Week 4

This week's topic, between the technology in education blogs and our unit in class, seems to revolve around a central question: how does one engage students effectively in the classroom?

English educator and author Steve Wheeler sees a solution in asking "unGoogleable" questions. In a world where a near-complete encyclopedia of all human knowledge is totally accessible to everyone, all the time, why should a student even bother listening? Perhaps if a teacher really were so interesting, students might put their phones down for a moment. Wheeler suggests that teachers should ask their students questions that cannot necessarily be Googled:

As with all unGoogleable questions, the challenge is to provide students with a significant challenge, after which the process of learning will escalate to a point where students are critically questioning and analyzing their knowledge.

To ask difficult, thought-provoking, open-ended, and insightful questions is certainly a necessary facet of productive learning. Questions that beg easily-researchable answers get boring. But Wheeler's idea is narrow. Questions whose answers are impossible, ridiculous, or too difficult can lead students to give up––what's the point to solving an unanswerable riddle?

On the other hand, is it solely the responsibility of the teacher to engage the student? When, if ever, is it the student's responsibility to be focused and present and engaged and listening? Terry Heick at TeachThought posits this question. Heick admits that it's touchy given the potential socioeconomic, geographical, or health-related variances among students that might affect learning. But he's talking about the issue of free will in the classroom. Heick describes education and learning as emotional processes. Therefore, an appeal to emotion ought to grab a student's attention.

The use of pictures and imagery can be most effective in engaging a classroom, if used creatively. David Deubelbeiss, creator of EFL Classroom 2.0, writes:

Pictures are the fundamental “intermediary” for context in language teaching. That can be the pictures in a textbook, those in flashcards, on the board, in a power point or through video. They bridge the bewilderment of sound and give it meaning.

Deubelbeiss' teaching blog is fascinating. He borrows techniques from special education to assist in TEFL. He provides a series of printable cards, each of which associates a small picture with a word or phrase.

 

There are a thousand ways to incorporate something like this into the classroom. I circle back to Wheeler's argument: if a teacher were to offer something so interesting into the classroom, students might put their phones down for a moment.