Justice Berumen

Professor Ogden
TED 534
November 15 2021
Inquiry Project: Student Engagement
Part One: The Question

How do teachers get students enthusiastic about and engaged with course material?

Part Two: Literature Review with Citations

Student engagement and enthusiasm is a large area of study within educational research.
This interest has only grown in the past year and a half, as distance or online learning has forced
teachers, as well as students, into new circumstances which require new strategies to get and
keep students engaged in the classroom. While there is certainly valuable information in these
resources, this paper will be focusing on research that focuses on more “normal” educational
circumstances, i.e. in person learning.

Preventing Loss of Student Engagement Through Reading and Writing Tasks:

One source I found discusses the use of reading and writing activities to help build and
maintain student engagement with history course content. Reading and writing are critical skills
that students need in order to properly build the historical conclusions and arguments that history
teachers expect them to make. In this piece, Lauren Trotter goes over a couple of different
strategies to not only implement reading and writing into a history course, but also to make it
engaging for students. She also talks about strategies that work for students who typically have
trouble working with or staying focused on reading and writing assignments. These were split
into sections as follows: “Interactive (Non-Digital) Tasks,” “Chunked Reading,” and “Teaching
Writing Through Content.”
“Interactive Tasks” are primarily activities that have students moving around the room or
engaging with imagery that also encourage writing. Trotter describes how, for a unit on World
War I, the students are tasked to go around to nine different stations in the room, while also using
a scaffolded note card to collect and write down information from each station. Trotter finds that
students typically become more involved as the activity progresses, and by the time the full class
discussion begins, they are very engaged with the material. Trotter also makes a note that these
activities work best when students are given a clear and concise goal or objective.
The “Chunked Reading” section focuses on ways to break up readings to make sure
students do not get stuck or give up as easily on reading assignments. Trotter describes how
breaking up readings, using subheadings, and encouraging students to search for unknown words
helps students, even those that struggle, complete and understand reading tasks. It is noted that
these approaches especially help when students are lacking confidence in their reading skills.
Trotter takes a similar approach in the “Teaching Writing Through Content” section. The
strategies described here focus on having students start with smaller, more manageable writing
tasks, then build up to longer, more challenging ones. In this section, Trotter describes a booklet
she planned out to teach her students about World War II. The booklet uses Cornell Notes for
students to use while watching videos which, according to Trotter, help students focus on big
ideas first, then get more detail later. These are followed by short answer questions that require
the students to justify their responses. These then collectively build up into longer questions that
students answer as they progress through the booklet.
Despite its short length, this source offers some interesting strategies to help teachers
implement writing and reading tasks in their classroom.

DIY assessment feedback: Building engagement, trust and transparency in the feedback process:

The next source I looked at studied the effects of a DIY feedback workshop on student
engagement. The ultimate point of the study was to help students get more out of their feedback,
while also becoming more familiar with the process of assessment feedback and grading. This
idea was built off of the ideas of previous research, which also looked at student self-assessment.
The process for this study is described in great detail. First, students would turn their
assignments in to their tutors, who would then grade the work with criteria developed by both the
tutors and the students. When the tutors grade in this stage, they only make small annotations.
Formal feedback and final grading is held back until the later stages of the process. The students
are then given back their now-annotated work, and are able to self-assess their own work using
the same criteria. The tutors then give students their formal feedback, so that the students can
compare their own assessment with the tutors. Students can then meet for individual meetings to
discuss any significant differences between the two versions.
The study also got students' own opinions on this process through a series of poll
questions. The opinions of the students were broken down into a number of different categories
and described in detail. Overall, students found the feedback process to be more helpful,
engaging, and informative than typical feedback processes.
The authors then spend some time discussing, reflecting, and concluding on the results of
the study. Overall, they were very pleased with the outcome and found that students were able to
benefit in the ways that they hoped they would.
This process certainly serves as an interesting model for a feedback process for a class of
students. Changes would definitely need to be made so that it can be more readily applied to a
non-college setting, but the ideas presented certainly seem valuable.
USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO ENHANCE STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND QUALITY:

The ever growing presence of technology and the internet also serve as an opportunity to
increase student engagement. In this source, a study is conducted that looks at the effect that the
introduction of social media has on a group of college students. The study was conducted over a
year and studied the same group of students. In the first semester, the students went about the
course as they typically would. In the second semester, Whatsapp was introduced to students as a
voluntary option. Around 65 students agreed to join the group, and the social channels were run
by a moderator. Face to face meetings were encouraged with the student’s teacher, so they were
not allowed to communicate with the teacher on Whatsapp.
The researchers used a number of different statistical tests to look at how student
performance changed as the result of the introduction of Whatsapp. For one, they found that the
passing rate of the student population increased in the second semester. This also correlates with
higher average test scores. After testing their data, they come to the conclusion that students who
participated in the Whatsapp experiment were more engaged with each other and their lecturer
than students who did not use Whatsapp.
Student engagement increased as a result of Whatsapp for a couple of reasons. For one,
the social media channel gave students a chance to ask questions that they would typically not
ask in class. This meant that students had greater opportunities to get their questions answered.
The collaborative aspect of the experiment also meant students had more opportunities to work
with and learn from their peers outside of class time. In fact, the increased time to interact with
each other outside of class seems to be the key factor behind the overall engagement increase.
Overall, this research brings up a very interesting prospect for all teachers to potentially
consider going forward. Of course, introducing a social media outlet for a class will require a
certain level of moderation and caution, due to the nature of social media, but the positives seem
to be really impactful. Personally, I have found that I am also more engaged with classes when I
am able to work with at least one other person outside of regular class time. This is only
anecdotal of course, so having some level of research to back up this feeling is nice.

Works Cited

Lottering, R. A. “Using Social Media to Enhance Student Engagement and Quality.” South
African Journal of Higher Education, vol. 34, no. 5, Sept. 2020, pp. 109–121.
EBSCOhost, doi:10.20853/34-5-4271.

Smith, Matthew, and Cassie Lowe. “DIY Assessment Feedback: Building Engagement, Trust
and Transparency in the Feedback Process.” Journal of University Teaching & Learning
Practice, vol. 18, no. 3, June 2021, pp. 1–14. EBSCOhost, doi:10.53761/1.18.3.9.

Trotter, Lauren. “Preventing Loss of Student Engagement Through Reading and Writing Tasks.”
Agora, vol. 55, no. 2, June 2020, pp. 41–45. EBSCOhost,
 search-ebscohost-com.proxylib.csueastbay.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&d
b=ehh&AN=145166836&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Part Three: Teacher Interview:

As part of this assignment, I was required to interview the best social studies teacher or
teachers I know, and ask them my inquiry question. The interview took around an hour to
complete, and was not as structured as a typical or professional interview. While the
conservations that ensued started out and focused on the inquiry question, other topics were
covered as well.
For my interview, I spoke with Ms. Jennifer Sitkin. Right now, she is my coworker at
Castro Valley High School as part of the student teaching program. Previously, she was my
Modern World History teacher. My time in her class room was excellent, and her teaching has
certainly impacted me in ways I have only truly begun to realize. When I heard we had to
conduct an interview based on our question of choice, she was the first person to come to mind.
After asking her my question, she gave a couple of different tricks or strategies that she
found to be helpful in keeping students engaged with history course material. Some of these are
more structured, or rigid approaches, in that it typically is much more built into a lesson. The
first thing she talked about was the usefulness of experiential activities. She described how she
finds that having students do things, whether it was in a simulation or another type of “hands on”
activity makes students both more engaged with the topic, but also typically more enthusiastic
about whatever they are covering. This is especially so when you are using games or other forms
of competition to teach material. Activities where students also play roles build engagement, as it
puts students directly in the “shoes” of the figures they are studying.
She also talked a lot about smaller tricks or strategies that can be implemented into pretty
much anything you teach. One of the tips that stood out is to have students answer prompted
teacher questions as a class. Instead of just calling out a student to answer some question during
a lecture or activity, she finds its better to have students discuss the question with their seat
neighbors, then to look for responses. By doing so, you give students a chance to think and see
what their classmates think about the topic. It also serves as a good way to break up a lecture,
which can hurt student engagement. She also recommends that these questions be open, in the
sense that you are looking for their responses, not the right answer. This way, there is less focus
on getting the question right, and more focus on seeing what students understand.
Another big thing she mentioned involved connecting the history of the course with the
world today. This was mentioned in two pieces: the first is the obvious connections that history
teachers need to make that shows how the events of the past influence the realities of the present.
The more often and more effectively you can draw that connection, the higher chance there is of
students being engaged with and enthusiastic about the material. The second piece is that you
should use a student's own personal histories and connections to help bring the past to life. The
example she used to explain this focused on labor movements. When talking about unions, you
can ask students if there parents are in a union, and what they know based off of their experience.
When you are able to do this, students can grow stronger connections with the material, thus
making it easier for them to engage with it.
Overall, the interview was very pleasant and informative. I will certainly be in touch with
Ms. Sitkin going forward, and I cannot wait to learn more from her as I continue working at
Castro Valley High School.

Part Four: Doing Something New

Researching and interviewing about my question is certainly useful, but what is even
more useful is to actually try and apply something I have learned in my own classroom. While I
am pretty limited in what I can do at the moment, as I am only a student teacher for one period of
a class, I still have plenty of things I can do to apply my learning to where I am not as limited.
With these limits in mind, I decided to try and do something that I learned from Ms.
Sitikn. A lot of what she shared with me can be applied with little to no preparation. This works
really well for me, as again I am pretty limited in what I can do to the current class structure and
content. I ultimately decided to use her strategy of having students talk amongst themselves
before trying to answer a question or come up with a response. It should be noted that I also
sought to have students respond with what they knew or felt. I was not asking a super specific
question that I already knew the answer to, but rather a more general check-in question, like
“What do you think about this?” Part of this plan is to try and get this into my lectures, activities,
and more as much as I can. I also used varied versions of this strategy to add some diversity to
the types of conversations students would have.
My first opportunity to implement this came at a really opportune time. Shortly after my
interview with Ms. Sitkin, I had to have a class that, due to some accidental mis-timing, had back
to back lecturing in the same day. This is obviously not ideal, as just lecturing really hurts
student engagement and thus learning, but the way the unit was planned out my CT and I really
couldn’t modify too much. We gave them a short break in between, but this did not do too much
to help the students with focusing and engaging. As I looked around, I could tell many students
were struggling to keep up with the second lecture. Once I realized this, I used a section of the
lecture’s powerpoint to have students stop and talk with their neighbors for around one to two
minutes. The section was a quote from William McKinley describing how and why the U.S. was
going to take over the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. The quote was good for this
as it was very explicit in its messaging and intent. If someone expressed that sort of intent now
with another country, we would be shocked (depending on who said it, of course).
The student response to this was pretty good. Not only did it serve as a good break for the
students, it also served as a great way for them to think about the quote and what it reminded
them of. I had some students share their responses and they brought up a lot of interesting points.
The open nature of the question also meant I was getting a lot of different types of responses.
Some students expressed their issues with the quote, others related it to what we covered
previously, and more. I should mention that the break did not work to completely revive the
students' energies, but the quick little pick up most likely helped them in the moment.
I also implemented this to check in on students’ understanding on the notes of the lecture.
Next class, before we started to continue the unit, I had students play a little game that combined
Ms. Sitkin’s approach with a game I learned about in this class (TED 534). I told students that,
after some time had passed, I would call on them at random to share something that we had
covered in the past couple of days. What they had to do before then was to make sure that each
student had at least one thing they could say in case they were called on. If a student couldn’t
answer, then they would “lose.”
The students were able to do pretty well with this. Not only did they not “lose,” but they
actually came up with some pretty good responses. In this case, I was much more limited on
time, but it felt like a pretty great way to get students talking and thinking about what needed to
be covered. Having more time would give me an even better understanding of what they have
learned thus far.
Ms. Sitkin’s advice seems incredibly helpful and versatile. I definitely plan to incorporate
more of these types of questions and discussions into my classrooms going forward. The big
challenge for me (which I bet Ms. Sitkin has an answer for) is how to incorporate this on a
day-to-day basis but without having it become stale for the students.

Part Five: Reflection

This whole process was a very interesting and informative one. It certainly allowed me to
see a lot of new ways of doing things that I certainly think will be valuable in the future. Even if
I am not in the position to take full advantage of what I learned, I think I will still be better off
knowing it then not knowing it at all. Because teaching seems to be based a lot on planning for
the unexpected, the more tools you have in your bag, the better.
One thing that stood out to me from this was how much research is being done in
education. This makes sense from most perspectives, but actually going out and seeing the
research really gives you an idea as to how much scholarly work is (hopefully) involved in
developing the educational systems and strategies we have today. What is even crazier to think is
that all of this research is likely only barely scratching the surface. In the case of the COVID-19
Pandemic, we likely will never have a great collection of academic research on how COVID
impacted education even though so much research now is talking about COVID related issues
like distance learning.
The interview process was also very nice. Being able to talk with old teachers and new
coworkers is really great, and I am very lucky to have the opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, I
wanted to talk to another teacher I had, but they did not message me back in time. Regardless,
this process was fun and I think I will try to make sure I reach out to other teachers when I have
questions in the future.
 I definitely plan on using what I learned in classes going forward. Ms. Sitkin’s advice in
particular seems very useful, but even the things mentioned in the articles already have me
thinking of things I could do in the future. The social media channel in particular has me
interested, as I think it is a great opportunity for engagement. It definitely will need to be more
refined for my application, but the general idea seems like a great opportunity.