predictors of good course outcomes is an instructor's use of something called "immediacy cues" - primarily nonverbal social behaviors like eye contact, gestures, varied vocal tone, and movement. Students "read" such cues to decide if you as the instructor are enthusiastic, effective, and in the moment.

You may have a knee-jerk reaction against the idea that college teaching is, in some sense, a performance art. But as an instructor, you are using your words, props, and actions to try to get students involved in and excited about something you are involved in and excited about. The degree of effort and enthusiasm you invest in your presentation will be evident to your students and may, in part, determine how much effort and enthusiasm they will invest in your class.

How to Do It

Observe yourself in action, or get someone else to. People who do any form of public speaking are often advised to record themselves and then watch the video to spot areas for improvement. Try videotaping one of your classes. Do you sway back and forth in a distracting way? Say "um" too frequently? Talk to only one side of the classroom? If the idea of watching yourself teach is a bit too nauseating, you can always ask a colleague to sit in on your class and give you feedback. Many teaching centers or faculty-development programs offer this service. A colleague's evaluation of your videotape might reveal a few behavioral tics that tend to discourage student engagement, and you can work on avoiding them.

Focus on your immediacy cues. A videotape of your teaching might also reveal a lack of behavioral cues that would encourage engagement. It is probably best to work on one at a time so you don't appear distracted or awkward. Focus one week on making more eye contact, another on moving around the room, and another on being sure that you're not lapsing into a monotone. An easy immediacy cue to adopt is to use language that invites students to see the course as a communal effort ("today we are going to ..." versus "today I am going to have you ...").

Watch good communicators in action. In his widely viewed TED talk, "Teach Teachers How to Create Magic," the Columbia University professor Christopher Emdin recommends visiting places where people are already skilled at the art of public performance and audience interaction - like rap concerts and the black church - and taking notes on the techniques people use to enliven their performance and energize the audience.

Take risks, and freshen up your material. In my own teaching, I've seen certain activities that used to reliably induce enthusiasm fall flat over time. I've realized that it's probably because an activity loses its ability to hook student interest as I smooth out all of the rough corners and present it with more polish and less raw enthusiasm. As Kevin Gannon, a historian at Grand View University and director of its teaching center, writes in his Teaching Manifesto: "If I want my students to take risks and not be afraid to fail then I need to take risks and not be afraid to fail." Inject new material. Try new things. Experiment.

Create vivid instructional videos. Whether you are teaching an online, in-person, or hybrid class, you can post short videos about course topics, future assignments, lectures, or updates on how the semester is going. For visual variety, film them in a mix of settings. You can either go low-tech and approachable (check out the educational developer Karen Costa's excellent book of tips here) or high-tech and glossy (watch the anthropologist and online instructor Michael Wesch's work ). These videos share you as a person with your students, and also your teaching.

Jazz up before class. My go-to, for better or worse, is coffee. A friend of mine ramps up for large lectures with loud heavy-metal music. Some people need to be sure they have a full belly; others work better on an empty tank. Whatever puts you in an energized state, do it before you teach.

Get enough sleep. I am a bit of a sleep evangelist. I won't belabor the point, but to have good energy in any area of your life, I believe you need to be well rested.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: A Nonlecture-y Lecturer

As part of a recent research project on student learning, I observed some of my colleagues teaching in various disciplines. One such course was "Introduction to Art History," taught by Elissa Chase, a lecturer at my campus. On paper, her lesson plan would look like a straight lecture via PowerPoint for a solid hour, sending a shudder down the spine of diehard advocates for flipped classrooms and active learning.

But in practice, her "lecture" was instead a lively, enthusiastic, energetic tête-à-tête. She began each class with a music video related - often very tangentially - to the day's topic and played loudly over the classroom's speakers. She then invited students to guess its relevance. For instance, one day she played Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" because they were covering the Reformation. The result: Students started the class curious and thinking ahead to the topic of that day's lecture.

Chase proceeded to conduct the class like a vibrant conversation. She spoke quickly and energetically, in a way that made you sit up and pay close attention in order to keep up. She moved quickly around the lecture hall. She knew all of her students' names and would often query them or make sarcastic quips that set them laughing. They knew they could be roped into the lecture at any moment, and so seemed at attention and eager throughout the class. Time passed quickly, and at the end, I leaned over to one of my research assistants and murmured, "I've never been interested in art - but I really wish I could take this class!" And I meant it.

Teaching with gusto, whatever strategy you use, is key to student engagement.

What It Means

Human beings are not just a social species - we are an ultrasocial species. We crave community and form groups easily. Our ideas, emotions, and theories about how the world works spread as easily as cold viruses in midwinter. Michael Tomasello, a psychology professor at Duke University, believes we are so ultrasocial that even when we're alone in our own head, thinking our own thoughts, our sociality is still stamped all over the moment. "Thinking is like a jazz musician improvising a novel riff in the privacy of his own room," he writes. "It is a solitary activity all right, but on an instrument made by others for that general purpose, after years of playing with and learning from other practitioners, in a musical genre with a rich history of legendary riffs, for an imagined audience of jazz aficionados. Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix."

A college course is a group of human beings working together for up to 15 weeks on a mutual enterprise. There, the sharing and influence is explicit, baked into the very structure of the endeavor. Establishing a sense of community in the classroom helps predict whether your students will participate in class discussions, have high or low levels of anxiety, and even have better grades.

It is particularly important to make sure that all of your students feel equally welcome and equally valued in the conversation. Students whose identities and backgrounds vary from those of the rest of the class (in terms of gender identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability status, social class, etc.) may feel less able to easily join the community, and so it is critical that you plan carefully how to help them feel included.

In How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, Joshua R. Eyler, a historian and director of the Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence, provides an extensive review of the research supporting three fundamentals for a social classroom:

A sense of belonging.

A classroom-management philosophy that privileges community building.

An instructor who effectively models intellectual approaches.

How to Do It

Learn their names. You've probably heard that a million times, but it doesn't make it any less true. If it is at all feasible given your class size, learning your students' names is a powerful first step in establishing a warm social climate in the classroom. See some names on your roster that you aren't sure how to pronounce? Consult Google before the first day of class.

Make sure everyone gets a chance to contribute. A variety of techniques can be used to that end:

Mix classwide debates with small-group discussions, since introverted students might feel more comfortable speaking up in a small group of peers.

Don't call on someone too quickly after you've asked a question. Waiting a bit allows those who require more time to gather their thoughts (and courage) to participate.

Question stacking - a practice in which students indicate by some gesture or nod that they have something to contribute and get added to a list that you work through during discussion - can also allow for a greater number and variety of students to participate. While it can be controversial, progressive question stacking, in which the professor prioritizes marginalized voices that traditionally get silenced, can help you establish that diverse voices are valued in your classroom.

Work as a class on a shared project. Rather than asking students to work alone or in a small group, unite the entire class on a major project. In a beautiful example of this, a biology instructor recently replaced his final exam with a class project that developed a children's book on the topic of the course.

Diversify your curriculum and your teaching strategies. Mix up the voices that are included in your course content so that students hear from people with a variety of backgrounds and life histories. Vary your teaching strategies and assessments so that students with different skill sets and different strengths have an opportunity to shine. Rather than offer separate policies for students who need learning accommodations, practice universal design, so that all students have access to policies that benefit students with disabilities. As the prototypical example of universal design goes, having sloped curbs doesn't just help people using movement aids like wheelchairs, but also helps the elderly, parents pushing strollers, etc. The same is true of universal design in the classroom. As an example, you might provide captioning and transcripts for any films or videos you show in class. This practice will benefit not just hearing-impaired students but all students in understanding and taking notes on the material.

Build community in small ways. Instead of a traditional roll call, do a question roll where you take attendance that day by having everyone answer a fun question about their favorite movie or food. Or offer a two-stage exam, in which students complete the test on their own first and then have an opportunity to work together to earn more points. You don't have to wait for the first exam to begin building community, either. As James Lang, a professor of English at Assumption College who writes regularly on teaching for The Chronicle, reflects here, the first day of class is a great time to begin laying the foundation.

Consider jumping off your learning-management system. More and more instructors are abandoning the discussion boards of their institutionally assigned LMS (e.g., Brightspace, Blackboard, Canvas) in favor of group messaging apps like Slack or Discord. I experimented with that approach in an advanced seminar and both the students and I and found it much more engaging. Derek Bruff, assistant provost at Vanderbilt University and executive director of its Center for Teaching, did a webinar on the various options and how to get started .

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Bonding Over Brains

Many colleges have attempted to ease the transition from high school with the introduction of learning communities for first-year students. The models vary but involve some mix of shared classes, dorms, and extracurricular activities.

As a professor, I was part of a freshman learning community with a colleague, Michele Lemons, who teaches biology at my college. The same group of new students took both my "Introductory Psychology" course and Michele's "Introduction to Biology" course. To demonstrate that true knowledge spans disciplines, we dovetailed our topics at several junctures - talking in both courses about neurons and brains, eating and motivation, the biology of vaccination and the psychology of why some people opt out of life-saving vaccines. Outside of class, we met with our students for occasions that were both social and intellectual - for instance, we all had breakfast together one morning before class while a nutrition expert answered student questions about healthy eating. Michele took the lead on a community-building project in which students worked together to craft a miniature science fair on basic aspects of neuroscience, which they presented to local middle-schoolers during Brain Awareness Week.

It was delightful to get to know these students on a deeper level than I usually do, and to joke with them in settings outside of class. I think it was also valuable for them to see their professors socializing. As these students continued in their studies over the years, and occasionally showed up in some of my more advanced courses, I would always smile when I saw their names on my roster. I like to think they felt the same.

What It Means

You might notice - as the psychologists Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson once did - that some words, with just a handful of syllables, seem to contain entire storylines. Words like "betrayal" and "crucifixion."

Schank and Abelson argued that stories are our "most natural form of thought." A narrative weaves together otherwise isolated bits of information into a meaningful whole, linking them in important ways but also chunking the information so that it takes up less space in working memory and connects to existing threads in long-term memory. The causal relations in stories and the use of reliable narrative structures are also thought to benefit understanding and remembering.

Clearly stories are a way to engage students. The stories you tell in your classroom can be about your own intellectual path, about discoveries in your field, about people who have lived through different historical eras, about patient case histories, or about previous students who went on to succeed. Whatever their type or shape, tell stories.

How To Do It

Share your own stories. Research confirms that, when it's done well, disclosing anecdotes from your own personal history can motivate and inspire your students. As David Gooblar, a lecturer in rhetoric at the University of Iowa and author of the blog Pedagogy Unbound, wrote, "When you talk about yourself to your students, you signal to them that you trust them and see them as worthy confidantes. That, in turn, encourages students to feel more at ease, to open up themselves and commit more fully to the class." Obviously, sharing too much and too often is inappropriate and likely to detract from your credibility, but qualitative research suggests that students appreciate, in particular, hearing stories of their instructors dealing with academic obstacles and overcoming them.

Share your field's stories. Perhaps you teach in a discipline like math, where the subject matter seems very divorced from the idea of personal stories. But every field has its stories of frustration and discovery, of accidental solutions and sudden new insights. So share the stories of how specific scholars or entire fields traveled a path to discovery. In fields like psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and health sciences, considering or attempting to solve case studies of people who have struggled with disease, brain injury, or mental illness can engage, reduce stigma, and spread awareness all at once. You could even elicit the help of advanced students or alumni to come back and tell stories about how their early training benefited them on internships or working in the field.

Create stories in the classroom. Immersion games like the famed Reacting to the Past in history have enviable track records of student engagement, with students volunteering to come in for extra class time. Even if you don't have time for an extensive immersion game, brief role-plays can also energize the class.

Focus on the whole journey. To really maximize the stories you use in class, don't just include a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Rather, include a story that includes both a goal and an obstacle. In his book on science communication, the actor Alan Alda describes how, in giving a talk, he often asks for a volunteer to carry an empty glass across the stage and place it on a table. He then asks the volunteer to fill the same glass to the brim with water and carry it back across the stage. He tells members of the audience that their entire village will die if even a single drop of water is spilled. It's nonsensical - the audience doesn't even live in a village, never mind share one, and who will do the smiting? - yet people are on the edges of their seats watching that second glass. The point here: Students want to be a part of the story; give them a reason, even contrived, to be invested in the outcome.

Your students have relevant stories to tell. Inviting them to share those stories can do double-duty for engagement and inclusion. "Teachers can devise activities for students to share their diverse experiences," writes Dena Simmons, assistant director of education at the Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence. "These could include spoken-word performances, written pieces, podcasts, videos, other multimedia and art projects, or even simply one-on-one lunch conversations with classmates or educators." By inviting your students' stories, you demonstrate your interest in them and their potential for contribution to your class and to your field.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Know Thy Selfie

Mark Marino, an associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California, shares an engaging story-based activity that would work well for classes in writing, digital studies, or psychology. He asks students to bring to class a series of "selfies" they've taken on their phones and to examine the story being told by those images. What do the choices of backgrounds, outfits, poses, and activities tell an observer about the person in the photos? What story are you trying to construct about yourself? What identities are being emphasized or downplayed?

You could ask students to complete this activity on their own or in groups. I used it in a "Motivation and Emotion" course when we were discussing sense of self as motivation. I've this approach in a traditional classroom and online, where students posted their selfies on a Google Jamboard. It proved highly successful in engaging students in both settings.

I received my Ph.D. in psychology in 2007, but I became a psychologist over a decade earlier, as a teenager in Cheryl LePain's Advanced Placement class in psychology. At the time all I knew was that her course was highly engaging and deeply motivating. But reflecting on the experience now, I see that she practiced all four of the principles outlined in this guide:

Emotions: She engaged our emotions with one part intimidation (horror stories about the difficulty of the AP test) and one part inspiration (how much psychologists had unlocked about the human mind, how much remained to unravel).

Performance: She was a charismatic and passionate lecturer, who put a lot of thought into her classroom performance, and who frequently employed humor.

Community: With only eight students, LePain had us pull our desks into a semi-circle around hers - all the better for developing a community atmosphere for considering high-minded subjects. She also had us meet after school for fun study sessions.

Stories: And she enthusiastically told stories about prison experiments and dream theories, and invited us to see the material through her own lens of sophisticated understanding.

Most of us aced the AP test. More important, we learned deeply. In college, I would have to get to at least the three-quarters mark of any upper-level psychology course to hit material that I hadn't already mastered at LePain's feet. Several of us formed deep friendships that would endure both the passage of decades and our scattering across the globe. A few of us, myself included, found a vocation.

Cheryl LePain's teaching may have been informed more by intuitive artistry than intentional design, but anyone can learn and apply some of the principles that informed her teaching - the same principles that informed this guide.

Helpful Resources

Plenty of polling websites are available to help you ask "clicker" style questions in class or set up discussions.

Use concept-mapping software to illustrate connections among ideas or pieces of information.

Try attending a conference on Reacting to the Past to understand immersion game tools.

You can find all sorts of classroom materials - discussion activities, icebreakers, and the like - on the Cult of Pedagogy website. There are also wonderful open-source "warm-up" activities designed by Equity Unbound .

The podcast Teaching in Higher Ed, led by the warm and wonderful Bonni Stachowiak, provides accessible, fun advice from some of the best thinkers in higher education.

This collection of teaching-and-learning resources from Jessamyn Neuhaus on her Geeky Pedagogy website just keeps getting better and better.

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Consider a student in an introductory math class - let's call him Alex. Alex had some unpleasant experiences with math in high school. When he got to college, he tested into a math course below the level that would count toward his general-education requirements.

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What are some common mistakes made in presentations and how can you avoid them?

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What are some common mistakes made in presentations and how can you avoid them?

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The ongoing process of measuring student performance. And it is IMPORTANT!

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Asking students to demonstrate their understanding of the subject matter is critical to the learning process; it is essential to evaluate whether the educational goals and standards of the lessons are being met. From Edutopia.org’s Assessment Professional Development Guide.

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What kinds of assessment can we use in the classroom?

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What kinds of assessment can we use in the classroom?

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Lights! Camera!  Action! In this summative assessment have students write a script and create a short play, movie, or song about a concept or strategy of your choosing. This gives them the opportunity to express their understanding in ways that apply to different learning styles

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Summative assessment strategies for keeping tests clear and fair

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Summative assessment strategies for keeping tests clear and fair

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Use a rubric — Rubrics help set a standard for how your class should perform on a test or assignment. They outline test length, how in-depth it will be, and what you require of them to achieve the highest possible grades.

Design clear, effective questions — When designing tests, do your best to use language, phrases, and examples similar to those used during lessons. This’ll help keep your tests aligned with the material you’ve covered.

Try blind grading — Most teachers prefer knowing whose tests they’re grading. But if you want to provide wholly unbiased grades and feedback, try blind grading. You can request your students write their names on the bottom of the last test page or the back.

Assess comprehensiveness — Make sure the broad, overarching connections you’re hoping students can make are reasonable and fluid. For example, if the test covers measurement, geometry and spatial sense, you should avoid including questions about patterning and algebra.

Create a final test after, not before, teaching the lessons — Don’t put the horse before the carriage. Plans can change and student learning can demand different emphases from year to year. If you have a test outline, perfect! But expect to embrace and make some changes from time to time.

Make it real-world relevant — How many times have you heard students ask, “When am I going to use this in real life?” Far too often students assume math, for example, is irrelevant to their lives and write it off as a subject they don’t need. When crafting test questions, use culturally-relevant word problems to illustrate a subject’s true relevance.