Is the best chance for student engagement in the classroom?

Over the past month I've been involved in a series of small group discussions that constitute part of a "dialogue-to-action" project aimed at stimulating broad community support for our Achieving the Dream initiative. For me, one result of these conversations is the strengthening conviction that one of the best things we could do to improve student retention and academic success at our 100%-commuter university is to build up our student life (AKA student affairs, student activities) programs and incentives so as to promote more and stronger connections among students, students and faculty, students and staff, and all the other combinations. Engagement. We run into forms of that word, and the collection of concepts they stand for, at every turn these days, so much so that I worry if those words might become meaningless due to overuse.

Anyway, building up student life programs is a daunting challenge, especially at schools like ours. We certainly should continue doing all we can to address that challenge. But because I've been thinking a lot about promoting student engagement via student life programs lately, it really caught my eye the other day, and caused one of those "Well, duh!" moments when I read that "given most students' limited time on campus, the best opportunities to build relationships often are found in engaged learning (both in and out of the classroom) and other structured experiences." That's from Imagine Success: Engaging Entering Students, a report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement. This week several stories have appeared in the higher education press about the report, including this one from Inside Higher Ed.

Of course "engaged learning" can take many forms. And despite what we sometimes seem to be hearing, it can even happen in the context of the classroom lecture, as Rob Weir discusses in another article from Inside Higher Ed that appeared today.