Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty

By Elizabeth F. Barkley

Keeping students involved, motivated, and actively learning is challenging educators across the country,yet good advice on how to accomplish this has not been readily available. Student Engagement Techniques is a comprehensive resource that offers college teachers a dynamic model for engaging students and includes over one hundred tips, strategies, and techniques that have been proven to help teachers from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions motivate and connect with their students. The ready-to-use format shows how to apply each of the book's techniques in the classroom and includes purpose, preparation, procedures, examples, online implementation, variations and extensions, observations and advice, and key resources.

"Given the current and welcome surge of interest in improving student learning and success, this guide is a timely and important tool, sharply focused on practical strategies that can really matter."
?Kay McClenney, director, Center for Community College Student Engagement, Community College Leadership Program, the University of Texas at Austin

"This book is a 'must' for every new faculty orientation program; it not only emphasizes the importance of concentrating on what students learn but provides clear steps to prepare and execute an engagement technique. Faculty looking for ideas to heighten student engagement in their courses will find usefultechniques that can be adopted, adapted, extended, or modified."
?Bob Smallwood, cocreator of CLASSE (Classroom Survey of Student Engagement) and assistant to the provost for assessment, Office of Institutional Effectiveness, University of Alabama

"Elizabeth Barkley's encyclopedia of active learning techniques (here called SETs) combines both a solid discussion of the research on learning that supports the concept of engagement and real-life examples of these approaches to teaching in action."
?James Rhem, executive editor, The National Teaching & Learning Forum

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 24, 2009
• ISBN: 9780470549773

Reviews for Student Engagement Techniques

[kcannon_26 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If I could recommend only one book on course transformation for the Blended Learning in Higher Education group to consider, I would choose this one. Barkley organizes the volume into three parts encompassing the full range of requirements for a faculty who wish to either augment or fully reformat the way that students interact in their courses. It is a blended book, focusing on student outcomes in general and includes numerous very specific techniques that can be translated to in person and online experiences. It's sophistication lies in the fact that it does not make the simplistic assumption that listening to a lecture is ALWAYS passive nor that participating in a group is ALWAYS active. It recognizes that a student's prior knowledge and cognitive attention can be aligned with the faculty learning designer's academic expectations in a thoughtfully-constructed activity. It assumes that unmeasurable components are essential to the success of the teaching and the learning, such as: passion, enthusiasm, and personality. In Part 1 conceptual frameworks are covered broadly enough to remind any experienced instructor of one or two favorite or forgotten frameworks. In Part 2, 50 strategies are succinctly inventoried. Again they are broadly arrayed and clearly labeled so that an experienced educator can quickly locate a few new ideas. Specific tips are included with each strategy. And finally, in Part 3, Barkley catalogs a diverse array of well-tested techniques for the classroom. These give enough detail for the learning designer to use them immediately or to develop their own script for the new activity.Best of all, she includes brief descriptions of how the activities can be transferred to an online format.