The Image of an Engaged Classroom
Designing for Effective Practice Promotes Multiple Goals
The Classroom Environment
The behavioral classroom, one where the instructor examines carefully how best to arrange instruction to promote accurate student performance, can be significantly more rewarding for both the instructor and students, and not just in outcomes but also in the classroom experience.
A Culture of Efficacy
When the instructor structures behavioral designs sensitively, students work largely with whom they wish, proceed mostly at the individual pace that they alone can best manage, and swiftly recognize from immediate feedback that they are achieving the outcomes that the course and program demands. They develop voice, agency, identity, and efficacy. They move, think, record, speak, and emote, and respond to the movement, communication, and emotion of others.
A Healthy Mix of Skills
Students simultaneously exercise affective and interpersonal skills that they will soon need for the real world. The behavioral classroom at least begins, and with strong design more than begins, to do what school critics demand, which is to integrate the doctrinal knowledge and analytic skills into a service skill set and confident professional or vocational identity. Student engagement around instructional designs that offer abundant practice also accelerates the doctrinal and analytic learning. What should be a rich intellectual and academic environment indeed becomes alive.
All Due to Design
The behavioral classroom requires a thoughtful, sensitive, precise, and comprehensive structure, based on specific principles. What may look to a passerby to be a freewheeling study hall is instead a series of carefully crafted and staged instructional designs moving students toward the learning objective. The engagement can and should be palpable, infectious. Work toward that vision and goal.
