by: Patricia L. Hatcher

One of the biggest challenges in a society growing more dependent on technology to communicate is that the classroom experience must be constantly updated to match the ever changing student attention span. Technology is teaching all of us how to shortcut our lives from texting to twittering. Our classroom communication has to be updated so that our students can receive the information we are giving them. The question is how to do this effectively and innovatively change things without compromising the quality
of the education our students strive for.

I think the best way to engage students is to divide the time in the classroom into sections to where the student is getting the information from multiple sources so that the information is first being reiterated for mastery, but also so that students that have different learning styles are benefitted. The question is how to do this as educators without compromising our duty to teach each of our objectives and reach each of our determined outcomes.

First of all, to use our class time as optimum engagement time we must know our students’ overall temperament and how they best learn information given to them. Each class has its own learning persona. Usually after the first week you can tell whether your students want and respond to the majority of the class as lecture, flipped classroom or whether they benefit better from what I like to call the “mixed engagement.” The “mixed engagement classroom” entails an equal amount of lecture, visual stimuli, feedback from the students and a bit of group work, for interaction and reinforcement of the learning.

The beauty of splitting up the standard class time in the aforementioned ways is that you can vary how you include lecture, visual stimuli, student feedback and group work. There are differing lecture styles that one can utilize, you can incorporate taped interviews, documentaries and YouTube videos for the visual aspect. As for student feedback they can of course talk about the material covered, but they can also do things such as review the information and put their questions and answers in the form of jeopardy questions, paraphrase the information learned and have a certain amount of time to present that information to a group or the entire class.

Visual stimuli is the easiest to access because of how far advanced technology
has become. Students can see countless documentaries, cartoons, history or biography channel full episodes, films etc., to reinforce the subject matter taught in the classroom. Reinforcement of classroom materials and information is the key to the true mastery of a subject or concept.

My plan to spread the word about “Rules of Engagement,” is to put together a series of workshops in the Fall of 2016 that will teach my fellow instructors how to divide the standard 1 hour and twenty minute classroom into diversified learning categories. The workshops will include ideas on how to perk up the standard lecture, how to incorporate visual stimuli and varying group work ideas to perfect rules of engaging our students.