Response: Student Engagement “Requires A Conversation”

What distinguishes true engagement from simple on-task behavior is interactivity. Classrooms founded on mundane assignments, like rote-memory worksheets and multiple-choice tests, are easy to spot. However, putting a student on a computer to compose an essay, instead of asking her to write it in a composition notebook, isn’t much better than on-task seatwork. Engaging activities can’t be judged by points and percentages; they require a conversation and an opportunity to share both successes and failures across the classroom and, in some cases, across geographical borders. Tasks that are interactive and engaging have three distinct features:

Student choice. When students are given the opportunity to choose how to demonstrate learning, they are far more apt to participate than they would be with the “Do-this-and-do-it-my-way” worksheet. Engagement begins with autonomy, and teachers learn a great deal about how students learn by evaluating the choices they make to demonstrate understanding and curiosity. Saying to students, “How can you show me that you’ve learned about inertia?” is far more engaging than telling students to “Fill in the blanks on this test.”

Digital tools. Used appropriately, technology can be a powerful catalyst for engagement. The 21st-century learner is a digital native who wants to use Web 2.0, social media and mobile learning devices. When coupled with choice of tools to use and a variety of methods in which to deliver information, technology becomes the center of student engagement. Digital projects provide the opportunity for sharing online. There’s nothing more engaging than teaching students how to use the online community, Goodreads.com, and receiving alerts on a Smartphone when they add a book to a shelf or review something they’ve just read. Plus, most online learning tools can be used as a platform for narrative feedback, which gives students a chance to improve upon their work and demonstrate mastery.

Collaboration. Group projects, driven by student choice and an assortment of digital tools, inspire the aforementioned interactivity and feedback that provides clear evidence of engagement. When students collaborate, they feel a sense of pride in their accomplishments. Students performing simple on-task activities feel incomplete and, worse, learn very little.

“I know it when I see it.”

The phrase “I know it when I see it” has become an oft-invoked expression in an attempt to describe an observable “something”, even when the “something” is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase is most famously attributed to United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who uttered the words to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964):

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

In our noble profession of education, “student engagement” has become one of the most common “somethings” we strive for in our classrooms. Like most educators, the term connotes within me myriad positive associations and I suspect--based on both exhaustive research as well as my own experiences--that “it” has a strong correlation to student academic achievement. But what exactly does student engagement means and look like and how can we evidence it in our classrooms? To a large extent, I really do think “I know it when I see it,” but that, of course, is helpful to no one, so allow me to delve deeper.

When I served as principal of a large suburban middle school, I made it a point to read the daily morning announcements every day. I tried to keep these announcements very brief but I closed each day’s announcements with the same remark, 180 days a year, each year that I served as principal at this school. After sharing all necessary announcements, I would say, “Students and teachers, remember to work hard, have fun, and be nice today.”

Now, that is not exactly rocket science advice and surely nothing I picked up in my doctoral classes, yet it was, in essence, what I hoped to see occurring throughout our school each and every day: students and teachers teaching and learning together and, in the process, working hard, having fun, and being nice--or, to put it another way, students and teachers highly engaged. You see, the harder kids worked, the more fun they had doing it, and the nicer they were to each other while doing it, the more engaged they were in the process of learning. Happy, hard-working, and nice students are also highly-engaged students.

But, what evidence can we find during classroom visits to support whether or not students are “engaged” (working hard, having fun, being nice)? We can begin with the obvious, creating checklists of behaviors we would expect to see in each of the three areas. We can also spend intentional time examining the quality of student work assigned and student work completed. Most importantly, perhaps, we must continue to query our students, surveying them regularly (daily exit tickets) and periodically (engagement surveys) to assess their level of engagement and elicit heir feedback on what is working and what is not.

“Student engagement” is a strategy we would all agree is worth attaining. As with any other strategy we agree is important (e.g., “High Expectations,” “Relationships,”), we need to move from agreeing the strategy is important to taking specific, actionable steps we can employ to achieve it. The scope of identifying such steps may be beyond the constraints of a brief column, but the process begins with collaborative professional dialogue centered on: defining what it looks like, identifying what is already working and striving to replicate it systemically, conducting intentional classroom observations focused on it, and including our students in the conversation about it. The more we do this, the more we will agree on the meaning of it when we say, “we know it when we see it.”

Stay “engaged” in the conversation--and work hard, have fun, and be nice today!

I disagree. I think we can see a kid’s brain sweating. Or, at least, we can hear it. Levels of engagement, I believe, can be measured in what we are hearing almost more than what we are seeing. Are the students Asking questions? Are those questions in a structured, formal ask-and-answer format or are they rapid-fire-they-can’t-keep-up-with-answering-them there are so many? Are the questions simple, level 1 questions or higher level questions that could even stump an adult? If a student can make a teacher’s brain sweat, then you know they are really engaged and thinking. You might need to lay the groundwork, of course, teaching early in and repetitively on what makes good questions. But by a certain point of the year, after being submerged in the expectation of high level questioning, the students will begin to use those skills more naturally in their collaborative conversations.

Are the students teaching each other? Are they approaching each other for solutions before/instead of coming to you, the teacher? The goal, after all, is to have students own the information. Ownership pairs nicely with confidence and pride in sharing solutions and answers. Students enjoy being experts. It’s their eagerness at sharing the expertise that can indicate true engagement.

I think it depends on the activity. For example, you’d measure discussion-based activity engagement differently than engagement with independent seatwork. Rather than trying to identify a universal sign of student engagement, I think it’s more effective to provide training to educators on how to design assessment systems that would be able to capture the range of behaviors associated with engagement.

If there were a universal indicator of engagement, I like on-task measures such as the BOSS, which look behaviors such as what a student is looking at (teacher, blackboard, desk, etc.).