Providing support, challenge, and choice

We know our students are not all the same.

Those parents or carers amongst you will know that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to keeping young students engaged and on task. As educators you doubtless will have met and worked with students of varying skill sets, backgrounds, educational history, motivations and experiences: all of which impact their learning in various ways.

When working online and asynchronously a simple starting point is to have a clear understanding of what the learning outcomes for the session are. This will help you identify different ways that your students can meet these outcomes, and what you might do to support them in getting there.

By considering how to offer support, challenge and choice in learning design, we are working towards creating a more equal learning environment: what is taught becomes more accessible and more appealing – and therefore, hopefully, more engaging.

1) Design to Support

Start off by breaking down what you want to teach into different stages, or chunks. Chunking and Flipped models (where much of the instruction and content is given to students to engage outside of ‘class’ time) can create learning environments where students are better able to work at their own pace.

Each stage or chunk should clearly contribute to a student meeting a learning outcome. Next, identify the learning type for each of the stages you design. This will help you to pinpoint what students need to do to succeed, whether there are dependencies, or areas which might cause difficulty.

Productive tasks should also be broken up into key stages, with these stages mapped to mini-deadlines or touchpoints where feedback occurs.

Breaking things down will give your students time to get everything done, but kept on track with their mini-deadlines, which can also serve to encourage and motivate them to keep going.

Diana Laurillard, UCL: “Plan not just what was the face-to-face time with your students, but be explicit about what they should do before to prepare and after to follow up. This is part of motivating concentration.”

Amy Benjamin: “Having a choice gives students a sense of self-determination that translates into increased commitment.”

Professor Mark Brown, DCU. A word of caution to us all: “Although with the best intentions of helping my students by giving them access to lots of links and additional resources, I discovered that inadvertently I was actually increasing their workload. Indeed, I was even placing their success at risk as a clear flag was needed to differentiate between essential and non-essential information.”

Discussion

Which approaches or techniques to support, challenge and offer choice could be suitable for your context? How might they increase engagement and motivation?