In the fifth installment of a six-part series on building student engagement today’s teaching tips focus on strategies for improving classroom interactions.

In this, the fourth article in a six-part series on building student engagement, I offer specific suggestions for what to do in the classroom get your students interested and excited about your course.

In previous articles I’ve offered effective teaching strategies for building student engagement by setting the tone with the syllabus and first classes. Today we move to the general classroom atmosphere. The following suggestions will help you build an atmosphere of constant engagement, passion and learning.

To develop a vibrant, productive and memorable course, professors must continually work on building student engagement. Engaged students are enthusiastic, active participants in their own learning.

A few years ago, our university started accelerating its distance learning program. Some professors designed courses that worked well, while others found that 100 percent Web delivery wasn’t effective for them.

A love of the material and a willingness to convey that to students only enhances learning. The problem occurs when the content matters more than anything else, faculty are prevented from using methods that enhance student learning. Not only does this hurt the students, but it hurts faculty as well.

Questions are one of those mainstay teaching strategies used to accomplish all kinds of learning goals: questions help an instructor gauge levels of understanding; questions can pique flagging interest; questions lead the way deeper into content and questions challenge thinking. Adult educator Patricia Cranton identifies three kinds of questions especially effective at promoting critical self-reflection and self-knowledge.

Course management software programs make it especially easy for instructors to provide students with a set of complete lecture notes. It seems that more instructors are doing this, as witnessed in the regularity with which students ask that the instructor’s notes be posted. But is giving students a complete set of notes a good idea?

This particular list of characteristics appears in an excellent book that is all but unknown in the states, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, by noted scholar Paul Ramsden. In the case of what makes teaching effective, he writes, “…a great deal is known about the characteristics of effective university teaching. It is undoubtedly a complicated matter; there is no indication of one ‘best way,’ but our understanding of its essential nature is both broad and deep.” (p. 88–89). He organizes that essential knowledge into these six principles, unique for the way he relates them to students’ experiences.