How Do You Keep College Students Engaged In the Classroom?

As college turns more to a "serve us" mentality, rather than the service mentality, the questions keep coming up "How do you keep college students engaged in class?" After sitting through some pretty bad lecture classes and some times even worse lab classes, the realty of the situation is students are becoming bored in class and quickly losing interest in the material presented in class. More and more students are bringing laptops to class to surf the web or skipping class altogether. As the culture of what is acceptable in class it is always a battle between bored students and the professor. How do professors help keep students engaged throughout a class? Here are some helpful tips that I found that can help keep the classroom fun and interactive:

• Jigsaw group problems/questions/puzzles
• Class worksheets, individual or group
• Given a table of data/observations
  - interpret and analyze
  - find trends, generalize, make rules
• Students predict, instructor demonstrates, students observe and explain
• Students experiment and explain
• Multimedia/simulations: do and explain, predict and test, use or construct an animation or simulation
• Write a one-minute paper
• Discuss questions in a small group, report back to class
• Teach someone else what you have learned
• Group problem solving: work a difficult problem together

As you can see, I chose ones that had a group mentality and had a high amount of student interaction. I firmly believe that the more you have students interact the more learning that takes place inside the classroom and the more engaged your students become. If you are interested in knowing more check out the link below. https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/ltc/services/faculty_services/resources/tips/engaged/