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Creating Moments of Genuine Connection Online

10 Ways to Promote Student Engagement

How to Make Your Teaching More Engaging

Make Space for Informal Exchanges

active learning experiences, building relationships, and student engagement Take advantage of those precious minutes before class starts and after it ends to engage with your students and have informal conversations. Make mental notes of things they share with you and ask them about it the next you see them. These small moments can often lead to a big impact. Leverage technology to keep in contact with students outside of the classroom. Use Remind to send out a quick reminder the day before class and send a quick message to students who were absent - "Missed you today. How are things going?" These simple informal exchanges can mean the world to your students and impact their success and not just in your course.

Design to Deliver

Evaluate your course content and the learning objectives you want students to demonstrate knowledge of in your course. With that in mind, consider the best way for students to engage with the content, engage with each other, and engage with you. Thinking about the way that students learn best will help you to determine the appropriate engagement strategy for an assignment/assessment/activity.

Read more about active learning experiences in the ASSESSMENT - Authentic Assessment Strategies section of this course.

Metacognition & Self Regulation

Get students involved in thinking about how and what they learn. Metacognition is an effective reflection practice that leads to self-regulation. We want to build relationships with students that are positive and reciprocal but we also want to help our students build skills that will help them succeed long after they leave our classrooms. Read, Ten Metacognitive Teaching Strategies to get some ideas on how you can start helping your think about how they learn and make connections.

Mindfulness Exercises

Take the first two minutes of each class to conduct a mindfulness exercise with your students. Not only will this help to build community in the classroom but it will aid in the academic success of your students. Just like with metacognition, mindfulness and helps the student to get into the right mindset before class activities begin. Mindfulness has never been more important than during a global pandemic! People across the globe are facing similar stresses and anxieties that crowd our minds and keep us from focusing on what is in front of us. This year more than any other has really been challenging in terms of focus. Our students are not only facing the new stresses of a global pandemic but they are facing homelessness, hunger, and poverty. These factors make it very hard to engage in learning! If you are teaching online, infuse some language into your assignments or learning content that give students the prompt to engage in a mindfulness exercise on their own.

Read about Mindfulness in the Classroom and the Pedagogical Role of Mindfulness to get more ideas on how you can use mindfulness to engage students in learning.