Best Practice / Leadership /First Year of Teaching
Student engagement vs. student avoidance
Today’s article will begin to take a close look at student engagement and student avoidance. Past posts have spoken about how important and how difficult it is to engage our students. For me, it is and will always be the teacher’s responsibility to engage his /her students. That is why it is critical that we evolve from traditional educational practices to current best practices. Let’s take a look at ways to engage students. Pino-James suggests that when we think about student engagement we keep the following questions in mind:
- Is the work relevant and meaningful?
- While completing the work, does the student nurture his /her sense of competence?
- Does the student have control over his/her goals and behaviors?
- Do students work collaboratively?
- Does the work develop and nurture positive student /teacher relationships?
- Do students want to learn the work and seek mastery?
(Pino-James 2014)
On the other hand, students tend to avoid engagement when the work is:
- Too hard to complete.
- Introduced by poor instructional techniques.
- Assigned with no student reward in sight.
- Assigned by a teacher that the student does not have a positive relationship with.
- Assigned by a teacher that students have little confidence in completing successfully.
Whenever I think about student engagement, I reach for a book written by Arthur Powell which appeared in part as an article in Phi Beta Kappan Magazine in 1985 entitled Being Unspecial in the Shopping Mall High School. Although this is an old article, it illustrates the perfect description of student disengagement and how high school students purposefully and willfully avoid academic engagement. More importantly the message in this article is the realization of how the adults and especially the decision makers allow this disengagement. I will argue that the attitudes written about, and the overall culture of this school dominate the landscape of traditional high schools today. I will share several snippets and quotes from the article to illustrate my point. I strongly encourage you to read the full article.
Students readily identify themselves as “lazy”. They speak of taking easier courses to allow them to “slump off” and still get a B. One student describes herself as being just an average student so she took only average classes. Students describe the school as “relaxed”, but the “social life is great”. One of the best quotes in the article was when one student describes the school as a “do your own thing type of school.” They were pleased to report that “nobody was going to push you and they would do homework as long as it was not too much. Students proudly reported that they worked to construct their schedule in order to “work, play and be with my friends.” Overall, the students expected their classes to be boring, and they never complained when the classes met their expectation.
Not coincidently, students believed that the teachers felt the same way about school. Overall very little was expected of the students from the adults and for the most part, the students delivered on this expectation.
Ironically, as the students approached graduation, they spoke with remorse that “nobody was there to push me” (Powell 1985).
For me, it all starts with each educator having a personal academic agenda. Coupling this personal agenda with high student expectations will help build a climate and culture of academic excellence. Each educator must be both an encouraging and demanding teacher. Not surprisingly, students will define encouraging with two elements; the teacher does something extra for me and the teacher will not allow me to fail. When I say that to teachers, I make a point not to infer that they should sacrifice their standards. On the contrary, they must work to provide a variety of ways for each student to meet these high expectations.
What can you take away from today’s article? I hope you will see that it is our responsibility to foster student engagement. There are many things that we control that will lead students down this path. I also hope that no matter what level you teach you will not allow students to purposely disengage. You will not allow them to take the easy way out. I know it is so very easy for this to happen. With all the stressors placed on a teacher today, it can be easy to take the easy path. I implore you to dig deep inside and not allow this to happen.
Good Luck!
References
Pino-James, Nicolas (2014). Golden Rules for Engaging Students in Learning Activities. Retrieved form http: www. Edutopia.org/blog/golden-rules-for-engaging-students-Nicolas-Pino-James
Powell, Arthur G. (1985 December) Being Unspecial in the Shopping Mall High School. Phi Delta Kappan, 255-261.
