Engaging a Classroom

Through this week's reading, I came to explore the variety of ways to engage a classroom on the discussion of a reading assignment. I developed different methods to not only engage the students among the discussion but also ideas on how to tap into information they already know. The main point I seemed to understand from this chapter is that we,as teachers, need to prepare our students to think purposefully. The first way to go about doing this is to help them build their own self-efficacy. One way to aid in a students self-efficacy is to provide a response-centered classroom, as well as constant encouragement and support to assist in their reading. One quote I took from this section was, "brains may be born, but minds are made".  I feel as this shows why we need to encourage self-exploration among our students to engage them in their own thinking.

Through encouragement and activating a students thinking, you can complement it by delving into their prior knowledge. As these two ideas tend to go together, it takes practice to fully go about activating a students prior knowledge on a subject matter. The book provided examples such as creating story impressions, establishing problematic perspectives and using guided imagery to help in understanding their knowledge while sparking interest in the subject. These strategies provide a good way that will engage students in material to come but also see what they already know. The key thing that was discussed in this whole process is to activate the students thinking. By doing this, added with a little encouragement, a students prior knowledge to a subject will be revealed and then will aid in the learning process of the lesson.