Active participation in the learning session is important both to the students and the instructor. This is a way to increase our understanding of the concepts discussed in the class and a way to gauge student engagement. However, there are instances when active participation from the students may take some time not because the students are not interested with the topic but because they may be engaging in a process where they take the time to personally connect the present information to their previous learning experience. This reflects the idea of Barkley and Major (2020, p. 8) who asserted that, “Highly skilled listeners who are involved in a lecture by self-questioning, analyzing, and incorporating new information into their existing knowledge are learning more actively than a student who is participating in a small group discussion that is off-task, redundant, or superfluous.”
I personally engage in this kind of engagement in my learning experiences. I want to savor the information I learn and relate it to my prior knowledge because it helps me understand and retain the information better. After savoring the information, I then interact with the class through sharing my thoughts, feelings, and insights. This relates to my teaching philosophy of patiently waiting for a teachable moment to happen – one of the ways this teachable moment occurs is when the student is ready to integrate the new information to his/her prior knowledge. This process takes time so I patiently wait and respond to the student whenever he/she is ready to share and ask questions. For example, in a two-hour social psychology session on cultural differences and similarities, one of my students kept quiet for an hour and then participated in the next hour through asking insightful questions and sharing well-thought ideas on how knowledge is influenced by the cultural context. That, for me, was a teachable moment where I had the opportunity to reinforce that student’s knowledge and insights which also served as a fertile ground for more in-depth discussion with the entire class.
Berit Haug (2014) of the Norwegian Center for Science Education found that teachable moments may be planned or spontaneous. Hence, student engagement can be both structured and unstructured. In a structured (planned) student engagement activity, not all students may be willing to participate but this serves as a jump off point to stimulate their thought processes such that it can lead to spontaneous engagement at a later part in the session – a situation that I experience most of the time in classes as an instructor and as a student.
Aside from intellectual stimulation, student engagement also has its feeling aspect (Barkley & Major, 2020). Howard Woodhouse (2011), an educator from the Faculty of Education in the University of Calgary, suggested that emotions elicited through story telling can facilitate teachable moments. Through storytelling, students engage with their emotions which then facilitates emotional connection with the story and the lessons it wants to convey. I observed in my soft skills classes that one of the effective ways to activate engagement is to provide enough time for all learners to share their stories related to the topic. Through this, they found a deeper and personal connection with the topic and it created an open and non-judging class atmosphere – everyone was willing to participate and share their ideas.
Anchoring on the ideas of engagement as having affect and cognitive aspects and engaging by connecting to prior learning (Barkley & Major, 2020), teachable moment as both planned and spontaneous (Haug, 2014), and engaging emotions through storytelling (Woodhouse, 2011), I can start the class by prompting the students to connect what they previously learn to what they will be learning. This bridging activity may activate their cognitive connection with the information and makes it personally relevant which then facilitates an efficient learning process (Priniski, Hecht, & Harackiewicz, 2018). To further facilitate the bridging activity, I can ask for a story about their prior learning related to the present topic. This nonthreatening invitation to participate will open opportunities for other students to share their story, and in return, will activate emotional connection with what they are learning. Hence, in this planned student engagement activity, I may be able to activate both the thinking and feeling aspects. I also hope to experience spontaneous engagement along the way.
References
Barkley, E. F., & Major, C. H. (2020). Student engagement techniques: A handbook for college faculty. John Wiley & Sons.
Haug, B. S. (2014). Inquiry-based science: Turning teachable moments into learnable moments. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 25(1), 79-96. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10972-013-9375-7
Priniski, S. J., Hecht, C. A., & Harackiewicz, J. M. (2018). Making learning personally meaningful: A new framework for relevance research. Journal of Experimental Education, 86(1), 11–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2017.1380589
Woodhouse, H. (2011). Storytelling in university education: Emotion, teachable moments, and the value of life. The Journal of Educational Thought (JET)/Revue de la Pensée Educative, 45(3), 211-238. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23767205
Acknowlegment: My sincere gratitude to Glenn Galy, PhD for the feedback of the previous version of this article.
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