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How Do We Know When Students Are Engaged?
March 1, 2012 | Ben JohnsonEducational author and former teacher, Dr. Michael Schmoker shares in his book, Results Now, a study that found of 1,500 classrooms visited, 85 percent of them had engaged less than 50 percent of the students. In other words, only 15 percent of the classrooms had more than half of the class at least paying attention to the lesson.
So, how do they know if a student is engaged? What do "engaged" students look like? In my many observations, here's some evidence to look for:
Teacher-Directed Learning
You will see students...
- Paying attention (alert, tracking with their eyes)
- Taking notes (particularly Cornell)
- Listening (as opposed to chatting, or sleeping)
- Asking questions (content related, or in a game, like 21 questions or I-Spy)
- Responding to questions (whole group, small group, four corners, Socratic Seminar)
- Following requests (participating, Total Physical Response (TPR), storytelling, Simon Says)
- Reacting (laughing, crying, shouting, etc.)
Student-Directed Learning
You see students individually or in small groups...
- Reading critically (with pen in hand)
- Writing to learn, creating, planning, problem solving, discussing, debating, and asking questions)
- Performing/presenting, inquiring, exploring, explaining, evaluating, and experimenting)
- Interacting with other students, gesturing and moving
To boil the descriptions above down and get at the essence of student engagement, whether for teacher-directed learning or student-directed learning, engaged means students are active. Is that surprising? I shouldn't think so. If true learning is to occur, then students have to be at the very least participants in the process, and not merely products.
Activity and Ownership
I believe that the majority of teachers pick up on the audience cues as they direct-teach and can tell if a student is not interested or not engaged. Most teachers act on what they see and adjust their instruction to try to engage all of their students. However, no matter how hard teachers work at making it interesting, a lecture is still a lecture, and having students simply listen is still a passive action. The solution is simple: If a teacher wants to increase student engagement, then the teacher needs to increase student activity -- ask the students to do something with the knowledge and skills they have learned. Break up the lecture with learning activities. Let them practice. Get them moving. Get them talking. Make it so engaging that it will be difficult for students not to participate.
The ultimate engagement is to put the learner in charge of learning. Create a rich learning environment and a motivation to learn, and the students do all the hard work of learning, while the teacher merely facilitates. It sounds so easy.
I do not minimize the hard work involved in creating those rich learning scenarios, custom-made motivators and engaging learning content. And it is a bit risky. Sometimes it works like a charm, and other times it would have been better to assign seat work. But we keep trying, improving, and enhancing until we get it right.
How have you found success in engaging your students?
Comments (21)
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It was Two way ENGAGEMENT Now its three-way!
I certainly agree with Dr Ben Johnson, that in order to get students engaged in Learning is simply by getting them to be "ACTIVE" or Pro-active in the classroom. Ultimately you as the teacher must set up the Custom-made motivators to get students to be active during your instruction! A lecture can only go so far as being passive! I love how Dr Johnson continues to reiterate that if you want student engagement you must increase it by bringing the class together to do an activity, you as the teacher are in control, and you can make it HARD for them where they have to participate! In terms of my own future classroom, drawing from this article, i also believe that the student and the teacher and vice versa must come to one way street where they are on the same boat. A two way engagement is what they say in the classroom,..but in these days it is more of a 3 way engagement you have the student, teacher and peers..!
Engagement of students in
Engagement of students in their activities can be easily adjudged through their interests in the subject matter and also from there performance monitoring. Learning through online resources is an innovative method for engaging the students as they get to learn in a new way and the pictorial representation of the concepts make these easy to grasp. The free tests help in gauging the performances also.
We find that students tend to
We find that students tend to be more engaged in their education when they understand the role education plays in their lives. Everybody student knows "when they grow up" they are going to be pursuing some career, but they don't all realize that their education contributes to it. Once they understand the link between their career of interest, and how their education will help them achieve those career goals, they tend to be more enthusiastic in the classroom. It is important to inspire students to set career goals, and then have them work backward to see what education is required in achieving those goals. Once they see the direct impact that education will have on their future goals, they start being accountable for their actions, and naturally build a higher level of engagement and interest in their education.
Ben, I like the way you put
Ben,
I like the way you put it as students taking ownership for their learning. I love to let my students have discussions in which they fight for their solution and try to prove each other wrong. Besides discussions, I also have the students put solutions on the board and correct each other's work. This strategy draws the kids into the lesson because they want their answer to be correct and to find an error in their classmates' work. I also agree with you that technology is a tool which draws students into the lesson and keeps their attention. One other idea I use in class is to allow students to make up their own math problem, similar to ones we have done in class. The kids enjoy showing their creativity and creating a problem which I end up using as part of the class. Thank you for your input.
Ben, In this video game
Ben,
In this video game entertainment society in which we live, it becomes harder and harder to keep students engaged. I have found that the more hands on and the more technology I incorporate into lessons, the more my students are attentive and cooperative. They are very vocal about telling me what they find engaging, and what they don't.
Librarian
Very informative post and comments. Thank you. Things are getting more complicated when you want to check engagement in online context. Do students engage with tutorials we make or it is just a click-click race? Or even better do they learn? Any tip is welcome.
Librarian, NBCT
In another school district we used the model "Working on the Work" by Schlechty and we had various methods of assessing the students level of engagement when they left class. Often kids seem engaged and we think they are, however the activity may not be as engaging as we think it is. Students can describe their level of engagement:
Engaged – High attention and high commitment
Strategic Compliance – High attention but low commitment
Ritual Compliance – Low attention and low commitment
Retreatist – No attention and no commitment
Rebellion – Diverted attention
Some teachers had 5 jars (or cups,bottles) and a bowl of candy kids could eat an M&M (or gum drop) and then on their way out, drop one in the jar that represented how they felt about the work that day and their level of engagement. Several teachers used this as a form of exit card and the kids are usually quite honest about how the activity engaged them.
Just a thought regarding assessing levels of engagement.
Kids engaged in my class...
I teach special education and my role has shifted to co-teaching more than teaching myself. I teach two self-contained classes. As soon as the kids enter my room in 5th hour, I hear "what are we doing today!" They are always every excited. Right now we are reading the novel The Hunger Games. I made a timeline for them that included the dates for which I wanted each chapter read. Each student read ahead. The book was schedule to be done in two weeks but they have all already completed it. That's how I can tell they are engaged.
I have done exit slips, where
I have done exit slips, where students comment on what they learned so that my co-teacher and I know if they learned the concepts that we were asking, but I have to say that I have never heard of asking the students if the lesson was easy/hard to pay attention? To be honest, it shows kids that we realize not everything is great but we really do want to get better. I can think of teachers whom I had through the years whose classes were quite boring. I always thought that they didn't care. If they had us fill this out, I would have felt that they were serious about teaching. This is a great idea and something that can be added to our exit slips. Thanks for sharing! I am going to research the Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform, too!
Engagement or Merely On-Task Behavior?
I have had some intensive training through the Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform. A teacher or administrator can guess a student's level of engagement, but the only way to truly know if a student is engaged is to ask the student. The activities Ben Johnson describes may be signs of engagement or they may not. They are observable on-task behavior. This is not the same as true engagement.
As part of the Schlechty Center training, I have gotten in the habit of asking for students' feedback about lessons in the form of an engagement meter. The meter asks students how easy it was to pay attention to the lesson and how much they've learned from it.
I have had lessons that I thought went quite well from the amount of on-task behavior and from the grades that resulted from students' activity. But the engagement-meter showed students' perceptions were that the lesson was a waste of time. I have adjusted my lessons accordingly.
I am a proponent of active student learning and of hands-on and "minds-on" learning, as Phil Schlecty puts it. But let's remember to avoid assumptions regarding engagement on the students' part.