Resistance to Learning

This week’s readings from Stephen Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher were enlightening for me. The readings were on understanding and responding to students’ resistance to learning (Brookfield, 2015). While reading I could easily picture students in my classes and hear their statements of resistance as well as my own. I teach a lot of required courses for all the business schools’ students such as introductory accounting and…

Key to Student Engagement is Outreach

The comment that caught my attention from the second assigned reading of Student Engagement Techniques was from chapter 6, “From Theory to Practice”. The quote is “[y]ou have to reach out to students. You can’t wait for them to reach out to you. The good students always have and always will reach out, but the struggling students don’t know how to make the first move.”…

Student Engagement and Confidence

How to do I get my students engaged in the lessons? What is student engagement? In her book What Does Student Engagement Mean. In her book Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty, Elizabeth Barkley defines “[s]tudent engagement [as] the product of motivation and active learning. It is a product rather than a sum because it will not occur if either element is missing.” (Barkley, 2009)…