Student Engagement

The longer I am in education the more convinced I am that the most important outcome of education is fostering in students the same innate curiosity they brought to school as preschoolers.

Unfortunately, too often the outcome of education gets reduced to scores on tests like ERB, SSAT, SAT, ACT, AP. (I was talking with a educator from Britain earlier this week who said he liked teaching in here in the U.S. but was getting frustrated with government influence in education. Move to independent schools I told him.)

In a previous article summary post, I mentioned that kids become disengaged from school as early as 3d grade.

The article summary below provides research on effective teaching techniques that foster engagement in high school students.

As I read the article I thought both of the ways I had (and hadn't) engaged my students in the classroom and which teachers I best connected with when I was a student and why.

We in education often try to complicate good teaching with fancy terms, etc., yet to me good teaching is always more about getting to know students as "real people" and just as importantly having them know you as a real person with interests, dislikes, etc.

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

----------

Eliciting Engagement in the High School Classroom

Student engagement (versus boredom) is a key correlate of success in high school, and some teachers are much more successful at engaging their students than others.

The research so far haven’t given us a clear idea of how to increase engagement across a school.

There are three types of student engagement:

• Behavioral: the extent to which a student listens, does assignments, follows directions, participates
• Cognitive: the extent to which a student applies mental energy, thinks about the content, tries to figure out new material, and grapples with mental challenges
• Emotional: the extent to which a student enjoys a class, feels comfortable and interested, and wants to do well.

These three dimensions interact in a synergistic way, but the emotional dimension may be the most important, driving the other two.

This is because it’s all tied up with adolescents’ identity development – the process of integrating successes, failures, routines, habits, rituals, novelties, thrills, threats, violations, gratifications, frustrations into a coherent and evolving interpretation of who we are.

Identity development could be an underlying mechanism by which adolescents subconsciously make meaning of classroom experiences and then engage or disengage accordingly.

Three classroom approaches seem to work best to get students engaged:

Connective instruction: Making personal connections to the subject matter through six teaching practices: helping students see the relevance of academic content to their lives, cultures, and futures; conveying caring for students at an academic, social, and personal level; demonstrating understanding of students; providing affirmation through praise, written feedback, and opportunities for success; using humor; and enabling self-expression by having students share ideas, opinions, and values with others.

Academic rigor: Emphasizing the academics of a class via three teaching practices: providing challenging work; “academic press” (emphasis on hard work and academic success); and conveying passion for the content.

Lively teaching: Replacing tedious lectures and low-involvement videos with three perkier teaching practices: using games and fun activities (such as academic Jeopardy and Family Feud); having students work in cooperative groups; and assigning hands-on projects.

Connective instruction practices were seven times more effective at fostering student engagement than academic rigor and lively teaching, with lively teaching by itself coming in last. The key is tapping into students’ identity development. Through emphasizing relational connections between students and their teachers, content, and learning experiences connective instruction practices appear to draw on students’ sense of self as a mechanism for engagement.