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This chapter aims to discuss methods for promoting student engagement to counteract declining academic motivation and achievement in the contemporary setting.

In this chapter, two studies are presented that describe ways to promote student engagement in and out of the classroom. The in-class study was conducted with psychology students at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK). The Student Course Engagement Questionnaire (SCEQ) developed by Handelsman, Briggs, Sullivan, and Towler (2005) was used to measure student engagement. Study 2 examined the extent to which four high-impact educational practices promoted student engagement. Undergraduate UNK students who had participated in undergraduate research, learning communities, service learning, or internships were surveyed.

The results of the first study indicated that instructors can promote engagement by how the structure of the classroom (discussion classes), individuation (knowing student names and keeping class sizes small), and teacher support in the form of being responsive to student questions, encouraging students to seek assistance, and assigning effective aids to learning. The second study indicated that undergraduate research and internships were more engaging than service learning or learning communities.

These results suggest practical methods for meeting a variety of student needs, including their need for relatedness — by encouraging them to seek assistance and knowing their names, competence — by assigning effective learning aids and autonomy — by encouraging intrinsically motivating activities.

Proponents of community engagement to promote social change advocate bringing together researchers, practitioners, politicians, business leaders, advocates and other relevant stakeholders to identify and solve community problems and issues. This chapter will describe the need for academic and community partnerships, how academic institutions can develop priorities, governance and financial structures that facilitate stronger, more effective community relationships and make contributions to the resolution of social ills. The current literature on community engagement, community-based participatory research, community action research, community-engaged scholarship and service-learning are reviewed. The principles and tenets of engaged scholarship are reviewed, barriers to implementation are discussed and examples provided. Academic institutions can play an important role in social change if they are willing to embrace community engagement. A key to success is building trust, sharing power, fostering co-learning, enhancing strengths and resources, building capacity, and addressing community-identified needs. Academic participation requires institutional and faculty commitment to engagement principles, flexible and inclusive governance structures and strategies to educate community members. The development of the relationships and structures required for successful community engagement can be inhibited by imbalances in power and knowledge that often exist among practitioners, researchers, and community members. This review may assist academic institutions to examine implementation of tenure and promotion policies, oversight strategies and structures that assure community development and benefit, as well as opportunities for faculty, staff and student training on principles and best practices of community-engaged research.

E-learning has the potential to engage learners in ways that is not possible in a conventional classroom environment. Nevertheless, for this unique capability of e-learning to be optimised, a good understanding of learners’ need as to what motivate them to be engaged in activities is paramount. This chapter suggests strategies for engaging learners in e-learning based on past empirical studies on computer games characteristics and an exploratory study on values influencing learners’ decisions to engage in activities. The exploratory study in this chapter adopted qualitative research methods of Kelly Repertory grid and laddering interview based on the means-end chain (MEC) theory. Based on the exploratory study, value dimension was added to the existing literature. The value dimension of excitement, warm relationship with others and sense of accomplishment were revealed as important to learners in their decision whether to engage in activities. Strategies for e-learning instructions that promote the revealed values were suggested with the aim of integrating the value dimension with the existing literature as well as proven teaching approaches.

This paper aims to review the literature to discuss engaging online instructional design and instructors’ role in enhancing learner engagement in educational and corporate settings.

This paper carries out a narrative literature review.

Instructor presence in online learner engagement is a multidimensional effort, and learner engagement can be established in online instruction through communication, consistent feedback on learner performance and critical discourse. Building connection with the learners is essential in an online learning environment. Engaging online instructors challenge and encourage learners to spare more academic effort, use techniques to improve engagement and involve and care about learners.

Instructors’ roles in shaping online learning and instruction deserve more attention. More research is needed to understand which technologies work best for specific academic areas or learner demographics and why online learners find it difficult to learn with peers unless supplemented with appropriate online instruction.

This review offers strategies for improved online instructional design to achieve learning engagement.

This review highlights an underexplored concept of instructors’ role in creating engaging online instructional design by understanding learner needs and receptiveness.

This paper aims to explore service learning with its insights in empowering corporate responsibility awareness. Attempts to build corporate responsibility widely in incorporating into the sustainability engagement could be demonstrated in fostering the transformative experiential learning with extensive evaluation and reconfiguration of existing programs. The focus on enhancing the learning experience in emphasizing the community engagement would be applied with strengthening the actual performance in encompassing the ability raising awareness about the environmental issues.

The approach used in this paper refers to develop the conceptual framework about the service learning with various strategies to give insight on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Incorporating the approach of conceptualizing the basis of service learning, key consideration was generated into particular enhancement of service learning in contributing to the CSR.

The finding reveals that getting benefit to serving into the community engagement may take beneficial outcomes with its valuable insight to assist in the progress of program designed with associating to enhance corporate responsibility and sustainability awareness. The advancement of the social control among the companies would be deployed within empowering service learning for CSR where sustainability awareness-based community service as embodiment of CSR should be enhanced through nurturing corporate responsibility-based transformative experiential learning. Moreover, this initiative refers to an attempt to strengthen the basis of corporate responsibility and sustainability awareness-based experiential learning, which could enlarge creative thinking with envisioning sustainability and corporate responsibility.

This study is expected to contribute to the experiential learning to enhance the sustainability within the learning setting engaged in achieving what to contribute to the environmental concern. In creating the situation where the balance between serving and learning can be achieved, attempts to encourage them in joining the service learning program should be collaborated with orienting both personal and social community oriented comprehensively in underlying the responsibility awareness, the sustainability-based moral values. These aim to enhance the understanding stage about the care for protecting the environmental concern within learning experience with the goal to produce responsible awareness especially by economic agents such as shareholders, managers, regulators and active participants to promote sustainable benefits.

The purpose of this paper is to identify student clusters based on patterns of behavioural, cognitive, emotional, collaborative and social engagement in virtual classrooms, within the context of higher education. The study also attempts to explore the differences amongst the student clusters with respect to various motivating and demotivating teaching behaviours.

The study relies on the self-determination theory to describe the dynamics related to various motivating and demotivating teaching behaviours and five different dimensions of student engagement in virtual classrooms. The data were collected from a convenience sample of 831 students from higher educational institutions in the Delhi – National Capital Region of India. Cluster analysis was performed to classify students into mutually exclusive groups based on five student engagement dimensions.

The findings revealed three student clusters: ‘fully-engaged’, ‘externally-engaged’ and ‘individually-engaged’ students. The findings also provided insights into varied correlations between specific dimensions of motivating/demotivating teaching behaviours and student engagement.

Considering the multi-dimensionality of student engagement as well as teaching behaviours, the study adopts a person-centred approach to understand different clusters of students in virtual classrooms and investigate the relationship between teaching behaviours and student engagement dimensions.

This chapter draws from the authors’ experiences with service-learning pedagogy in allied health training programs, and illustrates ways in which community-engaged teaching and learning can prepare students to become ethical healthcare practitioners. The authors infuse examples from their own courses throughout the chapter, mostly from the clinical fields of speech-language pathology, audiology, and occupational therapy. However, the chapter is applicable and generalizable to faculty from a wide scope of allied health training programs. The chapter introduces considerations for establishing campus–community partnerships in an ethical manner, as well as ways to foster student self-reflection and critical thinking through an ethical lens. Principles from the codes of ethics of various allied health professions are incorporated throughout the chapter along with examples of how each can be applied in community-based clinical experiences. Through a review of relevant literature, analysis of professional codes of ethics, case-based examples, and a step-by-step guide to course development, this chapter provides readers with a mechanism to ground their courses in professional ethics in a way that is relatable and relevant to students.

This paper explores the question, “what does it mean to be an engaged school leader in an educational context that promotes standards-based accountability as a model of quality development?” Specifically, what drives educational leaders? What do they do to lead schools as quality organisations? and How do they lead schools as quality organisations?

An ethnographically grounded theory case study was conducted with 16 principles in Sweden, USA and Finland, who participated in a three-year project to lead schools as global learning centers.

Findings showed that school leaders used a variety of leadership styles as they developed worked cultures grounded in a value system, to support student learning and development. Also, work cultures that engaged members of the school and community were critical for leading schools as learning organisations.

The small sample may not be generalizable to all educational systems.

This study provides evidence about the complexities for school leadership today that are not currently addressed in most principal preparation programs. The findings can serve to help inform further development of principal preparation.

The experiences shared in this study provide an alternative perspective about what it is that school leaders do and think about amidst a high-stakes testing context of school development. The grounded theory nature of this study, combined with an ethnographic approach, provides deep insights into the daily working life of engaged school leaders to learn first hand from their dialogue about what it takes to lead schools as quality organisations.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to assist teachers in developing inquiry-based learning environments in secondary and post-secondary subject area classrooms that support their diverse students’ capacities for deep and intellectually engaged reading.

Design – Reading Apprenticeship professional learning has been developed to transform teachers’ understanding of their role in students’ literacy development and to build teachers’ capacity for re-enacting literacy instruction in the academic disciplines, engaging students in text-based inquiry, supporting their ongoing engagement, and gradually turning the work of learning over to students. The model reflects the understanding that for practice to become truly responsive to the needs and varied contexts of teachers’ work, teachers must become adaptive and generative in their use of specific practices. Reading Apprenticeship immerses teachers in experiential learning through patterns of practice that we expect them to recreate in their own classrooms. Teachers participate in inquiries designed to help them become reacquainted with their own disciplinary expertise in relation to literacy. Importantly, teachers collaboratively analyze students work through case studies of student literacy learning and videotaped classroom lessons designed to help teachers to reimagine what they and their own students can accomplish.

Findings – Reading Apprenticeship instructional tools and routines offer multiple opportunities for teachers to hear and respond to student thinking in relation to the text, thereby deepening the student reasoning processes and turning work over to students. The work of gradual release occurs in recursive cycles of reciprocal modeling that respond to students’ particular puzzlements and challenges with specific texts and engage students in shouldering more of the work of learning moment-to-moment, over time. Just as curricular ideas and topics build on one another over the course of a year of study, the challenges of text-based inquiry increase and build on previous accomplishments, constantly extending students’ reach. Engaging learners in taking up the work of text-based inquiry is a continuous cycle of support and graduated release and challenge calibrated to students’ needs and skill levels in the current learning moment.

Practical Implications – Current policies focused on accountability and efficiency in school reform conflict with evidence-based understandings of the learning process. The ongoing nature of learning and development through the gradual release of responsibility require that we not only tolerate, but unreservedly embrace and value learning progressions and their messiness for both students and their teachers. Embracing the ongoing learning journey calls for tolerance and generosity that we often withhold from teachers and students alike – to be in process, to be a learner, and to be en route to accomplishment. Learning entails risk and vulnerability. If we are truly invested in growth for both students and teachers, we must expect to invest continuously in and provide sustained support for their learning. The more opportunities to learn teachers are able to offer students, the more students can do. And the more students can do, the more teachers can give them.