photo ala the amazing @venspired
I am reading Eric Jensen’s latest book from ASCD, “Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind“, and am blown away by the research and strategies I’m finding. In even just the first few pages, he discusses how engagement always shows up as a vital achievement factor in most studies. It isn’t, however, always called “engagement”, that’s just the buzz word of the moment. He references a study by John Hattie where engagement was also found to be called “feedback”, “cooperative learning”, “project learning”, or any kind of “interactive teaching”.
Research shows that for every 2% disengagement rises, pass rates on high stakes tests drop by 1%(Valentine & Collins, 2011) via Mr. Jensen. We can’t afford to not care about engaging our students. We can’t continue to only worry about the material we need to teach, and not those lil’people we are teaching it too. School should be the BEST part of their day. If we can make that happen, attendance rates would soar.
Some of the pushback on providing lessons for students that are “engaging” is that we have a lot of content to impart, and not a lot of time in which to do it. “School is not about always being fun, Amber.” But when you think of those synonyms above…those are the kinds of activities that we SHOULD be seeing in our classrooms. That’s not rocket science! With such a national focus on having students graduate, and attending some form of higher education, we first must KEEP our students in schools. To keep them in school, we need to make it more engaging. Students do not just magically become more interested, we have to do our part to make that happen!
What can you do to make your class more engaging these week? Not more entertaining, but more engaging. Whatever it is, know that it will be worth it.
Engagingly,
Amber
Agency is a bit better word in my opinion. I think it speaks to the idea that all learning is personal. Teachers who create opportunities to make it their own, essentially create engagement. That means different strategies but also the realization that not all learning and all school can be engaging and that’s okay. I think however, it ought to drive us to make sure that at some point during the day, students have taken agency and ownership of their learning.
That was like, 5 decades, of wisdom in that response, DS! 🙂
I agree it can’t all be exciting, but think the effort to make it worth their while should still be present. Dave Burgess asks how many lessons in your classroom would you pay a dollar to sit through in his TLAP, and I think if we plan with that in mind, if an intentional avoiding of a “sit & get” mentality is your focus, we’ll all be better off…
🙂 thanks for reading and commenting Dean. Honored that ya did!