In Parts 1 to 3 of this series, barriers to active learning are discussed: various causes that affect students’ ability or willingness to learn. In Part 4, we discuss strategies for engaging students and engaging them in their own learning. In Part 5, the final article in this series, we will discuss the final strategies for engaging your students.
Building trust: Beyond the mechanics of the classroom, beyond the curriculum, the technology used, and external inputs, is the core of motivation: relationships. Many students, both today and throughout time, long for someone they can trust. Most of the time, they burn up looking for it. Teachers back down too. Legalities and politics dampen the desire to pour your heart and soul into teaching. Too involved and a teacher can be accused of abuse; too detached and a teacher loses communication of anything valuable to students.
There are degrees of trust: eliminating mistrust is a completely different concept than building trust. Mistrust is the absence of trust, the belief that people are actively trying to harm you. Trust is basically the belief and assurance that people will keep their promises and that they have the ability to do so. However, building trust is an active process by which people allow themselves to be transparent to others and therefore vulnerable. Building trust involves risk. As such, it appears that building trust is a cyclical process; that once an individual risks trust and anticipates that results will be achieved, the ability to trust in that instance deepens and the risk diminishes with respect to future actions.
The strength and transparency of the student/teacher relationship contributes to a stronger student learning experience. The positive relationship allows students to identify with their teacher and feel a sense of belonging.
Teachers who reveal themselves to their students, who let students know who they are, are more successful at building relationships with students. It is important for teachers to demonstrate their personal feelings, emotions, difficulties and successes. By modeling transparency, students learn to build trust and relationships…a skill that will serve them for the rest of their lives both personally and professionally.
Another important aspect of building trust with students is the ability of teachers to laugh at themselves when they make mistakes. Mistrust develops at a much higher rate when teachers make excuses or try to cover up their own mistakes, and conversely, students’ trust and respect increase when teachers allow themselves to be exposed, openly accept responsibility for their mistakes, and they keep going.
Problem-solving skills involve discovering how to recover from mistakes, an integral part of students’ success in their future careers. Actually, it is considered worthwhile to build time into lesson plans to deal with mistakes. Projects or assignments that contain flaws give students the opportunity to remedy problems through critical thinking. Students learn to respond effectively to miscalculations or faulty materials, a skill corporations find to increase employability. Discovering that there are multiple paths to remedy a given situation helps students develop acceptance and tolerance for numerous solutions or opinions that differ from their own, helping them understand the concept of more than one correct answer.
Students need to know how to identify their strengths and integrate their skills into class assignments. Most students demonstrate a basic need for self-worth; They have something to contribute to the whole.
Cheer up: Using the example of mentoring from the business world, and just as importantly, reverse mentoring, students learn the value of helping one another. Instead of viewing the learning process as a competition (in which one student must fail for another to succeed), education should be viewed as a collaborative effort. Encouraging students to help each other learn, without experiencing negative consequences on their own grades or personal achievement, improves student behavior. Most students are familiar with working in groups or study teams, particularly on class projects; however, many students do not experience true positive interdependence. Unfortunately, in an often confusing and forced process, students are randomly grouped together and expected to work together on a common goal without guidance on group interaction skills. Positive group experiences are more likely when team member grades include additional credit points for participating in a group, a percentage of the grade for group members is based on teammate evaluation, and students feel they have a responsibility to educate classmates during presentations rather than simply being graded on a data dump.
Another powerful aspect of encouragement and motivation involves the student’s awareness of academic value. Students are more encouraged to participate when they understand exactly how the classroom material applies to their lives and specifically their futures. They need the balanced guidance of educators who understand and can honestly explain what to expect from the world of work. Understanding the strong connection between scholasticism and life application helps reinforce the importance of education and makes students more engaged in learning. Since no two students respond to the same stimulus in the same way, variety is a must.
American students are typically offered so many choices that they are ultimately limited by freedom, a concept known as choice overload. Although students may initially yearn for free and open choice without any limitations, the reality of such a concept turns out to be so overwhelming that students actually experience demotivation. However, monotonous completion of assignments leads to complacency…by both teachers and students. Imagination turned into planning and presentation through student participation raises the level of student participation and increases their involvement in the outcome. It also contributes to a greater perception of students of the responsibility to learn and contribute to the learning process, motivating students to participate in active learning.
We have examined the barriers that prevent teachers from effectively engaging students in the learning process in a classroom setting. These barriers include home life challenges, feelings of not belonging or not identifying with peers at school, disrupted sleep patterns, and varied learning styles. We know that these challenges contribute to the decline in the average high school student’s motivation to learn. Hopefully you have gained insight into today’s education crisis and some strategies for intervening and improving the system.