For Spring 2006, the Continuing Education and Academic Affairs Divisions at Schenectady County Community College came together to focus on student engagement. A challenge that both adjunct and full-time faculty routinely face is how to encourage our students to engage.
How do we get them to leave home and come to campus, leave the halls and Student Commons and come to class, stay awake and hang with us as they sit at their desks, and maybe even speak in class?

We can encourage students to engage by creating a community in the classroom. At our recent Spring Convocation, the evening adjuncts came together to talk about classroom practices. We discussed and then practiced a method I use consistently in my classroom: teacher as facilitator, with participants who do not sit passive but actively generate ideas. This article is the first in a series and will begin a discussion of the theoretical basis for creating community in the classroom. Follow-up articles in subsequent issues of Stone Soup will further discuss theory and then move to the effective methods and practices shared by our teachers about what is working in their classrooms.

From Educational Psychology, we get these figures:

"We learn 10% of what we read,
20% of what we hear,
30% of what we see,
70% of what we discuss with others,
80% of what we experience personally,
and 95% of what we teach someone else."

These statistics indicate that we learn best from discussion, personal experience, and teaching one another. The very elements that make for high-quality learning are also those that are integral in creating community. When we are in community, we talk with one another, and we teach and learn from one another.

We tend to think of our students' need for peer socialization as something that distracts them from their coursework: keeping them from class, interfering with their attentiveness in class and leading to their neglect of reading and writing assignments when they choose socializing over school. But not only does the need for socialization not have to distract students from succeeding in their studies, we can tap that very need to dramatically increase the chances of their success.

The adolescent and post-adolescent need for peer socialization grows out of the more basic need we all share, the need to belong to the group; we are fundamentally social beings. And higher education is moving in the direction of community in the classroom by including the occasional group discussion or project, but we can do more. I have found that the more I focus on building community in my classroom, on encouraging students to discuss, teach and learn from one another, the more my students show up and the more they engage. I move more and more in that direction.

When the classroom is not merely a collection of unconnected individuals who find themselves in the same location for a semester but a cohesive interactive group, we can count on group dynamics to support our goals. While showing up and engaging with the course material holds out the long-range promises of a grade, a degree, and future employment possibilities, belonging to a community is a more immediate reward to motivate students. On an instinctual level, we know that membership in a community enhances our ability to survive, whether we are talking about physical survival or the ability to succeed in challenging circumstances (and college is on many people's list of "challenging circumstances").

Community offers rewards, but it is not a free ride. Every group we belong to also asks for our contributions. We make them to ensure that we continue to enjoy the privileges of membership and for the enhanced self-esteem that comes with seeing ourselves as essential to the group. When students know that they are not merely occupying a seat but are making contributions that are essential, they develop a sense of responsibility to the group. For example, when I know that I am scheduled to conduct a workshop, I am far more likely to show-up-even in the face of any difficulties that might arise-than if I were planning to come as an observer. If I were planning to attend a workshop and wasn't feeing especially well, I'd be more likely to overcome that and get there if I knew my co-workers were depending on me to drive them. Meeting these responsibilities ensures our place in the group and enhances the way we regard ourselves. We can count on these same group dynamics with our students, and our conscious awareness of them can enhance student motivation and their chances of success in school.

So, how do students come to realize they are essential to the group? They speak, listen to one another, know that they are heard, form opinions, take stands, offer and receive feedback from one another, wrestle with questions in small groups, and bring the small group discoveries to the larger group. Going back to the three activities that provide the greatest yield for learning: they discuss, experience, and teach one another. Through these activities, they learn that the success of the group is dependent on their contribution. When students know this, they show up, pay attention and contribute.

The next installment in the "Engagement Through Community-Building" series will begin with the question, "So, what do we do if our students don't volunteer to speak?"