Instructional Strategies Motivate and Engage Students in ...

Instructional Strategies Motivate and Engage Students in Deeper Learning

Instructional strategies are becoming increasingly diverse as teachers tap into students' interests and abilities to help them absorb academic and career/technical subjects that will improve their chances of success in college and careers. Teachers are increasing the number of challenging assignments that engage all students in displaying creativity, problem solving and research skills as they learn the content essential to succeed in life. Technology has been a boon to teachers and students in making learning "come alive" and hold the interest of all students.

Help More Students Become College and Career Ready by Successfully Engaging Them in Reading Complex Texts in Science, Social Studies, Mathematics and Career/Technical Classes

APRIL 2013

592 10th Street, N.W. Atlanta, GA 30318 (404) 875-9211

Research-Based Strategies Help Teachers Build Students' 21st-Century Learning Skills

T eacher effectiveness is vital in determining whether students learn in the classroom. Too many classrooms are characterized by low-level assignments rather than diverse instructional strategies that actively engage students in deeper learning, according to Tom Dewing, consultant for Silver Strong and Associates in Ho Ho Kus, New Jersey. Completing more complex assignments is key. "Engagement is the key to learning. When students actively participate and pursue knowledge, they are preparing for life after high school," he said.

Dewing noted the word "strategy" is based on two Greek words -- stratos, meaning a multitude or an army, and agein or ago meaning lead, guide or move. A teaching strategy, Dewing said, is an instructional management plan that describes the role of the teacher and student and promotes particular patterns of thought to achieve specific learning goals.

Types of Engagement

Engagement types include intellectual, social, emotional and behavioral. "Students understand how teachers relate to the subject matter," Dewing said. "If a teacher is passionate and knowledgeable about a subject, students will respond with enthusiasm and interest."

Dewing points to the "knowing-doing gap" as the biggest hurdle for any school or teacher in enhancing learning for students. "Teachers must find a way to bridge the gap between what they know about good instruction and what they do in the classroom," Dewing said. "The degree to which teachers are able to implement best practices in the classroom in a thoughtful, meaningful way determines the performance of a school or a student."

To overcome the "knowing-doing gap," Dewing said educators must understand clearly what the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and other rigorous standards are asking educators and students to do.

According to its mission statement, the CCSS initiative aims to "provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy."

Lively Classrooms

One major way to accomplish a lively classroom with hands-on learning is to enhance literacy:

Emphasize teaching the reading of informational texts.

Steadily increase the ability of students to understand more complex materials over time.

Integrate research skills across standards and grades.

Write to argue, inform and explain to prepare students for college-level assignments.

"Promoting literacy is a shared responsibility for all content teachers, not just English/language arts teachers," Dewing said. Literacy plays an important role in teaching and learning math, science, history, art and career/technical studies.

Teachers can improve students' reading and writing skills by getting them to read for meaning:

Give students a list of "agree or disagree statements" about assigned texts.

Ask students to preview the statements and begin reading the text.

Ask students to indicate whether they agree or disagree with the statements based on what they read.

Have students justify their agree/disagree positions by citing appropriate evidence from the text.

"Applying the rigorous strategies outlined in the CCSS in all school subjects not only will improve the learning experiences of students in the middle grades and high school but will provide a strong foundation on which to pursue their aspirations after graduation," Dewing said.

Dewing is co-author with Harvey Silver and Matthew Perini of The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core. "The book is designed to help teachers look at the Common Core State Standards and implement six strategies that teach to the common threads that the standards are asking to be implemented," Dewing said.

Tom Dewing: rthomasdewing@

The Sweet Spot of Engagement Boosts Student Learning

I t is important for teachers to find the "sweet spot" for engaging all students in learning, according to Steve Barkley, executive vice president of Performance Learning Systems, Inc., in Madison, Georgia. At the same time, he acknowledges that competition for student engagement has changed over the years. "Many students today enter the classroom from the real world where they engage with electronic gadgetry, sports activities and other events."

Barkley suggests placing emotion and engagement on a continuum that begins with "fear" and ends with "bored." Learning is minimized at both ends of the scale, he said.

Fear

Attention

Comfort

Bored

"We need to eliminate school and classroom cultures based on fear, where students experience threats, embarrassment and/or violence and where learning is secondary to safety," Barkley said. "However, when students exhibit characteristics of boredom, teachers need to raise the anxiety level by increasing requirements through additional rigor or depth of learning. If students begin to show anxiety, the teacher must reduce that feeling. One way is for students to complete challenging assignments by working together in pairs or groups."

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Barkley said the ideal emotional learning spot -- the sweet spot -- lies between "fear" and "attention." Tutoring pays off because effective tutors hold students in that position. "If tutors see students getting comfortable with learning, they continue," Barkley said. "If they see students getting anxious, they give more practice."

Master teachers monitor constantly to sense when students are moving from the sweet spot of attention to the comfort spot; then they take action to bring students back to the high side of attention. Barkley said teachers must know their students and be skilled at adjusting the pace, assignments and strategies to maximize learning.

Barkley shared five types of engagement as described by author Phil Schlechty:

Engagement -- Students are attentive and focused on the task with commitment and persistence; they volunteer personal resources of time, effort and attention.

Strategic Engagement -- Students are willing to do the work as long as extrinsic rewards are present. Remove the reward (grades) and students withdraw their effort. Students in this case ask, "Will this be graded?" "How many points?" "Does this count?"

Ritual Compliance -- Students want assurance that what they do will pay off in grades and improved chances for college. This scenario generally requires supervision. Producing the work with minimal effort could mean copying work or cheating on an exam.

"Retreatism" -- This action manifests lack of compliance in passive ways, such as withdrawing from a task. If challenged, students may move to compliance or rebellion. Teachers often overlook retreatism.

Rebellion -- This action focuses attention on something else and often is seen as disruptive.

The five types of engagement can be related on the emotional continuum with engaged learning occurring at the sweet spot.

"Behavioral engagement is when students exhibit on-task behaviors, including persistence with challenging tasks, asking questions and requesting help," Barkley said. "Intellectual engagement is deep involvement and effort by students to understand a concept or master a skill. Emotional engagement is when students exhibit high interest, a positive attitude, curiosity and task involvement."

Barkley emphasized that people desire or volunteer to do things because they matter and are interesting. He said the goal of

Sweet Spot

Fear

Attention

Comfort

Bored

education is to create self-direction in students. "It is essential to design instruction that helps students connect with learning while developing autonomy, mastery and purpose," Barkley said.

In a survey conducted by Vito Perrone, former professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, students reported that they were most engaged intellectually when involved in defining learning content, when they had time to wonder and find a particular direction that interested them and when topics had a "strange" quality -- something common viewed in a new way, evoking a question.

How can a teacher who is required to teach standards maintain control and autonomy in the classroom? Barkley suggested teachers need to connect real life to the content being taught to get the emotional engagement that draws students to learning. He encouraged teachers to find the sweet spot of student engagement to be successful in preparing students for further education and careers.

Steve Barkley: lmalanowski@

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Challenging Students to Read More in Literature and History Classes

T wo teachers and a librarian at Monarch High School (MHS) in Louisville, Colorado, challenged students in literature and history classes to read 2,500 pages during the 2011-2012 school year. The challenge was successful and yielded positive changes in students' attitudes toward reading. The idea to promote reading at MHS originated with American history teacher Deann Bucher after attending the HSTW Staff Development Conference in summer 2011. "I learned that students perform better in all content areas when they read more," Bucher said. "Some schools have seen as much as a oneyear growth in reading when students read the equivalent of 25 books per year outside of class."

"I enjoyed many new books I never would have thought to read." "I rediscovered the joy of reading."

Students, Monarch High School

MHS is a highly successful school for most students, Bucher explained, but some students do not reach their potential. "I needed ways to raise student achievement, and I realized that the answer was to increase students' abilities to engage with texts," she said.

Launching the Challenge

Bucher met with American literature teacher Mystayn Barnes and librarian Beatrice Gerrish. The result was the challenge to read 2,500 pages. Of those pages, 100 would be by a world author and another 100 would be nonfiction. Students would write summaries of their reading and post information on Edmodo, a secure social learning network for teachers and students. In the first year, 150 students participated from one history class (taught by Bucher) and two literature classes (taught by Barnes). In 2012-2013, most history students, along with students in literature classes, are participating in an expanded program. "We wanted students to read more and enjoy it," Bucher said. "We started with the belief that if students read more they will raise their reading scores and across-the-board achievement."

The Reading Challenge team launched the program by surveying students to determine individual attitudes about reading. "To get better at reading, you need to practice," Barnes told The Boulder Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado. "You're not going to practice something you hate."

Book Lovers or Haters

Using data from the survey, the team ranked students as "reading lovers," "neutrals" and "reading haters." Gerrish took responsibility for working with the reading haters. She met with them individually and in groups to help them find books and magazines of interest. She also taught students to use the library as a resource. "I lowered some of the library's restrictions on due dates, fees and access times so that students would be more comfortable with the checkout process," Gerrish said.

Needing to increase the library's collection of books to serve students better, Gerrish applied for and received a $1,500 grant from the Parent Teacher Student Organization. She combined that amount with her library budget of $1,000, a sum of $1,200 from the Impact on Education Foundation and $400 from the district office. The money was used to purchase Nook e-readers, iPod portable media players, special-interest books and magazines, plus Reading Challenge t-shirts.

Best-Liked Books

The reading haters found the following books most interesting: The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins; The Maze Runner trilogy by James Dashner; Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver; Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, both by Jon Krakauer; and the Rot & Ruin series by Jonathan Maberry. "Loading books on Nooks and iPods made them more approachable for many students," Gerrish said.

Parents indicate that the library expenditure for the Reading Challenge was a good investment in bringing about positive changes in students. Gerrish said one mother "shed tears of joy" that her popular son, a star football player, stayed home to read using his Nook. Another parent emailed the school, "We are experiencing amazing progress with our son. He was never a reader. When I heard about the reading goal at school, I was really worried. Now, it's as though something clicked. It's a parent's dream."

Positive Responses From Students

Students' responses were positive. One student said it was "cool" to read. Others arrived at class early to read and asked for more in-class reading time. Students participated with teachers in spontaneous book discussions, traded books with one another and encouraged classmates to read. One student said: "I enjoyed many new books I never would have thought to read." Another said, "I rediscovered the joy of reading."

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The Reading Challenge team conducted a survey to measure the success of the project. "When we began the challenge, we had one goal -- intellectual engagement," Gerrish said. "We discovered that the challenge resulted in unexpected improvement in social, emotional and behavioral engagement."

More than 60 percent of students said they read zero to one hour a week before the challenge. By the end of the year, that percentage had dropped to 20 percent. Fifteen percent of students were reading as many as five hours per week by the end of the year. In addition, 43 percent of students reported being better readers and 58 percent said they would continue reading during the summer.

"Perhaps the most impressive figure of all is that the students of just two teachers -- Bucher and Barnes -- read a total of 384,581 pages of text during one school year," Gerrish said.

Mystayn Barnes: mystayn.barnes@ Deann Bucher: dean.bucher@ Beatrice Gerrish: beatrice.gerrish@

Got Rigor? One School Increases Mathematics Achievement

" Y ou have to be willing to put yourself out there and try something new," according to Andrea Richardson, math department co-chair at Farmington High School (FHS) in Farmington, Missouri. FHS is an hour south of St. Louis in a city with a population of just over 16,000. Forty-three percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

"Faculty and staff knew we had to do just that if we wanted to increase student achievement in math and decrease the number of students taking remedial math in college, Richardson said" The result is an innovative math course sequence. The sequence courses are Algebra 1, Algebra 1.5, Algebra 2, Algebra 2.5, College Algebra, Informal Geometry, Formal Geometry, Probability and Statistics 1, Probability and Statistics 2, College Trigonometry, College Pre-Calculus, and College Calculus.

New Math Class

In 2008 the school created a new math class known as Algebra 1.5 to serve as a bridge between Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 for students not quite ready for Algebra 2. In conjunction with Algebra 1 and geometry, the new course is designed to keep struggling students on schedule for graduation.

FHS has continued to offer a nontraditional path for math students. Those who do not score well on the ACT or the Compass assessment can take Algebra 2.5. Taught like an intermediate college algebra course, it is intended to keep students from taking a remedial math class in college. For non-struggling students, FHS offers dual credit courses in college algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus.

As the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are implemented, FHS will require all students to take a one-semester course titled Probability and Statistics 1. "We decided it would be best for students if we took the statistics standards out of the CCSSrecommended Algebra 1, geometry and advanced algebra curriculum and taught it in one course," said Jane Harris, math department co-chair. "This is part of fulfilling the math department's goal of doing what is best for students."

Supporting Students

FHS offers a variety of student supports beyond the new class offerings. They include ACT bell ringers, before- and after-school tutoring, common assessments, Moodle sites set up to support students with resources, classrooms designed for students to sit in groups of two to four for daily cooperative peer support, and Cornell Notes. Teachers use formative assessment strategies such as exit slips to serve their students better. Students also have access to a wide range of technology such as classroom computers, graphing calculators and geometric software.

Leaders and teachers at FHS determined these student supports would not be enough to meet their goals. "We knew we needed to focus on teachers in order to help students," Richardson said. Each new teacher has a mentor teacher for two years. Teachers use collaborative planning time to review benchmark data, modify curriculum plans as needed, create common assessments, share successes and learn more about implementing different technologies.

FHS has found success in this journey of nontraditional teaching. Failure rates for freshmen in Algebra 1 decreased from 18.5 percent in 2009 to 14 percent in 2012. The percentage of college freshmen who graduated from FHS and took remedial math classes declined from 22.9 percent in 2006 to 14.2 percent in 2010.

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