Achieving Student Involvement: Attendance, Attention, and Articulation

 

The essential element of a healthy teaching environment is active student involvement. The first step in achieving involvement is to have students attend teaching sessions. You must then maintain their attention, the second level of involvement, from which they will articulate or express ideas to you and their peers. That is, they will be actively involved in the learning process that you, as teacher, are directing. Since the various levels of student involvement are achieved sequentially and depend on attendance, it is important to know why students come to teaching sessions. Quite simply, it is to obtain information, used here in the broadest context of the word. The teacher's main responsibility is to communicate information to students. If you communicate poorly, students will not attend your sessions, and from this it follows that they neither pay attention nor articulate their thoughts.

Clearly, a successful teaching environment realized through student involvement is readily attainable. A teacher must work hard in order to become familiar with the class material and to organize it into a comprehensive package. Tolerance and respect for others are a part of normal behaviour and should not be discarded when you pass through the classroom door. Emphasizing the positive and maintaining a sense of humour provide the glue which holds the enterprise together. As you get better at it, you will enjoy teaching more, and the opportunity to interact with students will be a source of much satisfaction.