Essential Question
How can teachers improve intellectual engagement in their classrooms to shift from student engagement to student empowerment?
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Module Goal
To provide an understanding of how to promote and build student choice in the learning environment that promotes intellectual empowerment
Module Objectives
Participants will understand intellectual empowerment and why it is important in improving student learning.
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Participants will identify teaching strategies that promote student empowerment as it relates to intellectual empowerment.
Intellectual Engagement Overview
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What is Intellectual Engagement?
Intellectual engagement is defined as “personal psychological and cognitive investment in learning" (Kennedy & Milton, 2011).
Fostering Intellectual Engagement
To create a learning environment that shifts from student engagement to student empowerment
requires teachers to give students more choices over the topics they write about or the way they investigate a topic or demonstrate what they have learned. The goal of student empowerment is to spark student’s curiosity and to promote student choice. Student choice includes individual choices, product choices, varied content, and cultural connections. Promoting student choice can increase a student’s motivation to learn, engage in what is being taught, and increase even knowledge retention and recall (The Glossary of Education Reform, 2013). Fostering intellectual empowerment focuses on building students' intrapersonal and interactional skills.
