Student Engagement

Today we’re discussing  five absolute essentials for engaging students in education for life.  It wasn’t until I was preparing this video that I realized how important engagement is (you can catch the video version of this post here). I had always thought of engagement in the short-term, as something to help a student get the most out of a class, not as a necessary ingredient for a life of freedom. But if you aren’t engaged in school, you are probably not going to consider school a long-term option toward lifelong freedom. I’m going to tell you a quick story, and then we’ll talk about the deep engagement that brings freedom to students.

 It was probably a decade ago when I got to be Richard’s teacher. He was smart and opinionated and utterly disengaged in school. 

He would do nothing I asked without intense cajoling. He said our work didn’t matter. 

Not long after graduation, he was incarcerated. There were a multitude of factors working against this young man, but one of them was reading.

The Department of Justice states, “The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure.”

And I have other examples of this. Students who were incarcerated or worked the same jobs after high school without economic mobility. Again, I believe that people can always make a change, but I know I could’ve done a better job teaching engagement. This is my vulnerability here.

In preparing for this post, I began thinking about how we overemphasize engaging students and underemphasize teaching students to be engaged. I think both are important, as they are things we can do to engage students, but it is also important to teach students what engagement looks and sounds like. This is somewhat similar to when I talk about the standard of coherence. This is expecting a text to make sense. If you have this expectation, you look for it. If you don’t, you don’t. If you expect class to be worthwhile to engage in, you will.

Five Essential Practices To Engage Students and Teach Engagement

1. Bias-proof preparation. I approach my lessons, texts, and standards through the lens of bias prevention. We can’t control it entirely, but I can keep myself awake to it. What might my decisions be implying to students, and how might those decisions push them away from engagement? How can I make the most joyful, agency-filled decisions for them? Where can I share this power with them, to teach them to engage with where bias may be present?

2. Processes for anticipating a variety of challenges. I include challenge in every lesson. The brain craves novelty. I have seen students in classes for reading intervention rise to the occasion when I made the work harder. They didn’t do the easier work because they knew it was patronizing. Their minds were not necessary for the work. The other part of this is ensuring that students know they are capable and can meet those challenges head-on. We seek to heap up evidence that they can do hard things. This promotes future engagement because persistence is rewarded from challenge.

3. Clarity around teaching standards. John Hattie emphasizes that teacher clarity is one of the most high-impact activities in teaching. Beyond clear learning targets, it’s about getting the students involved in understanding and monitoring their own approach to the standards. This is the stance of an engaged person.

4. Total participation in reading, discussion, and writing every day. This isn’t through mandatory, compulsory means. The energy matters. Everyone should participate because everyone should be included. Because everyone is important. This means the activities created for students should include them. Games. Challenges. Cooperative learning. The possibilities are endless for getting students involved without forcing them to be involved.

5. A sustainable system for language instruction. Students who feel disengaged from school often feel like they are missing pieces of the language of power. Any time we are in a situation where we don’t know the language, we feel less like we belong and therefore begin to disengage. Share with students this academic language and show them how they can wield it for collective good.

Student Engagement With The Literacy Lesson Plan

These five practices are reinforced through my literacy lesson plan. Bias-proof preparation and teacher clarity come from the text and standards preparation. It includes a process for anticipating challenges that can become a sustainable system for instruction. Total participation in reading, writing, and discussion are part of everyday.