In the past few years, there has been a significant lack of in-class participation within students. Environmental factors, teaching style and lack of motivation are all things that can have an effect on students’ participation and engagement.
According to “How to Encourage Participation in Your Classroom” from Harvard, the lack of participation and engagement from students today is one of the biggest challenges educators face. The lack of participation in classrooms can have an affect on classroom performance.
There can be a lot of factors playing into this such as lack of confidence, low self esteem, anxiety, lack of motivation, and shyness. Sometimes it’s about the environment that students are learning in, sometimes it’s about the teaching style or the students’ best learning style.
Some teaching styles are based on long lectures, lack of real world application, and more. These teaching styles can easily lead to distractions and can decrease the amount of student engagement. Using real world activities, having breaks, and creating other ways for learning are all ways that can help to improve engagement.
There are definitely strategies and techniques that can be used to improve the amount of participation teachers are seeing.
According to “Why Your Students Are Disengaged” by Western Governors University, creating an atmosphere that encourages participation is one way to help increase engagement. This includes being respectful, speaking loud enough for everyone to hear, listening well to others, not interrupting others, building on others comments with your own, and using participation for clarification and not only for answering questions.
There are also other ways and techniques that can be used for students to participate in class indirectly. Using different sites and discussion boards makes it easier for students to participate without having to say things out loud.
Letting students know that everyone makes mistakes and that it is easy to identify them and call yourself out on them without it being embarrassing or a big deal. Letting students know that they are in a safe space can easily improve participation.
The Talon believes that in the past few years there has been a significant decline in student engagement and participation, and there is something that can be done to try and improve it.