Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty [Paperback]

“The conclusion is easy: if you’re going to be teaching on the moon and have only one suitcase for resources, this is the book on motivation and active learning that you’ll want to pack. I know it’s the one I’d be taking with me… probably as a carry-on so I have something good to read on the way.” —The Teaching Professor, December 2009

“The book is full of practical advice and ideas for teachers who are striving to increase student engagement and learning supported by research. It is well organized and accessible. Student Engagement Techniques is an important and useful guide for any teacher interested in improving student learning.” —Gayle Venegas, Math Teacher, San Jacinto USD (Icezablog.com)

“This handbook will be useful to educators with any level of experience in the classroom. It can provide guidance to new faculty and ways to refresh a stale course for faculty who want to update or enhance their classroom experiences. While some of the SETS are common sense—and you may be using them already—the help comes from the details about how to use the SETS more effectively and how to extend or vary different activities. Even if you do not have the time to appreciate the theory presented in the first sections of the book, the SET examples alone make this book valuable for novice and experienced educators alike.” —Laura L. Carruth, Neuroscience Institute, Georgia State University, for CBE—Life Sciences Education, Vol. 11, 135–136, Summer 2012

Keeping students involved, motivated, and actively learning is challenging educators across the country,yet good advice on how to accomplish this has not been readily available. Student Engagement Techniques is a comprehensive resource that offers college teachers a dynamic model for engaging students and includes over one hundred tips, strategies, and techniques that have been proven to help teachers from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions motivate and connect with their students. The ready-to-use format shows how to apply each of the book's techniques in the classroom and includes purpose, preparation, procedures, examples, online implementation, variations and extensions, observations and advice, and key resources.

"Given the current and welcome surge of interest in improving student learning and success, this guide is a timely and important tool, sharply focused on practical strategies that can really matter."—Kay McClenney, director, Center for Community College Student Engagement, Community College Leadership Program, the University of Texas at Austin

"This book is a 'must' for every new faculty orientation program; it not only emphasizes the importance of concentrating on what students learn but provides clear steps to prepare and execute an engagement technique. Faculty looking for ideas to heighten student engagement in their courses will find usefultechniques that can be adopted, adapted, extended, or modified."—Bob Smallwood, cocreator of CLASSE (Classroom Survey of Student Engagement) and assistant to the provost for assessment, Office of Institutional Effectiveness, University of Alabama

"Elizabeth Barkley's encyclopedia of active learning techniques (here called SETs) combines both a solid discussion of the research on learning that supports the concept of engagement and real-life examples of these approaches to teaching in action."—James Rhem, executive editor, The National Teaching & Learning Forum

Elizabeth F. Barkley is professor of music at Foothill College in Los Altos, California. She is anationally known scholar, educator, and consultant and has been the recipient of several honors,including being named California's Higher Education Professor of the Year by The Carnegie Foundationfor the Advancement of Teaching. She is coauthor of Collaborative Learning Techniques from Jossey-Bass.