Forms of Engagement: Strategies to Deepen Student Comprehension

Wednesday, October 6, 4-5:30pm on Zoom
Hosted by Chy Sprauve

It is very common for instructors to feel frustrated with students’ apparent “lack of engagement” in the classroom–especially now, as many of us are teaching online. We might seek out tips on how to capture student attention or try to tweak assignments or course activities so that we can encourage any increase in participation—and while these strategies can sometimes work, they can also often feel like “add-on” pieces of a lesson plan—practices we may or may not pick up again in the pursuit of the “perfect” engagement strategy.

In this workshop, we will look at engagement not as a series of activities to try in order to achieve a particular outcome, but rather as a series of practices we embed in our pedagogical approach. Imagining engagement as a global presence in the course (rather than a helpful piece) can help us to revisit all of the ways in which we communicate (written and verbal) with our students, which in turn might lend itself to greater general attentiveness in the classroom—on the part of students as well as instructors.

Our aim in this workshop is to develop an engagement philosophy (How do you imagine engagement? How might that show up in your teaching / course?) and apply said philosophy to how we create assignment directives (How do your assignment instructions read to students, for example?), feedback (one-on-one discussion with students or notes on graded assignments) and course activities.

To register, please visit https://cuny.is/tlc-workshops. A Zoom link will be emailed to you prior to the workshop.