Thursday, April 28, 2022

How to Foster Student Engagement in the Classroom

This week's article summary is The Engagement Illusion.

Young children are innately curious and intrinsically motivated to learn. Almost everything they see and experience is a learning opportunity. But research studied show that kids as early as third grade can become bored and disengaged by school.

One of Trinity’s goals is to maintain student engagement in all grades: one of my measures of school success is seeing our UED students, especially in our older grades, engaged and motivated by their schoolwork.

Yet the article advises us to not confuse engagement with compliance in the classroom.

So how can we be sure students are engaged?

As the article attests, first we need to allow plenty of classroom open discussion and collaboration. Our kids at all ages and grades need to be able to actively participate and talk about why, what, and how they’re learning and their role and responsibility in the process and demonstration of their learning. A by-product of these discussions is teachers get a better sense of what is truly relevant and meaningful for the student(s), a critical need for continued engagement.

Second, teachers need to provide an appropriate amount of student voice and choice. There are a lot of cons to high-stake standardized testing, yet perhaps the biggest is its one-size-fits-all outcome. All humans crave being celebrated for their individuality, and giving kids a greater voice about what they learn and how they will demonstrate their understanding is vital to their continued engagement. We put in our Program Pillars that we give our students opportunities to be ‘critical and creative problem solvers and thinkers.’ 

I really like how the article states that our goal as teachers should be to create students who are ‘confident learners.’ Too often I think of confidence as being about the person’s character, while in fact confidence also supports academic achievement.

As the article states, there is no ‘silver bullet’ to sustain student engagement. Rather it takes a lot of trial and error and time, an example of the true art needed to be a master teacher.

Joe

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Who doesn't like a good magic trick? Regardless of how many times you see them, it's always satisfying to watch magicians make things disappear and reappear.

Yet, once you discover how the trick works, you realize it's just an illusion—that what you thought you were seeing was wrong. And while magic tricks are often just harmless fun, other illusions are dangerous—for example, when they lead educators to settle for the appearance of student engagement as a substitute for vital learning.

We may believe we can easily identify the behavior of disengaged students—sleeping in class, playing games on a device, or disrupting the learning for others. But disengagement can be less obvious, and sometimes hidden. Students may be quiet and compliant in class, facing the teacher and occasionally nodding in agreement, but not be connecting with the learning. They may turn in all their work on time but not really understand the concept and purpose.

Consider, for example, Jaiden, a 10th-grade student. He is quiet, comes to class on time, and follows directions to clear his desk or move to a group. He is not always prepared but is polite in asking for a pencil or book when he forgets his materials. Jaiden does not see any need for most of the classes he is taking and is not sure what he wants to do after high school. Jaiden's behavior may lead his teachers to believe he is engaged, but that behavior is an illusion. It is a performance designed to satisfy his teachers, who value an orderly environment in which the teacher talks and the students listen.

Many students know how to "play school": Be quiet in class, take notes when anything is written on the board, smile, and nod now and then. The engagement illusion can also exist when students appear diligent and on task by quietly working on a digital device, but the human interaction that is essential to learning might be so minimal that it disengages the student from active learning. Layer on top of that a lesson that fails to make connections to the lives of students, and students like Jaiden can sink into a sea of boredom and distraction, even while not showing it.

This one-way communication is the opposite of the vibrant and sometimes noisy collaborative environments that reveal evidence of real learning. The science behind the impact of student engagement on learning is not new, but in the pandemic age, the importance of authentic engagement has grown dramatically.

Let's consider another case. Kari is a 3rd-grade student who is constantly being disciplined. She gets inside recess for failure to complete homework, misbehaving, talking in class, not following directions, and being off task. She loves to draw and will engage in any conversations about current events but doesn't like math or science. Her outbursts usually come during silent reading time. The students like Kari in our classrooms are routinely classified as disengaged, though they are capable of focus and engagement if we take the time to learn about their interests and how they best express their learning. Sometimes, educators create misconceptions about students like Kari rather than probe into reasons the outbursts seem to only happen during silent reading time and consider modifications to support her behavior.

Teachers must look beyond the superficialities in these cases to gain a deeper understanding of engagement. It's possible that in our rush to support our students, we classify student understanding of the material through compliant behaviors. There's an illusion that manifests through our correlation of attentive students as successful students and withdrawn students as not caring. But the power of learning occurs when lessons are created to engage each student.

Student engagement is "the energy and effort that students employ within their learning community, observable via any number of behavioral, cognitive, or affective indicators across a continuum". The research reveals two forms of student engagement: (1) the student's behaviors, emotions, and thought processes, and (2) the student's intellectual response to the challenge of the material.

How can you tell if students are engaged? First, reflect on who is doing most of the talking—the students or the teachers? Teachers sometimes are led to believe that it is their job to perform for the class. These performances frequently involve presentations in which the teacher's expertise is on full display, but there is little demonstration of student learning. In contrast to these performances, other teachers are willing to explore student understanding—and lack of it—by allowing students to talk and make fearless mistakes. These educators can transform students into confident learners.

One of the greatest challenges teachers face in improving student engagement is correcting the perception that engagement is something within the student that cannot be influenced by a teacher. In the midst of a teacher performance, Jaiden, for example, might appear to be engaged, with his eyes on the teacher and pencil poised to copy whatever notes the teacher posts on the board. This compliant demeanor shields the reality that Jaiden's mind is a million miles away, but he has learned how to behave. Kari, on the other hand, may be deeply engaged in learning as she draws what may look like doodles but are in fact creative visual representations of how the teacher's lesson fits into her broader understanding of the subject. Rather than copy the teacher's notes, Kari is constructing learning with arrows, diagrams, pictures, and quotations above characters that reveal deep understanding and questions for further learning.

Here are three major educator misperceptions that perpetuate engagement illusions, along with suggestions for how to correct them to ensure proper learning is taking place.

What I'm Interested In, They'll Be Interested In: Our experiences as teachers illuminate our own errors in understanding student engagement. One teacher often used his own frames of reference—sports, after-school activities, and family vacations—as a way to connect with students to build relationships. But they did not always reflect the interests of his students. But this teacher learned to listen to his students and let their genuine curiosity fuel an environment of mutual discovery in which he became a fellow learner and explorer with his students. Engagement can also be explored outside of the confines of the classroom. Careful listening to student conversations on the playground, lunchroom, and hallways can be illuminating. As teachers, we can only make these connections to the lives of our students when we listen to spontaneous conversations among students outside of the classroom.

Students Learn for the Sake of Learning: Teachers may have entered the profession because of a thirst and curiosity for knowledge, or for the desire to shape and mold young minds. However, we do not always understand that our students may not want to learn just for the sake of learning. They need relevance. We need to be ready to answer the frequent question, "When will I ever need to know this in life?" Listening and learning collaboratively with students and families is a never-ending journey for educators. When teachers invest time at the beginning of a unit to foster an open dialogue that gauges student understanding, misconceptions, viewpoints, questions, and interests, they can create essential questions and identify beneficial resources.

There Is One Clear Path to Learning: In folklore, the silver bullet was the key to defeating a werewolf or other supernatural creature. The imagery of the silver bullet is used today to suggest a simple tool to solve a complex problem. Yet, in most classrooms, the achievement of the perfect blend of challenge and confidence is elusive; there are no silver bullets. Skillful educators make midcourse corrections throughout the day to meet the learning needs of students and engage their interest. The perfect lesson plan, freshly downloaded from the internet, is never perfect for the real classroom. Rather, it's the messy plans, full of annotations, excisions, and marginal additions, that reflect the reality of our classrooms. For example, a lesson that allows students like Jaiden and Kari to identify a position on a current issue and construct an argument to defend their position would definitely raise their engagement level more than a lesson that just had them read an article about the issue.

Getting Beyond the Illusion: Optical illusions occur based on changes in patterns, colors, or light that mislead the brain's hardwiring. They make our brains perceive things based on past experiences or what seems logical. As educators, we can similarly be tricked into thinking that the lessons we've prepared and the planning we've done will allow for students to be engaged. Therefore, it's easy to look at students like Jaiden and Kari and make inaccurate inferences on their levels of engagement. Only by doing the work to look past these illusions—by identifying our students' interests and needs; creating meaningful, real-life connections to the work; and ensuring our lessons result in productive struggle for students—can we begin to gain insights and strategies for success for all our students.



Wednesday, April 20, 2022

I Left My Homework in the Hamptons

 This week's article summary is I Left My Homework in the Hamptons: What I Learned Teaching the Children of the One Percent.

I have spent my entire career working in prestigious independent schools across the country, and while I never had students on Long Island tell me they left their homework at their vacation house in the Hamptons, they like all kids had inventive excuses for not having their homework completed; we’ve moved from ‘My dog ate to my homework’ to ‘My printer jammed’ to today’s ‘It’s a supply chain issue!’

As you’ll see from the interview with the author who has taught in elite schools around New York City, just because kids come from affluent families doesn’t mean they don’t have struggles and worries and need strong guidance, support, and mentorship from teachers. Particularly when I taught 8th grade, I had many kids who needed a steady adult role model to help them navigate the ups and downs of early adolescence.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for most kids from affluent families is the pressure to succeed. The past few articles focused on rigor and that most parents equate it with a lot of school work. Add to the mix the need to have a robust GPA and a high school transcript with no ‘easy-A classes’ as the gateway to an elite college, Ivy League preferred. With the pressure to succeed, it’s not surprising that self-doubt, overwork, and anxiety often predominate the world of high schoolers.

While I don’t think external and internal pressures will subside for these students, the author below recommends that we must try to help our students focus on what last week’s article highlighted: development of ‘emotional intelligence, listening and empathy, collaboration, creativity, problem solving, generosity, and fairness.’

We need to help our high schoolers to be more well-rounded, be able to have time, as the article below points out, for ‘idea flow’, be less critical of themselves, favor intrinsic over extrinsic motivation, and enjoy the moment more.

I know that conflicts with the world today and its expectations, yet it’s what kids ultimately need to not only be successful but happy and fulfilled.

Joe

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Blythe Grossberg has a doctoral degree in psychology, worked for many years at private schools in Boston and New York. Her new book offers a window into the parenting ideas and experiences of today, and how we might all work to make things more equitable and better for our kids.

Below, Blythe shares 5 key insights from her new book, I Left My Homework in the Hamptons: What I Learned Teaching the Children of the One Percent.

Kids are way too over-scheduled: I’m really speaking about all kids, not just those in the 1% that I focus on in my book. In my book, the situations are a little more extreme, where there are kids in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights who have squash lessons at 5:00 AM before school, and after school, and even travel around the country or the world to play squash. But all kids, and especially kids who are in the middle class or above, experience over-scheduling in less extravagant ways. Squash is one of those sports that people use as a vehicle to get into competitive colleges, so it acquires this kind of outsized importance. But squash is just one example of the way kids really don’t have time to do what they want to do.

Kids have no time for “idea flow”: Flow was an idea popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a researcher and psychologist. He found that people can get into states of flow, and in those states they’re creative, but they’re also relaxed. Part of this state of flow is unconscious, or just letting your mind drift. We all know, for example, that if we’re running or taking a shower or singing, some really important ideas might come to us. They’re creative ideas, epiphanies—it’s during that time that we really grow and free-associate things in our mind. If kids are stressed out and over-scheduled, they’re not going to have time for this kind of idea flow, and they’re not going to be their full selves psychologically or intellectually. We’re losing a lot, and causing them to lose a lot, by over-scheduling them.

Affluent kids suffer from a unique set of problems: Research shows that affluent kids, in a counterintuitive way, often suffer from issues that resemble those faced by kids who do not have enough to eat or have a safe shelter. I by no means want to suggest that their lives are exactly the same as kids at the other side of the socioeconomic ladder—only that if we want to help all kids, we must acknowledge that affluent kids struggle with their own set of issues. Some of the problems that affluent kids struggle with are substance abuse, emotional issues like anxiety and depression, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes from thinking that they have nothing to offer, or that maybe their parents have done everything for them. Parents in affluent sectors of society place a lot of pressure on achievement over emotional connection, and it’s really that emotional connection that kids strive for with their parents.

There are commonalities in parenting regardless of wealth status: In the book, I discuss my own parenting of a son with autism. I realize that there are commonalities among parents no matter their socioeconomic group, and I think one of them is fear. It’s a fear that the world of tomorrow will be a zero-sum situation, one where if one person loses, another gains, and if one gains, another loses. I think that we can all relate on this level as parents, especially in a world affected by the pandemic, as well as environmental, political, and economic instability. It’s something that I think we need to not chastise ourselves for, but just recognize that a lot of what we do with our kids is motivated by this fear.

What can be done about this situation, really: I think there are several things that can be done, certainly for the kids I work with who often have the privilege of attending private schools or very good public schools. One key is they need the opportunity to reach out to other kinds of people. Because private schools are so expensive, the people who attend them are generally all from the very elite, along with a few kids who have earned scholarships. This situation deprives kids of exposure to other ways of life. Kids really grow from experiencing other people’s ways of life and helping them, though I don’t mean to imply that it’s a one-way street. I talk in my book about kids from an elite school in New York who went to a citizenship center nearby and helped people from all different countries learn the information needed to pass their citizenship tests. The kids felt really, really good about themselves that day. Several of them realized talents that they’d never had before. One kid, who was at the bottom of his class, realized that he was a very skilled teacher. Another girl who wanted to drop out of Spanish realized that she had beautiful Spanish and could communicate with a Spanish-speaking person. So as much as the elite can offer in their communities, their communities offer a lot back to them, and I think we’ve grown too stratified. So if people, especially kids, have that opportunity to leave their schools and go out in their communities, that is wonderful. 

We also need to look at the “sports industrial complex.” Kids today in the middle and upper class are playing on travel teams, and they’re playing so many sports that it starts to erode family time, time when they need to be reading or working at other things—like just relaxing, hanging out with friends, and getting to know their community. I think there are opportunities to play sports that do not operate at that level of stress. Granted, there are some kids for whom sports are a ticket to a better life. For the kids I talk about in my book, this is not true, and though sports are very valuable, we need to dismantle the type of sports industry that makes a lot of money for the people who run it and is not valuable for kids.

Thursday, April 7, 2022

Rigor in Schools

This week’s article summary is Out of the Shadows and its focus is the debate in education about rigor.

If you ask parents what they want for their children in school, most will say a ‘rigorous’ education.

The challenge for schools is that the word ‘rigor’ means different things to different people.

For most, a ‘rigorous’ education equates to a lot of work, especially homework. 

One of my kids as a high school senior took an AP American History class because he thought it would look good on his transcript. He didn’t particularly like history (his interests were more math, science, and technology) yet he thought he could handle this class. The problem for him was the course required a herculean amount of daily reading. He couldn’t keep up and didn’t have enough of a history knowledge base to help him read and digest the material more quickly. Two weeks into the class, he knew he was in over his head. 

His AP history class was clearly rigorous yet he didn’t get much out of it except a lot of frustration and a distaste for history.

The term ‘rigor’ needs to be redefined. For me, the article provides a better definition: Rigor in schools is ‘the degree to which a student is in equal parts intellectually challenged, engaged, enriched, and empowered.’

While last week’s article summary discussed the negatives of Bloom’s Taxonomy, the taxonomy at least helps a teacher avoid solely focusing on one type of thinking. AP American history for my son provided  challenge but no engagement, enrichment, or empowerment. 

The article reminds us as teachers to avoid an onerous workload for our students and to provide them with ‘provocative, stimulating, sometimes vexing challenges of grasping complex ideas that make learning meaningful and rewarding.’

We in elementary schools naturally implement the article’s definition of rigor in our classrooms to help our kids develop, as the article says, ‘emotional intelligence, listening and empathy, collaboration, creativity, problem solving, generosity, and fairness’. 

Of course, we teach a lot of content knowledge, yet we do so in a way that asks much more of our students than simply reading a ponderous textbook.

Joe

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Academic rigor has been “catnip” for many parents who associate it with favorable outcomes ranging from high standardized test scores and weighted grades to the grand prize, admission to elite colleges and universities.

But what does rigor mean in the classroom? 

The usual association is with difficulty – rigorous classes are hard – and not necessarily that they are intellectually challenging and conceptually deep. Rigor is more often associated with piled-on reading, homework, and assignments that produce anxiety, sleep deprivation, isolation, and emotional fatigue. Rigor as suffering.

This is not to suggest that academic achievement, ambition, or aspiration aren’t worthy and noble drivers, but there is an argument to be made against unnecessary, unhealthy, and inhumane academic distress – about the peril and the ethics of putting student achievement ahead of student wellness, and the fallacy that the two are competing aims. The additional layers of stress placed on young people during the pandemic have added urgency to the need to rethink rigor in middle and high schools. 

The irony is that parents who push schools to implement the hard-nosed conception of rigor are not helping their children prepare for the “best” careers. Many elite companies are looking for a different set of skills: emotional intelligence, listening and empathy, collaboration, creativity, problem-solving, generosity, and fairness. Certainly students need exposure to direct instruction, core knowledge, memorization and recall, and automaticity – and some students truly blossom when fed and watered by facts, but this is only part of what young people require to lead fulfilling lives. 

Here’s a new definition of rigor: The degree to which a student is in equal parts intellectually challenged, engaged, enriched, and empowered. The big idea is challenge, not in the sense of an onerous workload but the provocative, stimulating, sometimes vexing challenge of grasping complex ideas that make learning meaningful and rewarding (as well as empowering) to master. And this has to be tuned to students’ incoming knowledge, skills, and attitudes, so that work is at the Goldilocks level – not too difficult and not too easy. 

As schools courageously embrace a new conception of rigor that rises above merely a crushing workload, we expect to see both increased student wellness and higher levels of more-meaningful academic achievement. Even the most driven parents should be persuadable around the goal of producing graduates who are also healthy, well-adjusted, confident, and happy.