Public
Activity Feed Discussions Blogs Bookmarks Files

Ask a question from your peers to help you in your professional work. Seek different points of view on a topic that interests you. Start a thought-provoking conversation about a hot, current topic. Encourage your peers to join you in the discussion, and feel free to facilitate the discussion. As a community of educators, all members of the Career Ed Lounge are empowered to act as a discussion facilitator to help us all learn from each other.

Keeping Your Focus on the Students

As instructors we must focus on our students needs and what we have to offer them to become successful students. It is imperative that we do this throughout our teaching to help motivate our students and allow them to feel successful.

General Strategies for Student Retention

We must provide our students with the necessary tools to be actively involved in the learning process; and provide them with tools to feel and become successful human beings.

Understanding Student Characteristics

It's good to recognize our student's needs and meet them where they are; with this in mind we will increase student moral and produce successful students.

TRY TRY AGAIN

TO ERROR IS HUMAN,THAT IS WHAT CONTRIBUTES TO SELF DOUBT.SO IF AT FIRST WE DONT SUCCEED,THEN TRY TRY AGAIN.A LIFE SPENT MAKING MISTAKES IS MORE HONORABLE THAN ONE SPENT DOING NOTHING.

Motivating through announcements

I mentioned this earlier, but a nice touch that a professor once did to me was have a weekly motivational statement. Instead of giving a motivational story, this professor personalized it and made it unique and it really stuck to me. In my future classes, I am going to have something like this each week of the course that helps the students feel good about what they are doing and keeps them "on track". -Ron Stefanski

A challenge to juggle it all

Sometimes as a professor I find it difficult to juggle all of my different commitments. AFter all, I am working full-time, working on various side projects, and teaching the course. I have always believed in the "lead by example" clause and when students explain they are having hard times I immediately relate to them and explain what my schedule is like and how I manage it. I have had a few "heart to heart" conversations with students and they have said that I really helped them. -Ron Stefanski

Student retention - Methods that work

Something that I am going to begin to do in my next course is to send a message promoting how great the students are doing and motivational words for my students while they are pursuing their degree. I have found that many of my students WANT to do well, but sometimes things happen and they lean on the "giving up" method. -Ron Stefanski

Adult Learning - Not as weird as they may think

One of the best things that I see happen in my courses is when someone who is much older than the other students reaches out and says how excited they are. Surprisingly, twice I have had students who are retired from the work force contact me in Live Chat sessions and strike up conversation. Many of them think that their colleagues are much younger than them but that isn't always the case. Usually I shock the student by telling them how old other students are but it is always refreshing to let them know that they aren't "too old" for an education. -Ron Stefanski

working in small groups

working with small groups I believe is esenial. I let my students pick their own lab groups and they all sit together. I feel this removes some of the tension. They are more at ease when we do reviews or studying. The answers are very often collective and if it is incorrect I just say ok lets find the answer together. Usually my class is very at ease and that takes the pressure off of the student and me.

Apply life practical experience to course lecture

One area to help all adult learners is to use their life experience to enrich the course content. This will help motivate them to be in the class because they can see their contribution to the overall course. Matt

Motivating Student

I tend to enter class full of energy and the students will begin to show a little energy, but I also find when I smile at them or speak pleasant to them they respond better to me.

Games and competition

I like your comment about competition being a part of human nature. I use a variety of games in the classroom, and it's during those games where I see the most involvement among the students.

Learners across generations

While taking this course I have had the opportunity to read an article about millenials working in the skilled trades. In the article the researchers provided comments on how millenials viewed themselves, how Gen Xers viewed millenials, and how baby boomers viewed millenials. The comments focused on specific skill sets. I mention this article because the comments seem to match up well with how this lesson described adult learners and those right out of high school. The millenials had a fairly good understanding of what others expected from them. Just as this lesson points out we need to remember that students come to us wanting to learn and wanting to succeed.

Finding the right motivation

I agree that intrinsic motivation is the more powerful motivator. I think that most insturctors will agree with that concept. The big challenge is finding what will intrinsically motivate each individual student. Sometimes you can find what motivates a student intrinsically by knowing what motivates them extrinsically. In-other -words the transferance of an external stimulas to an internal stimulas.

keeping your focus

never use long media presentations to students

Human Factors

what make professional differents then coworkers?

why do you think that adult have so much fear of returning to colllege

please think about before replying

Competition

Games seem to mativate and keep intrest in learnig

Cell phones

Visual aids seem to grab my students attention.

Field Trips

Field trips are fun for students.