More Student Engagement

On November 12 I attended the second installment of the three part series of PD about student engagement. The first session I attended in August was brilliant and I was able to start implementing some of the suggestions immediately. This latest session was much more confusing for me and I found the suggestions to be more limiting.
Some things I liked:

1. Criteria for effective critical challenges:
• requires reasoned judgement?
• perceived as meaningful to students?
• fosters significant curricular understanding?
• within the zone of proximal development?


2. Teachers need to build value into their content and into the routines and learning processes. Students will be more engaged if they can see a meaningful purpose to doing the task or learning a concept. Teachers may need to develop lessons and activities that demonstrate the value of the subject they are teaching or of the individual outcomes.
   The following will help teachers "sell" their subjects:
• Quality objectives and tasks that are linked to things that matter to students and anchored with inspiring stories.
• Teacher communicates with enthusiasm.
• Reasons and consequences students appreciate.

Some things I am not sure of:

1. Empowering Students: Students need to become self-regulatory learners who have a large repertoire of thinking strategies and the values and attitudes of a conscientious thinker. The Critical Thinking Consortium has many great lessons for developing student skills in this area. However, getting students to this stage seems like a daunting task that one teacher could not expect to do alone in one class in one year. I was fortunate to be attending this session with 6 other teachers from school and we started a discussion about how we could make this a whole school goal. Something we would have to start developing now to implement for the 2013-14 school year.

I am looking forward to the final installment of this three part series in February, when we will learn more about providing students with timely, helpful, encouraging feedback and how to nurture respectful, collaborative and supportive atmospheres.