The Importance Of Student Engagement In The Classroom

From the very moment the students walk into my mentor’s English classroom, they are expected to write from a prompt she has displayed on her Smart board. She has set a routine and ritual that the students are accustomed to and allows for them to know exactly what to expect when they enter her class. The prompt is always an essential question that can apply to all of her students. The question initiates a discussion that engages the class and it also provides a connection to the topic that the class will be exploring during the class period. For example, the other day her warm-up prompt instructed the students to write five sentences about whether they like scary movies and to explain why they feel the way they do about them. This prompt initiated the class to talk about their personal experiences with watching scary movies, which engaged all of them into the next reading that involved a dark and scary setting. She has built her classroom as a literary community by welcoming the opinions of her students and ensuring that everyone’s contribution is …show more content…
The warm-ups are created daily and provide a way to engage the class and jump start them into a class discussion that will introduce the reading or lesson for that day. Each lesson includes a reading component that may include her reading aloud to the class, requesting students to read aloud, or having students read silently at their desks. After the reading component a writing assignment is introduced which usually goes back to the warm-up question that started the class discussion at the beginning of the class. The teacher has varied the types of writing the students are expected to produce ranging from writing short sentences to writing short essays. She has selected all of the texts that have been read and she solely determines the writing prompts for the