Activities That Teachers Can Use to Enhance Retention

Activities That Teachers Can Use to Enhance Retention
April 2008
UW-Stout Teaching and Learning Center

What teaching attitudes and activities might affect student retention (or 'persistence') at UW-Stout? Essentially all good teaching positively affects retention. Two key concepts are to treat the class as a learning community and to develop relationships that encourage a feeling of being 'safe' in that community. Research done at the Teaching and Learning Center, suggests a number of attitudes and activities.

Background

1. Each classroom should be a "learning community" argues one of the foremost theorists of retention in colleges, Vincent Tinto. Students should be involved in shared learning experiences with their peers and with their teacher. Engagement and active learning are two broad areas that must exist in such a class.
   
2. Six key areas were identified by UW-Stout students during a two-year research project that investigated what they meant by engagement. The six areas are
   

• Relationships. Develop relationships by demonstrating respect and trust. (teacher student, student-student, student instructor)
  
• Empowerment. Make students active participants in the learning process.
  
• Application. Explain how course content relates to students' personal futures; and give “hands on” experiences.
  
• Instructor Passion. The passion of the instructor both for the material and for student learning affects engagement.
  
• Question Asking. Students are more engaged when they feel comfortable asking and answering questions.
  
• Openness. Openness to experience also affects engagement. Students feel more engaged when they perceive that they and their instructors are able to “go with the flow” of whatever occurs in class.
  

3. Students feel safe in class if they feel supported, respected, and encouraged to learn by their instructors, and students want to belong to a community in which the instructor, and by extension, the institution, care about them and their future, proposes Angela Provitera McGlynn, another theorist and author.

Let's translate Tinto, McGlynn and the students' ideas into attitudes and activities

Attitudes

• Work on the relationship aspect of your course. Let students know one another; get to know students by name; be willing to interact in class.
  
• Demonstrate to students that you respect them. This appears to be the most important feature in their being engaged in learning. Insist on it from yourself and your students.
  
• Create a "safe" classroom environment—one in which students feel that they can speak out and can ask questions.
  
• Insist on attendance. Show that you care that students come to class.
  
• Be clear that you believe in students as learners and want them to learn.
  
• Be clear about when you are available and be attentive to students during those times.
  
• Show your passion for your subject.

Activities

• Set high but reasonable standards, and explain them.
  
• Learn students' names.
  
• Tell students what you prefer to be called.
  
• Spell out course learning objectives.
  
• Give appropriate feedback, as quickly as possible.
  
• Develop facilitator or "guide on the side" strategies. These are "active learning" strategies, such as think-pair-share, one-minute papers, requiring small groups to focus on specific questions or issues.
  
• Give students "hands on" experiences.
  
• Find methods that allow students to leap from hearing information to analyzing what they hear.
  
• Add in "reflective learning" exercises to cause students to verbalize what they learned, the process by which they did it, and connections they see to other topics.
  
• Use "interactive lectures." Periodically stop and ask for a one-minute paper, or a small group discussion of a question you pose.
  
• In questioning students, give them time to answer. Find a way to respond to their answer that makes them feel the answer counts, even if it is wrong. One tip is don't ask questions that they know you know the answer to.
  Periodically show how course content relates to students' personal futures.
  
• If possible, give students choices about how they can demonstrate their mastery.

Resources
This list of activities and attitudes that enhance student retention (or, to put it another way, that cause students to want to stay at Stout) was developed

• from research conducted by the UW-Stout Teaching and Learning Center in cooperation with the UW-Stout Office of Budget, Planning and Analysis http://www.uwstout.edu/tlc/engagement.htm
  
• from reviews of scholarly research, including
  
• McGlynn, Angela Provitera. Successful Beginnings for College Teaching. Atwood, 2001).
  
• Starke, Diane. "Professional Development Module on Active Learning" Texas Collaborative for Teaching Excellence. 24 April '08 http://www.texascollaborative.org/activelearning.htm
  
• Tinto, Vincent. "Linking Learning and Leaving: Exploring the Role of the College Classroom in Student Departure" in Reworking the Student Departure Puzzle, ed. John M. Braxton. Vanderbilt U, 2000. 81-94.