How to Make Your Teaching More Engaging

By Sarah Rose Cavanagh May 29, 2019 

Consider a student in an introductory math class — let’s call him Alex. Alex had some unpleasant experiences with math in high school. When he got to college, he tested into a math course below the level that would count toward his general-education requirements. He is thus feeling wary about the semester, and resents having to “waste” expensive college credit on a course that he is unlikely to enjoy and that won’t get him any closer to his degree. 

To have any hope of learning the material, Alex needs to actually involve himself in the course. He needs to direct his attention to the lecture and the problem sets. He must be willing to use his working memory to attempt solutions rather than daydream about his life outside the small windowless room full of equations. He needs to decide the information is important enough to commit to memory and then be motivated to grapple with it later, on his own time, to prepare for the exams. 

Alex can do all of that — but he could use your help. As his instructor, you can stimulate his curiosity with an inspiring and energizing presentation style, with activities and assignments that maximize his sense of control over the material, and with expertise that helps him reach just a bit beyond his current abilities.  

The psychologist Todd Kashdan writes, “If you want people to be interested, committed, and willing to devote effort to learning, mastering, and using these skills for the long haul, then you can’t avoid the initial step of stimulating excitement.” In short, if you really want a student like Alex to learn and succeed, something needs to happen first: You need to engage him.  

Who Is This Guide for? 

Welcome to The Chronicle’s guide on how to make your teaching more engaging. This guide is for anyone who wants to introduce energy or enthusiasm to their classrooms using methods that have been tried — and found true — through research and in classrooms.  

Certainly some teachers are naturally compelling and intuitively spark a zest for learning in students. But most of us have to work at it. You can energize your classroom for Alex and every other student by using principles familiar to both emotion scientists and pedagogical experts — principles available to any faculty member willing to investigate and apply them. 

First: Why Care About Engaging Students at All? 

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.” It is less work for Alex if he remains unengaged — sitting passively in class not really absorbing the material and only half-heartedly attempting to study. 

Engaging Alex using a variety of methods to attract his interest and excitement doesn’t mean that you are taking on the work of learning for him, or somehow cheapening your material. Instead, it is an invitation — to take the initiative, to apply effort, to risk the daunting possibility of failure. 

It is an open hand. 

It is good teaching. 

Here’s how to do it.  

The 4 Principles of Engagement 

I have organized some related strategies and research evidence into four core principles that you can use to foster student engagement in your classroom.  

Readers will no doubt expect one of the four to be “active learning.” This term has been repeated so often in recent years that it has started to lose its meaning. It is pretty much canon now that an engaging classroom is one that incorporates active learning at least some of the time. For that reason, I’ve threaded active learning throughout each of the four principles rather than having it stand alone. 

At its most basic level, active learning means getting your students involved in activities in class rather than just passively listening. Jennifer Gonzalez, editor of the teaching blog Cult of Pedagogy, summed up the concept quite nicely in the title of a blog post: “To Learn, Students Need to DO Something.” 

It isn’t that lectures can’t be dynamic and engaging in and of themselves. Some lecturing is always going to be required, especially in fields like the sciences and history. But to engage your students most effectively, you should, wherever possible, try to involve them in their own learning.  

Any number of popular techniques will do the job, including:  

The well-established effectiveness of active-learning strategies is why they are threaded throughout the four principles below. 

Principle No. 1: Cognitive Resources Are Limited. Emotion Trumps. 

What It Means 

Decades of psychological science have shown that cognitive resources (like attention and working memory) are sharply limited — you have only so much to go around. If you pay selective attention to a complex game of ball passing, the odds are good that you will miss a man in a gorilla costume walking through the scene and thumping his chest. Your ability to maintain focused concentration has its own strict limits. Working memory can handle only the infamous seven (plus or minus two) chunks of information at a time. 

All of these cognitive resources are required for effective learning in a classroom. Cognitive load theory argues that in trying to grasp new material, students face several related demands: intrinsic (understanding the task and how it is presented — e.g., reading and following lab instructions), germane (those involved in the process of learning — e.g., acquiring new knowledge and skills in completing a lab assignment), and extraneous (distractions — e.g., your lab partner cracking jokes while you are trying to focus). To help our students learn, we must direct their limited cognitive resources to the tasks at hand rather than to classroom distractions. 

One of the best tools we have to achieve that is emotion. We know that emotions evolved in order to motivate behavior — to tag certain things as important either to approach (e.g., tasty food, attractive mates) or to avoid (e.g. venomous spiders, rotten food). Emotional stimuli draw our attention and are more likely to be remembered, much the way an angry face stands out from a crowd of neutral faces. 

Liven your course content by connecting it to the emotional lives of your students and they are more likely to dedicate their cognitive resources to their classwork than to the phone buzzing in their pocket or to their anxieties about a calculus exam that afternoon. Present the material in the context of an arousing controversy. Use a quick demonstration or a brief video clip to hook their emotions. With more cognitive resources on deck, their understanding and future recall should benefit. 

How to Do It 

Chunk your class up into smaller time periods. Each one could be 15 to 30 minutes (depending on the overall class time). Assign each chunk of time a subtopic and introduce it with an “emotional hook.” The educational psychologist Kentina Smith describes emotional hooks as “brief lesson content teasers, relevant activities, stories, songs, provocative questions, headlines, current events, images, demonstrations, videos, or case studies designed to stimulate interest, curiosity, and active interaction with information that can be connected to course concepts.” Those hooks should not replace the day’s lesson, she says, but rather serve as a trailer of sorts for it, to spark student interest and curiosity. 

Choose activities and assignments that are clearly relevant to your students. That doesn’t mean you have to be an expert on their personal lives or on contemporary pop culture. You can also make class activities relevant to contemporary social movements, to future careers in your major, or to some transcendent purpose. James Hauri teaches an introductory chemistry class for nonmajors at my home institution, Assumption College, and aims to make the entire course relevant to students’ daily lives. All of the labs center around chemicals and materials that students interact with regularly. For instance, they evaluate bottled water versus tap water, test both for pH, conductivity, and taste, and then debate why so many people choose bottled over tap. His nonmajors do the same sorts of labs and practice the same skills learned in a traditional chemistry lab, but their curiosity about the material is aroused because of its direct relevance to their lives. Relevance attracts interest and motivates engagement. 

Invite students to solve a mystery of your field. Present a persistent puzzle in your discipline. Mysteries, as the writer Ian Leslie put it, “inspire long-term curiosity by keeping us focused on what we don’t know. They keep us ‘alive and active’ even as we work in the darkness.” Presenting unsolved mysteries also sends a message that students could have a hand in creating new knowledge in the world. 

Interrupt the routine. Especially once you’ve hit the groove in your semester where everything is running smoothly and students now can anticipate everything that is going to happen in your classroom, shake things up. Keith Johnstone, an actor and teacher, writes of the power of interrupting routines in his book Impro. All storytelling (more on that in a bit) involves describing a routine and then interrupting it. Two families are at war and hate each other — but their children fall in love. A little girl visits her grandmother — who has been replaced by a wolf. It is the interruption of the routine that arrests our attention. If you find that certain successful strategies prove less effective as the semester progresses, try a dramatic shift in routine. 

Make it funny. Course-relevant humor is a good way to liven up the classroom, because in order to understand the joke, you have to process material twice — once to understand the frame of the joke, and then again to understand the sudden reversal that triggers the humor. An entire body of research called the “instructional humor processing theory” supports the value of cracking quips in the classroom to improve student learning. So use your own humor if you are naturally funny. And if you’re not, use someone else’s humor, via memes and videos that are easily found on the web.  

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Candy, Candy, Candy 

Every October, Heather L. Urry, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University, focuses her “Experimental Psychology” course on a topic that is on everyone’s mind as Halloween approaches: candy. When discussing research study designs, she has her students evaluate the evidence behind a friend’s “Hierarchy of Candy Goodness Model,” which organizes types of candy into tiers of deliciousness. Tier 1 has Reese’s, Kit Kats, Twix, and Snickers, while way at the bottom on Tier 4 is candy corn and “anything with marzipan.”  

In a prototypical semester she might have students taste-test Reese’s (Tier 1) versus Hershey’s (Tier 3) and rate their feelings of enjoyment and gustatory pleasure. Students design a mini-study, collect the data in class, run the statistics, and make conclusions about whether or not their data support the Hierarchy of Candy Goodness. They can also debate theoretical constructs like: Do students’ pre-existing biases about candy influence the results? Does knowing the hierarchy ahead of time affect the results? 

She has two aims here — to teach students about this type of experimental design and to give them some hands-on practice with it. Her candy activity achieves both. Conveniently for our purposes, it also illustrates an effective use of an emotional hook — students begin immediately debating the merits of the Hierarchy (“How dare they put Almond Joys on Tier 3?”) and are eager to find out whether or not their data support the model. 

The free chocolate doesn’t hurt, either. 

Principle No. 2: Your Persona and Performance Matter, Like It or Not 

What It Means 

You may have a knee-jerk reaction against the idea that college teaching is, in some sense, a performance art. But as an instructor, you are using your words, props, and actions to try to get students involved in and excited about something you are involved in and excited about. The degree of effort and enthusiasm you invest in your presentation will be evident to your students and may, in part, determine how much effort and enthusiasm they will invest in your class. 

How to Do It 

Observe yourself in action, or get someone else to. People who do any form of public speaking are often advised to record themselves and then watch the video to spot areas for improvement. Try videotaping one of your classes. Do you sway back and forth in a distracting way? Say “um” too frequently? Talk to only one side of the classroom? If the idea of watching yourself teach is a bit too nauseating, you can always ask a colleague to sit in on your class and give you feedback. Many teaching centers or faculty-development programs offer this service. A colleague’s evaluation of your videotape might reveal a few behavioral tics that tend to discourage student engagement, and you can work on avoiding them. 

Focus on your immediacy cues. A videotape of your teaching might also reveal a lack of behavioral cues that would encourage engagement. It is probably best to work on one at a time so you don’t appear distracted or awkward. Focus one week on making more eye contact, another on moving around the room, and another on being sure that you’re not lapsing into a monotone. An easy immediacy cue to adopt is to use language that invites students to see the course as a communal effort (“today we are going to …” versus “today I am going to have you …”). 

Watch good communicators in action. In his widely viewed TED talk, “Teach Teachers How to Create Magic,” the Columbia University professor Christopher Emdin recommends visiting places where people are already skilled at the art of public performance and audience interaction — like rap concerts and the black church — and taking notes on the techniques people use to enliven their performance and energize the audience. 

Take risks, and freshen up your material. In my own teaching, I’ve seen certain activities that used to reliably induce enthusiasm fall flat over time. I’ve realized that it’s probably because an activity loses its ability to hook student interest as I smooth out all of the rough corners and present it with more polish and less raw enthusiasm. As Kevin Gannon, a historian at Grand View University and director of its teaching center, writes in his Teaching Manifesto: “If I want my students to take risks and not be afraid to fail then I need to take risks and not be afraid to fail.” Inject new material. Try new things. Experiment. 

Jazz up before class. My go-to, for better or worse, is coffee. A friend of mine ramps up for large lectures with loud heavy-metal music. Some people need to be sure they have a full belly; others work better on an empty tank. Whatever puts you in an energized state, do it before you teach. 

Get enough sleep. I am a bit of a sleep evangelist. I won’t belabor the point, but to have good energy in any area of your life, I believe you need to be well rested. 

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: A Nonlecture-y Lecturer 

As part of a recent research project on student learning, I observed some of my colleagues teaching in various disciplines. One such course was “Introduction to Art History,” taught by Elissa Chase, a lecturer at my campus. On paper, her lesson plan would look like a straight lecture via PowerPoint for a solid hour, sending a shudder down the spine of diehard advocates for flipped classrooms and active learning. 

But in practice, her “lecture” was instead a lively, enthusiastic, energetic tête-à-tête. She began each class with a music video related — often very tangentially — to the day’s topic and played loudly over the classroom’s speakers. She then invited students to guess its relevance. For instance, one day she played Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” because they were covering the Reformation. The result: Students started the class curious and thinking ahead to the topic of that day’s lecture.  

Chase proceeded to conduct the class like a vibrant conversation. She spoke quickly and energetically, in a way that made you sit up and pay close attention in order to keep up. She moved quickly around the lecture hall. She knew all of her students’ names and would often query them or make sarcastic quips that set them laughing. They knew they could be roped into the lecture at any moment, and so seemed at attention and eager throughout the class. Time passed quickly, and at the end, I leaned over to one of my research assistants and murmured, “I’ve never been interested in art — but I really wish I could take this class!” And I meant it. 

Teaching with gusto, whatever strategy you use, is key to student engagement. 

Principle No. 3: We Are Intensely Social Creatures, Motivated by Community 

What It Means 

Build community in small ways. Instead of a traditional roll call, do a question roll where you take attendance that day by having everyone answer a fun question about their favorite movie or food. Or offer a two-stage exam, in which students complete the test on their own first and then have an opportunity to work together to earn more points. You don’t have to wait for the first exam to begin building community, either. As James Lang, a professor of English at Assumption College who writes regularly on teaching for The Chronicle, reflects here, the first day of class is a great time to begin laying the foundation. 

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Bonding Over Brains 

Many colleges have attempted to ease the transition from high school with the introduction of learning communities for first-year students. The models vary but involve some mix of shared classes, dorms, and extracurricular activities. 

As a professor, I was part of a freshman learning community with a colleague, Michele Lemons, who teaches biology at my college. The same group of new students took both my “Introductory Psychology” course and Michele’s “Introduction to Biology” course. To demonstrate that true knowledge spans disciplines, we dovetailed our topics at several junctures — talking in both courses about neurons and brains, eating and motivation, the biology of vaccination and the psychology of why some people opt out of life-saving vaccines. Outside of class, we met with our students for occasions that were both social and intellectual — for instance, we all had breakfast together one morning before class while a nutrition expert answered student questions about healthy eating. Michele took the lead on a community-building project in which students worked together to craft a miniature  science fair on basic aspects of neuroscience, which they presented to local middle-schoolers during Brain Awareness Week. 

It was delightful to get to know these students on a deeper level than I usually do, and to joke with them in settings outside of class. I think it was also valuable for them to see their professors socializing. As these students continued in their studies over the years, and occasionally showed up in some of my more advanced courses, I would always smile when I saw their names on my roster. I like to think they felt the same. 

Principle No. 4: Stories Are Our ‘Most Natural Form of Thought’ 

What It Means 

You might notice — as the psychologists Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson once did — that some words, with just a handful of syllables, seem to contain entire storylines. Words like “betrayal” and “crucifixion.”  

Schank and Abelson argued that stories are our “most natural form of thought.” A narrative weaves together otherwise isolated bits of information into a meaningful whole, linking them in important ways but also chunking the information so that it takes up less space in working memory and connects to existing threads in long-term memory. The causal relations in stories and the use of reliable narrative structures are also thought to benefit understanding and remembering. 

Clearly stories are a way to engage students. The stories you tell in your classroom can be about your own intellectual path, about discoveries in your field, about people who have lived through different historical eras, about patient case histories, or about previous students who went on to succeed. Whatever their type or shape, tell stories. 

How To Do It 

Share your own stories. Research confirms that, when it’s done well, disclosing anecdotes from your own personal history can motivate and inspire your students. As David Gooblar, a lecturer in rhetoric at the University of Iowa and author of the blog Pedagogy Unbound, wrote, “When you talk about yourself to your students, you signal to them that you trust them and see them as worthy confidantes. That, in turn, encourages students to feel more at ease, to open up themselves and commit more fully to the class.” Obviously, sharing too much and too often is inappropriate and likely to detract from your credibility, but qualitative research suggests that students appreciate, in particular, hearing stories of their instructors dealing with academic obstacles and overcoming them. 

Share your field’s stories. Perhaps you teach in a discipline like math, where the subject matter seems very divorced from the idea of personal stories. But every field has its stories of frustration and discovery, of accidental solutions and sudden new insights. So share the stories of how specific scholars or entire fields traveled a path to discovery. In fields like psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and health sciences, considering or attempting to solve case studies of people who have struggled with disease, brain injury, or mental illness can engage, reduce stigma, and spread awareness all at once. You could even elicit the help of advanced students or alumni to come back and tell stories about how their early training benefited them on internships or working in the field. 

Create stories in the classroom. Immersion games like the famed Reacting to the Past in history have enviable track records of student engagement, with students volunteering to come in for extra class time. Even if you don’t have time for an extensive immersion game, brief role-plays can also energize the class. 

Focus on the whole journey. To really maximize the stories you use in class, don’t just include a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Rather, include a story that includes both a goal and an obstacle. In his book on science communication, the actor Alan Alda describes how, in giving a talk, he often asks for a volunteer to carry an empty glass across the stage and place it on a table. He then asks the volunteer to fill the same glass to the brim with water and carry it back across the stage. He tells members of the audience that their entire village will die if even a single drop of water is spilled. It’s nonsensical — the audience doesn’t even live in a village, never mind share one, and who will do the smiting? — yet people are on the edges of their seats watching that second glass. The point here: Students want to be a part of the story; give them a reason, even contrived, to be invested in the outcome.  

Your students have relevant stories to tell. Inviting them to share those stories can do double-duty for engagement and inclusion. “Teachers can devise activities for students to share their diverse experiences,” writes Dena Simmons, assistant director of education at the Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence. “These could include spoken-word performances, written pieces, podcasts, videos, other multimedia and art projects, or even simply one-on-one lunch conversations with classmates or educators.” By inviting your students’ stories, you demonstrate your interest in them and their potential for contribution to your class and to your field. 

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: A Story-Centered Course 

James Lang, the English professor and Chronicle columnist on teaching, recently structured his entire upper-level British literature seminar around stories. The course covers four major historical time periods, and he began each with a set of true historical narratives that set the tone for the rest of the unit. 

For instance, he introduced the unit on the Romantic Period (1789-1832) with two contrasting stories that sharply illustrated the socioeconomic divide that would inform all of the literature they read next. One story was of George IV’s lavish ball that included such extravagances as exorbitant amounts of food and champagne and an artificial river complete with bridges and greenery and cavorting fish. The juxtaposing story concerned a 5-year-old boy who worked as a chimney climber. Chimney climbers were small boys sold to chimney sweeps by their parents to climb up inside chimneys to clean them of accumulated soot. In short, they were sold into a painful, dangerous life that often ended in death from cancerous tumors, suffocation, or being trapped in the chimney. One chimney boy was beaten to death by his master while witnesses failed to intervene. 

The contrasting lavishness and penury, excess and grime, frivolity and tragedy provide a frame for all of the works that the students will encounter for the rest of the unit, and help set the historical stage. The emotions and moral imperative suggested by the stories are also likely to light a motivational fire under the students, create an itch to address the problem — even if just by reading and writing about it. 

Sarah Rose Cavanagh is an associate professor of psychology and associate director for grants and research in the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom With the Science of Emotion and the forthcoming HIVEMIND: Thinking Alike in a Divided World.