Back to Practical Pedagogy Questions
How can I increase student engagement and motivation?
Motivation is what causes students to invest the energy needed to engage with course materials. There are many aspects of sincere engagement–paying sustained attention, being ready to fail and learn from mistakes, self-regulation and honest self-reflection–that are very cognitively and emotionally demanding of students, and yet that deep investment is necessary for real learning to occur.
In our current climate we are seeing significant challenges when it comes to motivation and engagement. Educators are reporting chronic absenteeism and unpreparedness, as well as students grappling with challenges of mental and physical health and stress, all more acute in the wake of the pandemic. Giving some thought to the challenges students are facing, and the factors that affect engagement and motivation, can help you to create a class environment that sets students up for success.
Table of contents
Setting students up to succeed
Dogfooding
Subject-specific skills
Study skills
Seeing the point of it
Transparency
Bursts of enthusiasm
Fostering a sense of belonging
Welcoming students in
Moments of genuine connection
Peer connections and collaborative learning
Tools for motivation
Social annotation tools
Gamification
Setting students up to succeed
A key point to remember is that by and large, students will do good work when they can. When they are not doing good work, it is quite often because they can’t, or they believe that they can’t. The possible reasons for this are many: students can be overloaded, taking several classes simultaneously while working a job; they can lack key skills; they can lack confidence and self-belief, or have trouble believing that the work will bear results. To address engagement and motivation, one of the first things we need to do is to try to really understand what it is like to be a student today.
Dogfooding
Educators have a tendency to be ambitious with the things they want a class to achieve, which in many ways is a product of a wonderfully positive outlook–but the danger is that if the workload does become too much for busy students to grapple with, and students find themselves in the position of having to judge that they cannot complete the work as assigned, they are forced into a position of non-compliance that impacts on their relationship with the class and instructor.
A good practice to build in to your teaching is to put yourself in the position of your students to make sure that you have a realistic idea of what you are giving them to do. For example, we often underestimate how long reading really takes, even from our position as experts; novices will need longer to parse complex ideas and chase down new vocabulary. In Dogfooding: How Often Do You Do Your Own Assignments? on the Cult of Pedagogy Blog, Jennifer Gonzalez about the notion of dogfooding, or, the importance of inhabiting the student experience of the work you assign (in the sense of “eating your own dog food”). Try making a practice of actually completing the same reading your students are doing in a week, or creating an example project yourself before assigning it. This can help you both to get a realistic sense of the time requirement, and to improve the instructions you give and the rubric you use to grade it.
Subject-specific skills
Another helpful practice can be to start a class with assessments of skills and knowledge, to give you a sense of where students are when they come to you, and where they can realistically get to by the end of the class–and calibrate your ambitions for the class accordingly. Additionally, with a clear sense of the skills students possess and which they need to develop, you can give students support by strategically scaffolding key pieces of learning (read more about this under What can I do to scaffold learning?).
When there is a specific piece of the coursework that you see students falling down on, it is worth investigating whether there are particular challenges that we can support students to overcome. Are You Assigning Too Much Reading? Or Just Too Much Boring Reading? by Theresa McPhail in the Chronicle of Higher Education records educators’ reports that students are simply not doing the readings they assign. Rather than simply blaming lazy students, Critical Reading Skills: An Urgent Challenge from Inside Higher Ed argues that helping students to develop their reading skills is an urgent challenge for higher education. They reference a set of strategies for developing reading skills published by the Conference on College Composition and Communication which have applicability in almost any classroom, and could help to set students up with more confidence with and enjoyment of class readings.
Study skills
Similarly, students can learn a variety of strategies for academic motivation, from self-talk that focuses on what they can achieve, to connecting the work to their personal values or identities. Althea Need Kaminske discusses these motivational regulation strategies, and a meta-analysis conducted to assess their efficacy, in Motivational Regulation – Strategies for Academic Motivation.
Another powerful skill for students to learn is metacognition: that is, awareness of their own thinking and learning. Teaching students to reflect on their own learning can help them to better understand which strategies work best for them, which areas they are likeliest to struggle with, and where a particular subject might connect with their values and interests.
Where you see students needing additional support, you can encourage them to access the peer tutoring offered by the Center for Learning and Student Success (CLASS). Some students feel more comfortable seeking support from fellow students, or outside of the context of a class where they will be receiving a grade, and this can be a fantastic option in those cases. Another resource to recommend is the Student Success Courses provided by the Supporting Inclusive Success initiative, which is designed in particular to help students from AAPI, low-income and/or first-generation backgrounds achieve success.
Seeing the point of it
A great way to help students to feel engaged and motivated to participate in a class is by being communicative and transparent with them about what they can expect to get out of it, and why it is worthwhile. This may seem obvious, but it can be easy to focus on the content of a course and forget to communicate to students the bigger picture and the reasons for the work you’re doing together. Another thing to consider is how to help students to perceive what is valuable to them about the ideas and work: to develop their metacognitive awareness of where their interests lie, and where a particular topic intersects with their personal values and identity.
Give serious thought to your learning objectives, including the reasons why they are important to the students’ education and to you. How can you communicate these to your students, and connect those overarching objectives both to the on-the-ground work you are doing together, and to the real-world concerns that motivate them?
Transparency
When you introduce a task or assignment, spend a few moments explaining to students what the purpose is and what you expect them to get out of it. What are the skills you want them to develop or practice? Why are they important? How will this task get them there?
A helpful framework to reference here is that of Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT), which is based on a principle of promoting students’ conscious understanding of how they learn and how higher education works. The TILT approach recommends that, in communicating with students about some activity or set of activities, you take care to address with them in detail the purpose of what you’re doing (i.e. the knowledge or skills they are to get out of it), and the criteria for success. Resources for applying TILT, including small TILT-informed teaching changes that can enhance students’ learning, can be found on the TILT website, and you can read more about TILT under How can I make my classroom more inclusive?
Bursts of enthusiasm
In Mind over monsters: supporting youth mental health with compassionate challenge, Sarah Rose Cavanaugh emphasises the effect that a professor’s passion can have on student motivation, through varieties of emotional contagion. Students who are exposed to another person’s genuine excitement for a topic are far more likely to discover their own.
If you want to find ways to help students to access your passion while also understanding where the work you’re doing fits in with the broader picture, you can also look for, or schedule, moments to step out of the everyday flow of your classes and talk creatively and enthusiastically about the reasons why the work is important. These can be moments to get fired up, to connect with students, and to remember what is so exciting about your field, and to connect the work with the broader real-world problems that students really care about.
Fostering a sense of belonging
When students feel as though they belong, they have a greater sense of control over, and investment in, their education. Additionally, students who have come from higher-resourced educational backgrounds are more likely to come to higher education with a greater expectation of belonging than students from less privileged backgrounds, and the latter’s sense of belonging can be more affected by the warmth of welcome they experience on campus. There are small, simple things you can do to make sure that every student feels that sense of belonging, regardless of background and educational history.
Welcoming students in
As you begin your class, there are several things you can do to welcome students, recognize them as individuals, and establish an interactive, responsive relationship with them.
Before the semester even starts, you can begin learning about your students using a ‘Who’s in Class?’ form. These can be used anonymized to give you aggregated data about students’ identities, strengths and needs to inform your teaching approach, and you can develop a richer non-anonymized survey to start to get to know your students further. This guide to the ‘Who’s in Class?’ form from the Center for the Integration of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Lafayette College links to a number of resources for using this method.
To get students talking with one another and feeling comfortable with your learning management system, you might consider creating a forum for students to introduce themselves. You can include some getting-to-know-you questions that intersect with course content to get students talking about the topics of the class, such as “What has your experience with [topic] been?” or “How do you see [topic] manifesting in your day-to-day life?” You can ask students to engage with at least two of their colleagues’ posts, and can set up the forum grading to automatically assign points accordingly. You can access our guides to setting up forums on Moodle here.
Some educators begin the semester by working together with students to develop a Classroom Community Agreement. This is essentially a co-created document that sets out expectations for participation and behavior, and can be a valuable tool for learning what you can do to best support your students, while inviting students to ‘buy in’ to the work you’re doing.
this guide from Boston University Center for Teaching & Learning offers some practical considerations and resources around the practice.
Moments of genuine connection
Education blogger Dave Stuart Jr. writes about a technique he uses to connect with students, and in so doing foster a sense of belonging: looking to foster moments of genuine connection with each and every student. Stuart advocates for finding tiny moments, at the start or end of classes, during discussions, in feedback on assignments, or in one-on-one meetings, to make a quick connection with students as individuals–as learners and as people in the world.
The way Stuart approaches this is to pay attention to small ways that students are overcoming obstacles and stepping up, and to recognize those with a small, positive comment. Stuart keeps track of these moments, marking them off on the class register to ensure that each student experiences at least one such moment. This kind of method can make it possible to really engage with every student even in a large class.
Educators also find ways to structure in moments for one-on-one engagement: for example, some faculty members strongly encourage students to come for a short one-on-one in their first semester. Sitting down face to face in this way offers an opportunity for teacher and student to meet as humans, making it a little easier for students to reach out and ask when there is something they need.
Peer connections and collaborative learning
Belonging isn’t all about the relationship between student and instructor; the relationships between students can be just as important. Paying attention to building community in your classroom can provide a crucial support network for students, such that they have multiple sources of support through their learning.
Talina Corvus in her Faculty Teaching Profile talks about building classroom community as a professor in physical therapy and education. A key aspect, for her, is helping students to see that they are in part responsible for their peers’ learning, and that their peers are in part responsible for their learning, such that students get used to seeking feedback from one another as they learn.
You can read more ideas about how to promote community and inter-student support in How can I encourage collaborative learning in my classes?
Tools for motivation
A question you might ask yourself is: How can the design of my learning experiences support motivation? In general, the more active and collaborative a course design is, the more it will promote engagement and motivation.
Consider the kinds of interactions that your course is promoting, and how these might motivate learning. These might be student-to-teacher, student-to-student, student-to-content, or (as students come to understand and develop their personal relationship to course content) student-to-self. One student might respond more strongly to certain of these interactions than another, and you might consider building in multiple types of engagement to your course to serve different students’ motivations and aptitudes.
There are some specific tools and structures that Pacific faculty have found to be helpful for promoting student engagement with particular aspects of a class. A non-exhaustive list is below, and if you have further suggestions, please let us know at edtech@pacificu.edu.
For readings specifically, a small intervention that can increase student engagement with readings and other course materials is the use of social annotation tools such as Perusall. This is a social annotation tool for assigned materials, which means that you can upload the readings for your class (or a wide range of other media, from videos and podcasts to web pages), and students make comments on the material, or read or respond to their classmates’ comments, as they read, or watch, or listen. Students often share definitions for difficult words or concepts, highlight the parts of the material that they are most excited about, and share moments in their own path to understanding. Making reading more of an active, social process for students can help them to feel confident and engaged even with challenging materials.
Perusall is integrated as an external tool on Moodle, so you can use it right within your class Moodle to enhance students’ engagement with the readings. Follow these instructions to add Perusall to your Moodle class.
Gamification
This approach aims to foster empowerment and motivation by encouraging students to see their grade more like a score, which they can add to in a variety of different ways. Students have the ability to choose between assignments, and are even able to “unlock” alternative assignments that might be seen as more creative or more fun. Higher scores going into a week unlock more advanced assignment options. Students are also invited to complete extra assignments, which can act as insurance in the case of illness or travel. This “insurance” can then be cashed in at the end of the class–students with sufficiently high scores at the end of term are not required to take the final exam. That’s pretty powerful motivation to put in a consistent effort during the semester, which yields better learning. Jennifer Hardacker in her Faculty Teaching Profile gives a brilliant introduction to gamification and its effects.
–
Interested in thinking more about ways to foster engagement and motivation? Reach out to us at edtech@pacificu.edu, and we can suggest more resources or schedule a one-on-one.
We are also always looking for more answers to this question, so if you have one that’s worked for you, please let us know!