The Four Pillars of Emotionally Engaging Teaching
Here I try to get more practical than some of the earlier articles, which focus more on theory and data.
Let’s put an old misunderstanding to rest: “Engagement” is not a synonym for “entertainment.”
To care deeply about whether students are actively involved in class and interested in the content does not mean you advocate coddling students or treating the college classroom as a free-for-all fun zone. In fact, anyone who conflates engagement and entertainment is not only mistaken but also quite in conflict with the psychology and neuroscience underlying how human beings learn, which demonstrates that learning requires the motivated application of attention and working memory.
“When educators fail to appreciate the importance of students’ emotions, they fail to appreciate a critical force in students’ learning,” wrote the neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio in the book Emotions, Learning, and the Brain. “One could argue, in fact, that they fail to appreciate the very reason that students learn at all.”
Engagement is a necessary first step for learning — which is one reason why efforts to enliven your classroom can’t be dismissed as empty entertainment. But beyond that, deep engagement in a course actually requires hard work. “Engagement means setting up challenges for students that are meaningful beyond getting a grade,” argues the writer and speaker John Warner, “challenges which encourage risk without unduly punishing failure so they may experience the pleasure of resiliency and be enthused about trying again.”