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Books

Brain Rules by John Medina

In his book, Brain Rules, John Medina convincingly argues that we need to pay attention to the recent plethora of brain research that has been conducted and begin to incorporate this new knowledge into the design of instruction and work places. Medina effectively uses brain research in his writing style to insure that the reader learns his brain rules. He also gives ideas, some realistic and some not, that can be implemented to fix our educational system. His credentials as a researcher are legitimate and he backs up his statements with real research. - Karen M.

Articles

The Eight C's of Engagement:
How Learning Styles and Instructional Design Increase Students’ Commitment to Learning
by Harvey F. Silver & Matthew J. Perini

In this article the authors enlist teachers to help define what engagement is and how we can use learning styles to design lessons to increase engagement in our classrooms. Connection to the subject and commitment to learning are what teachers really desire from their students. By carefully incorporating lessons that involve the authors' 8 learning styles of competition, challenge, cooperation, connection, curiosity, controversy, choice and creativity, teachers will experience more engagement of their students.

Videos

In this video, students and professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder tell us about how beneficial it is to use clickers during lectures. Clickers are individual hand held student response systems. Students respond to multiple choice questions posed periodically throughout a lecture. They are used during direct instruction to gauge student learning. Professors tout the benefits as increasing student engagement as active learners and allowing the teacher to adjust the lesson based on responses to questions. Students feel empowered in that teachers are more in tune to whether or not they understand the material and the anonymous nature of the clickers is far less intimidating than having to raise a hand and put themselves out there in front of the entire class.

In this video, project based learning is demonstrated at its best. Teachers of 7th grade science, math, language arts, social studies, art and multimedia, collaborated in a semester long project that had students each create an informational cartoon pamphlet about soil bacteria. They used laptops, the internet, Comic Life software and microscopes as they researched, created story lines, and drew cartoons. Then they scanned their drawings and organized all their research into folders before developing the final product. Teachers even brought in community experts to teach and critique the pamphlets. The published products were then distributed to community garden centers.

Links

Student Engagement Resource Roundup from Edutopia.