I am preparing a presentation for a couple of state conferences on how to increase student engagement in classrooms.
Based on the professional literature I have read1, plus what I have experienced as a teacher and a school leader2, here are the five key features I have found to best support student engagement:
Access and representation - Ensuring curriculum materials are accessible to students from a variety of backgrounds and abilities, as well as representative of who is in your school and our communities
Authentic, relevant tasks - Creating real-world learning experiences that students find relevant to their lived lives
Communicating with clarity - What is to be learned, how students will know they are learning, and why the learning is important to them
Discussion and questioning - Facilitating a safe space for conversation around important topics and fostering student-led inquiry
Voice and choice - Empowering students to make decisions about their learning within a guided educational experience
My questions for you are:
Do the key features seem to naturally fit within your understanding of student engagement?
What might be missing?
Do the descriptions of the key features aptly convey their meaning?
If you have a moment, please share your response to one or more of these questions in the comments. My skin is thick! :-)
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You have four big ideas to organize rich discussions and sharing, Matt. From a more pragmatic perspective, I’d suggest that teachers develop lots of opportunities for collaboration and social learning opportunities. You have voice and choice, which are empowering, a notion that requires frequent opportunities to act, to do, to perform, to publish, to present. Poetry as a staple of class work I’ve found to be highly engaging. Kids love to hear it, read it, and write. Readers theater, student scripts, giving speeches, routines that involve whole body expressive work motivates children.
Poetry was also a favorite of mine when teaching 5th and 6th graders! The core curriculum program gave it little attention, but I wove it into my instruction when possible. All of these wonderful examples of practice you share also seem to fit under "Discussion and questioning" and "Authentic, relevant tasks". I anticipate there is some crossover between the features of the framework, which I hope supports the strength of it as a whole.
I 100% agree with your key points when it comes to student engagement. I love the premise that we teach tiny human beings--not curriculum! And, all of your bullet points fall under at least 1 of the 3 qualities that all humans crave: autonomy, belonging, and competence. However, I do think one component is missing--assessment. To me, engagement comes when we teachers have 3 core elements working together: class culture, instructional design and assessment practices. If one of those gears are not in sync with the other 2, then we inadvertently unravel all the hard work we put in daily. We need to ensure our assessment practices (in the words of Solution Tree) foster hope, efficacy and achievement. Do our practices encourage growth and improvement? Do our practices allow for mistakes? If they don't, then what's the point?
Thanks Andrea. I agree as well - assessment deserves attention. I tried to do that with the description "how students will know they are learning" in "Communicating with Clarity". I'm reluctant to create a separate key feature just for assessment, as it too often gets siloed in educational discourse. I think a next step can be to flesh out the description shared even more to make sure assessment is conveyed prominently.
You have four big ideas to organize rich discussions and sharing, Matt. From a more pragmatic perspective, I’d suggest that teachers develop lots of opportunities for collaboration and social learning opportunities. You have voice and choice, which are empowering, a notion that requires frequent opportunities to act, to do, to perform, to publish, to present. Poetry as a staple of class work I’ve found to be highly engaging. Kids love to hear it, read it, and write. Readers theater, student scripts, giving speeches, routines that involve whole body expressive work motivates children.
Poetry was also a favorite of mine when teaching 5th and 6th graders! The core curriculum program gave it little attention, but I wove it into my instruction when possible. All of these wonderful examples of practice you share also seem to fit under "Discussion and questioning" and "Authentic, relevant tasks". I anticipate there is some crossover between the features of the framework, which I hope supports the strength of it as a whole.
I 100% agree with your key points when it comes to student engagement. I love the premise that we teach tiny human beings--not curriculum! And, all of your bullet points fall under at least 1 of the 3 qualities that all humans crave: autonomy, belonging, and competence. However, I do think one component is missing--assessment. To me, engagement comes when we teachers have 3 core elements working together: class culture, instructional design and assessment practices. If one of those gears are not in sync with the other 2, then we inadvertently unravel all the hard work we put in daily. We need to ensure our assessment practices (in the words of Solution Tree) foster hope, efficacy and achievement. Do our practices encourage growth and improvement? Do our practices allow for mistakes? If they don't, then what's the point?
Thanks Andrea. I agree as well - assessment deserves attention. I tried to do that with the description "how students will know they are learning" in "Communicating with Clarity". I'm reluctant to create a separate key feature just for assessment, as it too often gets siloed in educational discourse. I think a next step can be to flesh out the description shared even more to make sure assessment is conveyed prominently.