50 Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement
by Rebecca Stobaugh (Solution Tree Press, 2019)
Book Basics
50 Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement promotes a classroom culture of students who pursue learning actively, rather than attending passively as recipients of a curriculum. The author’s main premise is “As instruction becomes more complex and stimulating, students become more engaged in the learning process.”
The fifty strategies, delivered in highly accessible and actionable format, are grouped into four chapters, corresponding to four levels of cognitive sophistication from Bloom’s Taxonomy (understand, analyze, evaluate, create). Three dimensions of active learning are emphasized: movement, collaboration, and media literacy.
Although this book is aimed at K-12 teachers across the disciplines, many of the strategies are appropriate at the college level, and a relevant example from mathematics is often included.
Connections and Reflections
Several of the strategies offer an interesting twist on studying course vocabulary. Terminology plays an important role in college math classes for at least two reasons: 1) students learn new vocabulary words each week with some level of fluency, to be able to decode class information and problem statements, and to be able to respond to prompts with clarity; 2) language is used within the discipline differently from our everyday use of language. The practice of using terminology with complete precision is a fundamental characteristic of mathematics.
Strategy 7, Concept Attainment, is a sort of guessing game (not unlike the New York Times Connections game) that builds understanding of terminology and categorization. Students are provided with examples and non-examples of a category (e.g., regular geometric shapes versus irregular polygons) and are challenged to determine the common attributes of the examples - what defines a regular geometric shape, in this case.
Strategy 42, Rank, Talk, Write, is another exercise that focuses on terminology. Students read a passage, identify technical terms, then “work in groups to determine the most important of these.” Students often feel emotionally distant from mathematical studies, as if there is no connection between themselves and the lesson, but I have found it can be an eye-opening and successful exercise to ask students to identify their “favorite” from among mathematical concepts.
This book is recommended for teachers who are looking for bite-sized ideas to freshen up their in-class activities.
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