“Applying Principles Behind Engaged Teaching to Advance Student Learning” with Claire Major was one of the plenary presenters at Lilly Conference online 2022. Major has written so many books! Major has been at Alabama for 22 years! The goals for the session were to define the concept of engaged teaching, explore the process of engaged teaching, and consider how to apply the process to practice. The proceeds of Major’s newest book go to the K. Patricia Cross foundation to support videos and resources for teaching techniques. Major asked how do you define engaged teaching and commented on how similar it is to the concept of “flow.” Major defined engaged teaching as:
Engaged teaching is a complex process that centers on the intellectual effort that teachers willingly invest in the service of teaching.
Claire H. Major, Lilly Conference Online 2022
The cognitive element is knowing what… and Major explained that “Cognition refers to the conscious mental processes of coming to know and understand as we encode, store, process, and retrieve information.” Then, Major introduced the affective element: knowing why, and defined affect as “refers to the emotinoal interpretation of perceptions, information, or knowledge. It means coming to value or appreciate something.” Conation was a new one for me, and Major explained that “conation is closely associated with the concept of volition, defined as the freedom to make choices about what to do.” Major then spoke about encoding, consolidation of knowledge, and retrieval. Cognitive load was defined as the total amount of load in memory that includes intrinsic load, germane load, and extraneous load that in total compose the available mental effort. Major introduced “chunking” and techniques such as affinity grouping in which students chunk information in a way that sorts into categories. Another technique for chunking is a jigsaw, though I never thought about it! For activating prior knowledge and overcoming Germaine load, Major explained ways and strategies for connecting prior knowledge. Major started a timer for extraneous load and told the audience to count to 52… Tasks became more complicated and required task switching. The activity highlighted extraneous cognitive load and its impact on task performance. When students are reading, maintaining attention can be improved using active reading documents. Guided Notes and Reading Analytics worksheets help. Major mentioned Unsplash for images for presentations. During the questions session, one attendee asked about the engaged teaching model that has knowing what, knowing why, and knowing how with intellectual effort in the middle.
