Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement

✍ Scribed by David J. Shernoff (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 381
• Series: Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement analyzes the psychological, social, and academic phenomena comprising engagement, framing it as critical to learning and development. Drawing on positive psychology, flow studies, and theories of motivation, the book conceptualizes engagement as a learning experience, explaining how it occurs (or not) and how schools can adapt to maximize it among adolescents. Examples of empirically supported environments promoting engagement are provided, representing alternative high schools, Montessori schools, and extracurricular programs. The book identifies key innovations including community-school partnerships, technology-supported learning, and the potential for engaging learning opportunities during an expanded school day. Among the topics covered:

• Engagement as a primary framework for understanding educational and motivational outcomes.
• Measuring the malleability, complexity, multidimensionality, and sources of engagement.
• The relationship between engagement and achievement.
• Supporting and challenging: the instructor’s role in promoting engagement.
• Engagement within and beyond core academic subjects.
• Technological innovations on the engagement horizon.

Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement is an essential resource for researchers, professionals, and graduate students in child and school psychology; social work; educational psychology; positive psychology; family studies; and teaching/teacher education.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xvii
Introduction: Towards Optimal Learning Environments in Schools....Pages 1-24
Aims of Education Revisited (Einstein’s E = MC 2 of Education)....Pages 25-45
The Nature of Engagement in Schools....Pages 47-75
Measuring Student Engagement in High School Classrooms and What We Have Learned....Pages 77-96
Engagement as an Individual Trait and Its Relationship to Achievement....Pages 97-126
Connecting to “The How” of Classroom Engagement: Instruction and Optimal Learning Environments....Pages 127-149
Connecting to “The Who”: The Primacy of Supportive Relationships....Pages 151-174
Connecting to “The What”: Engaging Approaches to Traditional Subject Matter....Pages 175-206
Engagement Beyond the Core Academic Subjects....Pages 207-218
Models of Engaging Private Schools and the Case of Montessori Schools....Pages 219-246
Alternative Public School Models....Pages 247-265
Learning from Research on Youth Engagement During Out-of-School Time....Pages 267-289
Model After-School Programs....Pages 291-314
Technological Innovations on the Horizon....Pages 315-334
Re-engineering the Schools of Tomorrow: Towards Community Sponsorship....Pages 335-356
Back Matter....Pages 357-368

✦ Subjects

Child and School Psychology; Social Work; Educational Psychology; Positive Psychology; Family; Teaching and Teacher Education