Student Engagement – Rationale



Student Engagement:

• The involvement of the minds of all the learners with that which is to be learned.

Student Engagement – Rationale

Engagement, in general, stands for active involvement, commitment, and concentrated attention, in contrast to superficial participation, apathy, or lack of interest.

However, student engagement in academic work, or engagement of the mind, is the student’s psychological investment in and effort directed toward learning, understanding, or mastering the knowledge, skills, or crafts that our standards are designed to promote.

In the classroom, this translates to the learning objective for the day. What is it that students need to learn or be engaged in that day for that 50-minute period?

Engagement is not simply a commitment to complete assigned tasks or to acquire symbols of high performance such as grades or social approval.

Students may complete academic work and perform well with out being engaged or demonstrating mastery of a topic, skills, craft or standard. Effective teaching strategies can go a long way to reducing the need for accommodations in the classroom. Teachers who build in 10:2 (10 minutes of instruction with 2 minutes for students to process) and other teaching strategies ensure the students are learning. At the highest level, the result of effective student engagement would mean that the student has been able to understand the content, use it, apply it, master it and retain it.

Student engagement is linked dynamically to student achievement in the same way that a students’ “connectedness” (sense of belonging and having positive and supportive relationships) is linked to student success.

Student Engagement of the Mind - Explicit and Implicit

As an observer in a classroom, you might see student engagement in two main forms: explicit and implicit.

Explicit: Expressing understanding of the task in a clear and obvious way.

Implicit: The state of being involved. Understood, but not specifically expressed by the learner or observable.

What might you hear a teacher saying to get explicit or implicit responses from students?

|Examples of Explicit |

|Signal me when you have decided on the three events you will use. |

|Jot down a three-sentence summary of yesterday’s discussion. |

|Complete the Venn diagram, showing the similarities and differences of… |

|Create guide questions based on the headings in the chapter. |

|Write a brief summary of each section on Post-it notes. |

|In pairs, read one section to each other, ask one question, and summarize one point. |

|Prepare vocabulary cards for new and important terms. |

|Create a skit that portrays the elements we have been studying. |

|Examples of Implicit |

|Everyone think to yourself what might happen next in the story. |

|Be ready to tell me the introductory sentence to your essay when I give you your paper. |

|Be ready to state three of the important differences we discussed yesterday between the continental shelf and the deep water of the|

|ocean. |

|As you view the video for the next 8 minutes, think about the questions you have about the subject and what you want to know. When|

|I stop the film, be ready to share your questions with your trio partners. |

|We discussed the four effects of the monsoons on the people of India. Look at numbers 1-4 on the board. Each of you decide which |

|of these four is the most important and why. In just a minute, I will ask each of you to … |

How Engaged are Our Students?

What do we mean by ALL?

Is it OK to have just one or a few students engaged in learning? Is it OK to have only 40% of students engaged and meeting proficiency of the standards? No. What we mean by ALL is ALL.

Successful learning is more than passive receipt of processed information. All learning, except for simple rote memorization, requires active involvement of each learner. It is important to develop a group dynamic to engage all students simultaneously, not eventually. Eventual participation by all students at some time during the lesson is not what we mean by ALL students being engaged in the learning. Teaching difficult or complex content to a large group of students is impossible if only one student has an opportunity to answer a question or do a problem at a time.

You can look at student engagement almost as if it were an imaginary gauge for each student’s degree of learning. The gauge would show learning in real time and provide continuous feedback to the teacher regarding vital aspects of the learning.

A teacher can often monitor the gauge of an individual student. It is possible to change elements in the learning environment that will be reflected on the gauge. Changing words and phrases, student confidence, scaffolding relevant and interesting material, explicit and implicit tasks and the like can move the gauge’s needle to higher or lower states of engagement.

In this dynamic environment the short-term objective is to have the needle move in a positive direction. If the needle is more often in the upper range for each learner, then the likelihood of long-term student achievement is greater.

With That Which Is to Be Learned

Standards offer a new way of thinking about what a school and district can and should be for students. Standards unite excellence with equity and provide a lever for raising student achievement at all levels of school.

In a standards-based system, all students are expected to reach the same high standards – in different ways and in varying lengths of time. Standards keep the outcome expectations firm. The school becomes accountable for varying the input and the processes in order to insure that all students are successful.

In Robert Marzano’s book, What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action (2003), he states that the factor having the most impact on student achievement is what he calls a “guaranteed and viable curriculum.” Another way of saying, “that which is to be learned.”

If we link this to student engagement, we mean that the engagement of the student has to be around “the right stuff.” This is described in Marzano’s book as the intended curriculum, the implemented curriculum, and the attained curriculum.

Intended: The intended curriculum is content specified by the state, district, or school to be addressed in a particular course or at a particular grade level.

Implemented: The implemented curriculum is content actually delivered by the teacher.

Attained: The attained curriculum is content actually learned by the students.

The discrepancy between the intended curriculum and the implemented curriculum is a prominent factor in student achievement. The concept of opportunity to learn the “right stuff” is a simple but powerful one – if students are not engaged in the content expected of them, there is little chance that they will. This means that states and districts give clear guidance to teachers regarding the content to be addressed in specific courses and at specific grade level. It also means that individual teachers do not have the option to disregard or replace assigned content.

The Challenges of Student Engagement

The most immediate and persistent issue for students and teachers is not low achievement, but student disengagement. The most obviously disengaged students disrupt classes, skip them, or fail to complete assignments.

More typically, disengaged students behave well in school. They attend class and complete the work, but with little indication of excitement, commitment, or pride in mastery of the curriculum.

In contrast, engaged students make a psychological investment in learning. They try hard to learn what school offers. They take pride not simply in earning the formal indicators of success (grades), but in understanding the material and incorporating or internalizing it in their lives.

For teachers, the challenge is how to get students to do academic work and to take it seriously enough to learn; for students, the challenge is how to cope with teachers’ demands so as to avoid boredom, to maintain self-respect, and, at the same time, to succeed in school.

By Fred Newmann, Student Engagement and Achievement in American Secondary Schools, 1992

Studies that document student disengagement include Cusick (1973), Eckert (1989), Fine (1991), Goodlad (1984), McNeil (1986), Powell, Farrar, and Cohen (1985), Sedlak, Wheeler, Pullin, and Cusick (1986), Weis (1990), and Weis, Farrar, and Petrie (1989)

Summarizing Our Collective Learning

As a group, summarize your collective learning by filling in the chart:

|Examples |Non-examples |

|Give 2 more examples for each: |Discuss how these could be |

| |non-examples: |

| | |

|Explicit Engagement: |Are we ready to move on? |

|Everyone, show your white-board | |

|on the count of 3. | |

|Use hand signals to show… | |

| | |

| |Are there any questions? |

| | |

|Implicit Engagement: | |

|Think to yourself… | |

|Everyone be ready to share… | |

| | |

| | |

| |Who can tell us? |

|ALL engaged: | |

|Turn to your partner… | |

| | |

| | |

| | |

|Aligned to the learning: |Show how much you like this word. |

|Use 1, 2, or 3 fingers to show the number of syllables in the | |

|word… | |

| | |

| | |

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