Blogs on Student Engagement

Student Engagement

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Get advice from educators on how to build a positive climate for learning, improve student curiosity, and enhance classroom collaboration.

Ben JohnsonJuly 23, 2012

Have you ever tried to eat a mango? Well, it is quite an experience. Though mangos are my favorite fruit, I do not indulge as much as I would like because of the hassle of pealing and then eating it. To date, I have not personally found a clean way to eat a mango. It's kind of like trying to peal a peach and then eat it, or maybe even more like buttery corn on the cob -- both a juicy mess.

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Betsy WeigleJuly 18, 2012

Poverty is a huge factor affecting the performance of our elementary students. Schools, districts and states with a high percentage of low-income families can reasonably cite poverty as one explanation for lower test scores or poor performance in other measures of student achievement.

My concern, however, is always for the individual children in my classroom. At that level, should poverty be any excuse for poor student performance?

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Todd FinleyJune 28, 2012

Of the thousands of 18.5-year-olds that I've taught, some could not manage the challenges of college while others attacked higher education responsibilities with full uh-rah commitment. It is from observing the later group's mojo that I derived the following strategies.

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Ben JohnsonJune 26, 2012

According to Robert Marzano's book, Classroom Instruction that Works, 80 percent of what is considered instruction involves asking questions. It makes sense then, that if we want to improve our effectiveness at teaching, of course we would start by improving our questions. I have thought a lot about this topic and I would like to share three specific actions that we can take to improve our questions. To begin with, we need to get students talking rather than the teacher talking. Second, prepare the questions when you plan the lesson. And third, scaffold the questions.

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Dominick RecckioJune 22, 2012

One thing that teaches the lessons of accountability, responsibility, diligence and an appreciation for knowledge is homework. Every student has to do it, and for most kids, it is a necessity in order to do well in school. But its usefulness and whether it's taken seriously are always topics of conversation among students.

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Autumn CrispJune 12, 2012

Even those of us who teach Shakespeare may never take the time to appreciate the dedication that he had to craft. He's such a fixture of Western sensibility that he's easy to take for granted; we might begin to assume that writing came easily to him, but wouldn't that diminish his hard work? According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, his complete works consist of 118,406 lines of verse. A solid majority of those verses are in rigid iambic pentameter or trochaic tetrameter or some other icky meter that most of us modern poets don't touch with a ten-foot quill. I personally lean towards haiku, as do most of my students.

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Rebecca AlberMay 21, 2012

I don't know about your students, but so many of mine, coupled with Senioritis, were DONE after state testing. (The well had run dry, no blood from a turnip -- all those sayings applied!) With just a few precious weeks left in the school year, what do you do to keep the kids energized and onboard with learning?

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Larry FerlazzoMay 16, 2012

Students and teacher need to develop positive and trusting relationships in an effective classroom. It is also critical that all students, especially English-language learners, develop trusting and enriching relationships with each other. There are many activities which can be used for both introductory purposes and throughout the year to build and maintain positive relationships in the classroom. Some activities which work well to introduce students to each other and to the teacher can be used again at later points in the year as students' interests change and as they gain new life experiences. While this is certainly not an exhaustive list, it contains several suggestions we have found successful and which could easily be adapted for use with different levels of students.

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Marisa KaplanMay 10, 2012

What does CTT stand for? Some people think it's "creative thinkers thinking," or "cool teachers teaching." Others say it's "conflict tackling together." While CTT means all of the above, it stands for "collaborative team teaching" and refers to the idea of a co-teaching partnership.

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Heather Wolpert-GawronApril 26, 2012

A while back, I was asked, "What engages students?" Sure, I could respond, sharing anecdotes about what I believed to be engaging, but I thought it would be so much better to lob that question to my own eighth graders. The responses I received from all 220 of them seemed to fall under 10 categories, representing reoccurring themes that appeared again and again. So, from the mouths of babes, here are my students' answers to the question: "What engages students?"

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