All of us hope that students will take advantage of the time they spend on our courses to acquire knowledge and skills that can be used broadly and flexibly. For our part, we create activities and organize resources to help students build understanding. However, these efforts will be successful only if students spend time doing the reading, thinking, writing, arguing and problem solving that we make available. In short, students learn only if they fully engage in these activities, without distraction and with sufficient time. Yet, many faculty members report low levels of student engagement, and there's a growing frustration with the
perceived inability to get students' full attention to their studies.

As noted in the Introduction, there are mutual responsibilities for learning. Faculty members need to use well-crafted and up-to-date teaching methods, and students need to spend adequate time on preparation and study. Without presuming students have no interest in learning and without pandering to imagined youthful tastes, there are ways teachers can make it likely that students will give time and energy to studying that optimizes learning.

Generating meaningful discussions during class time is the traditional favorite of teachers, though some instructors feel their classes have become too big for discussion as a single group. In that case, many activities can be done in small groups organized within a class (large or small), in which discussions are held among a handful of students, often directed toward a particular aim or focused group product. A third approach grows from research on memory that suggests that the best understanding is one that's connected to already existing knowledge. If course ideas are used in the analysis of topics, situations or questions that are already part of students' interest, there will be more engagement and more long-lasting effects of the thinking and talking that are done. This last strategy is a form of student-centered teaching. The instructor starts by asking what questions or social contexts are most important to students, so that teaching is embedded in those contexts, not just applied as an afterthought.

LEADING DISCUSSIONS

Like other forms of active learning, class discussions provide variety within the flow of a class. They can be used as a starting point if you're teaching inductively; e.g., students lay out dimensions of a social setting or problem and try to identify solutions for resolving a conflict. Once the discussion has set the stage, the presentation brings academic knowledge or understanding to bear on the setting students identified. An alternative would be to discuss after a presentation, inviting students to discover ways the material aids in resolution. Leading discussions requires us to maintain a balance between using our voices and encouraging students to use theirs. Consider these ideas for sparking discussions:

Invite students to ask questions related to a reading assignment, then frame the discussion around those questions.

Have students write their answers to a sentence completion exercise, then share their ideas: What most struck me about the reading was ... A question I'd like to ask the author is ... The idea I disagree with most strongly is ... The part of the lecture or reading that made the most sense to me was ...

Ask students to respond to a contentious statement or an illustrative quote.

Have students recall an experience in their lives that somehow connects with the topic.

To increase the number of responses you get, try this from John Woodcock (in Stocking 1998): Break up your presentation, giving students two or three minutes to discuss a question with the person sitting next to him or her. Rather than reporting on their own ideas, ask students to report on their discussion partner's good ideas. When he tried this, Woodcock found "Three times as many hands went up, and the reports had a consistently better energy." This can work with any size group in almost any situation.

One strategy that several KU faculty members have found useful is called the fishbowl, a discussion format in which part of the class forms a discussion circle and remaining students form a listening circle around the discussion group. During the semester, students rotate through the groups (see right).

In a large group discussion, once it's moving, keep it going by asking for more evidence or clarification. Ask "How?" or "Why?" Pose questions that link or extend the discussion, address cause and effect, and ask for synthesis or summary of the material.

Other ways to encourage discussion are by affirming student comments and being silent when appropriate. McKeackie (2002) notes many lecturers check student understanding by asking if there are any questions, waiting three to five seconds, and after receiving no response conclude everyone understands. But this is often not the case; students just haven't had enough time to process material. Give students some "hang time" to think.

When it's time to end a discussion, conclude with a summary so that students know what important points were covered. A summative statement also gives you the opportunity to fill in points that weren't covered and to praise the class for their responses.

For more suggestions regarding leading discussions, see Active Learning in Using Class Time Well (p. 11).

USING GROUP WORK

Asking students to work in groups is common enough that everyone has an idea of what's involved, but many people have strong reactions to the invitation to "get into groups." It's important to use this method of teaching only when there's a specific purpose and only when you prepare a well structured activity. Students are wary of teachers who use group work as a way of dealing with being unprepared, and without clear direction conversations often move quickly away from course content.

Ruth Federman Stein and Sandra Hurd outline several justifications for the use of student teams and group work in Using Student Teams in the Classroom (2000). Besides increasing learning and preparing students for the environment of teamwork in industry and other organizations, teamwork and peer discussions help students more easily construct knowledge that's built upon their previous experiences (Fosnot 1996).

Group discussions also help students use and become familiar with the language of a profession or discipline. Evaluations of student understandings are usually structured to assess their ability to comprehend questions and provide convincing responses. These skills are more likely to develop if students are allowed to discuss these topics themselves, as opposed to only receiving passive exposure to this new language. At their best, group activities engage student in active use of terms and ideas in ways that complement hearing them used by a professor in a lecture.

Teamwork is also more useful than lectures when teaching practical knowledge or material that's evaluated based on social context. Finally, Stein and Hurd argue that group work helps students absorb the behaviors and way of thinking needed for success in the classroom.

To make groups really work in your classroom, Dan Spencer of the KU School of Business recommends following the "Keys to Effective Group Work" he has developed, shown at left. In this model, the group has an ongoing structure and purpose, and there is some effort made to generate a product from the group work. Such projects can generate extremely high levels of engagement when the topic is of importance to students and there is a lot of interaction with and feedback from the instructor. If the group is generating a high-stakes product (with a significant grade attached), there will be important issues in managing the work distribution and providing fair individual feedback. There are many books in the CTE library that address those issues, but remember that the added benefit of serious engagement will require some cost in management of the group process itself. Many faculty members feel the return on investment is very high.

To initiate group work in the classroom that doesn't involve an extended project, try using Listening Teams (see right).

ENGAGING DIVERSE LEARNERS

When we talk about diversity in education, often the point is to highlight the general benefits of a world with multiple points of view and many forms of culture; it's a more interesting world when we have a richer palette of language, music, literature and traditions. At another level, cultural context is also an asset in teaching. The best learning takes place when students experience new ideas as they are connected to their existing understanding of the world. Learning becomes most flexible, most useful to students when they can see the same ideas, information or analysis applied across more than one context. A commonly used definition of "deep understanding" is that ideas can be used in a context that wasn't explicitly taught. The best way to generate such an understanding is to teach the same ideas embedded within multiple specific settings.

As we talk about diverse context then, we're talking about both how to capture the attention and focus of students whose life experience is not typical of most KU students, and also about how to promote a general understanding of ideas in all students that isn't bounded by particular circumstances. Embedding knowledge within realistic settings familiar to students will get understanding started, and asking students to recognize content in unfamiliar contexts will deepen that understanding.

As a first step, we need to make sure that the examples and settings we use in communicating knowledge include a wide range of the typical human experience. Students in KU classrooms are different in many ways: age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, religion, sexual orientation, and physical or learning ability. Van Note Chism (2002) reports that studies have found that this type of diversity benefits individual students, institutions of higher learning, the economy and society. She also reports that several studies have documented ways in which student difference enlarges students' perspectives, increases their critical thinking, and fosters higher intellectual engagement.

Van Note Chism states, "The weight of past research evidence suggests that faculty members are crucial to student educational attainment: positive in- and out-of-class relationships with their teachers can enable students to overcome constraints and achieve academic success" (p. 131). In light of disappointing retention rates for underrepresented students, teachers can play an important part in the lives of diverse learners. We can make knowledge accessible to students by using examples beyond our immediate lives and concerns. Drawing upon a range of experience isn't just an exercise, it's a good way to increase learning and retention.

One easy and valuable way to achieve these goals is to recognize students' cultural contexts and build examples into your teaching that connect with their lives. That could include references to music, entertainment and art that are relevant with students, rather than using only references to the work you know. For example, frame hypothetical problems or situations in issues that are relevant to people in their 20's in the early years of our century, along with the usual examples you've generated that connect to your interests and concerns. In doing this, you aren't pandering to students' tastes or family cultural backgrounds; you're making their understanding deeper by using multiple settings for their/your knowledge. At the individual level, you're also making it possible for each person to find an initial example that's embedded within familiar places, people and topics.

Think about the classic word problem from math class that many of us know: Toonerville and Toytown are 500 miles apart, and a train leaves each town on a single track, headed for the other town. The Toonerville train is going 55 mph, and the Toytown train is going 65 mph; in how many minutes will the trains crash into each other and where will that take place? This problem is meant to be abstract, devoid of real meaning, so as not to distract us from the mathematical operations that would solve it. That's a noble goal, but all the research we have on learning suggests that students would both embrace the problem more and remember more from doing it if the problem were framed in ways that engaged them. There are many possible ways to state an issue, and many possible frames you can use. If you engage your students by working to put your intellectual knowledge into multiple examples from their collective lives, it's a winner all around. They'll do the work you want more readily, they'll remember what they learn longer, and they're more likely to use what they learn in ways that expand on what you taught them.

Since we want students to become more aware of the rich variety of the planet's people and human geography, it's good to use context to engage people. We also want students from different cultural traditions who join our community to be engaged by our courses and benefit from our teaching. By building their experiences into our courses, we both communicate welcome and we make their learning more likely. When we rotate our teaching through multiple contexts for the ideas and information we want to share, we get the added benefit of greatly improving the depth of the learning that all our students get.