The top five of these research based tips, are surefire ways to get more and more diverse students engaged in your classrooms. My personal favorite "Periodically stop talking and pause. Wait at least three seconds after asking a question before calling on someone to answer. (Count to yourself 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi… if you need to). After asking a question, most instructors will wait a second or less before either getting or giving an answer. For over 30 years, research has shown that increasing “wait time” (e.g., waiting three or more seconds after asking a question) has a positive impact on student participation and response." Try it and let me know how it works.

The other day I, was watching the show Game Theory with my 12 year old grandson S. Watching the show made me realize how important it is to determine for whom everyday examples are, well, everyday. In the episode we watched the content was physics, the context was video games. S is a huge video game person, I am not. Although I might point out that, unlike my husband, when the kids were talking about Mario I knew that they were talking about the video game, not about iconic race car driver Mario Andretti. Sorry I digress. Anyway the physics concepts they were covering were ones with which I was quite familiar. However, I was so confused by the video game context that I had trouble following the concepts I already knew quite well. S, on the other hand, knew and understand the gaming context and came out of the program with increased understanding of the concepts. Yes, I checked. Same program- his physics knowledge went up, mine down- hopefully only temporarily. And S continues to watch Game Theory- I don't. If you are not a gamer, watching a Game Theory episode can be a very enlightening way of learning how context influences content learning

Using Everyday Examples to Improve Engineering Student Learning and Retention. Pat Campbell and Eann Patterson fabulous workshop on everyday examples is happening June 11, 2015 at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken NJ. It's fun, it's informative and it's free (you even get lunch.) Space is limited so click on the link. It's targeted for those teaching first and second year engineering students, but could be useful for high school teachers teaching pre0engineering