How to E ngage S tudents in C lass Essays - FoolProof,

How to E ngage S tudents in C lass Without question, a major classroom challenge facing today's educators is getting their students to put down their phones and pick up their level of engagement. While a generation ago educators might find their students getting sidetracked by an attractive classmate, an enchanting daydream or passing notes about an upcoming tailgate party, today's smartphones present educators with a whole new array of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. After much trial and error, I have come to the conclusion that engaging my students is best accomplished by making them feel a bit anxious while keeping them in relatively close proximity to their comfort zone. I've had a great deal of success simply by rearranging the chairs in my classroom, making my students give pop oral reports on the previous night's reading assignment and, when assigning collaborative writing assignments, pairing up two students who are exceedingly different from each other. Although these three pedagogical methods are far from foolproof, they have generally proven effective. All or most of my students suffer from what Professor Sherry Turkle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describes as being "alone together." For example, before my class starts, my students will be texting with their friends instead of bantering with the person seated next to them. The nature of the pairings, combined with the complex topic of the assignment, forces my students to meet and work with someone from a vastly different peer group and thus escape from this insidious ostracizing malaise. While it would be easier for me to let my students choose whom they wanted to work with on this assignment, watching these inscrutable duos collaborate on a complex research question makes this assignment very rewarding -- at least, to me. Although sometimes the circle of debate fails to produce valuable discourse, the pop oral reports cause my students to question my fairness and the crossover pairings result in students opting to write the essay themselves, more often than not, I have found that these three strategies can change the energy in my classroom from disengagement to engagement without my ever touching the thermostat.