Cultivating Student Engagement

Educators have been talking for many years about the need to increase student engagement. We all remember sitting in those classes where the lecturer droned on about a topic. The motion picture industry has numerous scenes of the typical classroom teacher talking on and on about some mind boggling useless topic with students holding their bodies awake through the terror of the monotonous lecture. As we have taken this stereotype to mean that we need to move from teaching students as if they were sponges absorbing content to having them actually perform tasks within the classroom.

Students actively doing tasks within the classroom may only be slightly better than half-listening to the parable of the day. Essentially, not all activities are created equal. Early in my career, I remember walking into primary grade classrooms before school each morning to see the teacher circulating around the room distributing the morning work. Piled upon each desk was a set of worksheets. Many easy coloring of letters, sight words, or early mathematical concepts. The expectation was that the children would walk into the classroom and begin their morning work. As the bell rang, the children would walk through the room, give a hug to their teacher, sit at their desks and complete their pile of papers. Sure the children were doing things, but for some of the students, all they could complete was the coloring of the letter, the rest of the worksheets sat untouched. For others, they were done in 6 minutes because the few actual problems within the tasks were so below their level that the answers were rote. And yet for some students, they stared at the pile. The simple set of tasks shut them down before they even considered whether the concepts were above or below their level. Essentially, the majority of students were compliant with completing the daily tasks.

What did the students' gain? What long term learning happened during this time? Are there other tasks that could have been done during these 30 minutes each day, or 90 school hours each year that would have had greater long term benefit? Certainly the children learned to work quietly and independently. The teacher had time to complete the administrative tasks of the day. However, is there more to learning.

In a world where knowledge is not always at our finger tips, compliant knowledge-based learning experiences are less and less meaningful. Engagement in modern education needs to mean more than students simply doing a task independently or with partners. Engagement needs to incorporate manipulation of ideas or concepts. Students need to add value to the knowledge, creating deeper meaning or connections than those that can simply be gleaned from a textbook or Google. Engagement isn't always quiet, although it can be. Engagement isn't always consistently productive. It ebbs and flows. Engagement isn't always collaborative nor always solitary. It moves in and out.

In an engaged learning experience, students have to draw conclusions based on their knowledge gains. Frequently making unique products as a result. In Sunday School this morning, I will be encouraging students to explore Jewish Immigration during the Early Colonial period. Students will be asked to research who the first Jews were to come to the Americas. They can Google that. As they discover that the Jews arrived and colonized in Recefe, Brazil, they will be asked to figure out why they went there and what may have caused them to leave. They move from knowledge to analysis. Drawing conclusions based on Internet-available information. Students will then explore online the first three Jewish Congregations in the United States, comparing the origins of the Congregations to the architectural styles of their buildings. Finally, students will explore a letter from George Washington to one of the Jewish Congregations and explain why the letter is important. An hour later, these 10 year olds will have some tangible artifacts and dialogues about the Jewish Colonial Immigrant experience.

Could we lecture them? Of course, but they would remember nothing except we talked about George Washington. Could we give them worksheets? Absolutely, but they would walk out drawing pretty pictures of Jewish Temples. Giving students big questions and saying you go find the information. Following that with questions in which they need to think and draw conclusions engages children to manipulate the information, connect it to their background knowledge, and generate their personal perspectives. This is engagement. This is when learning becomes personal and meaningful. This is possible in many of our lessons. If this can be done with Early Colonial Jewish Immigration with 25 ten-year old children who would have 900 better things to be doing with their Sunday mornings than be at Sunday School, it certainly can be done when we explore the characters and settings of a story in our classroom or identify volumes of different shapes in our math classes. Engagement is possible if we allow it. Engagement is powerful if we go beyond compliance and make it personally meaningful.