Derek L. McCoy

Student engagement has always been a critical goal for how we set up classrooms and develop lesson plans. Ensuring that we have a tight time frame of activities and that we were monitoring students of on-task behaviors were [and are] essentials. This defined quality lesson planning.

Some recent training in my district on engagement led me to find and share this infographic from the Schlecty Center on Levels of Engagement. Great, clear illustration of where students fall into the spectrum of activity and attentiveness. I really like the illustrations on the side where the student moves from his head down to his hand up. If you haven’t seen or heard about these levels of engagement, give this a good read. We should have a clear understanding of strategic and ritualistic compliance. We will change the world when we change practices and beliefs to keep kids from just ‘doing school.’

Empowerment

My recent conversations about engagement have forced me to reconsider how I look at it and place it on the spectrum of what goes on in the classroom in terms of learning and student agency.

I’m sharing a definition of engagement from edglossary.org for student engagement:

Motivation, meaningfulness, inspiration and inquisitiveness are all important components and explained well. But when I think of the great work my teachers do here at West Rowan Middle and the work we are building up in Rowan-Salisbury Schools, I identify a key missing component as empowerment.

I believe empowerment is a next step. We can have engaging and interesting lessons created by teachers. I would safely guess that we have all been students in classes where the teacher created a lesson that was fun to dive into. But at the heart, that was a teacher-centered activity or at least a teacher driven lesson that had students captivated, engaged in completing.

Empowerment is the action of giving students choice and/or freedom to develop their own understandings or deepen their knowledge about a topic. When we have options we chose when we want to be challenged and how far we want to go.

Please consider the below stock photo I found of the interwebs. While I’m not sure how they were used for original intent, I am going to make some assumptions [yes, I know] about them that we can hopefully apply to our schools and classrooms.

I consider the students in this picture engaged. Students are attentive, no one is throwing desks, eyes on screens appearing to attend to work. Again, we would have to get in the classroom and have a couple of talks to find out the true nature of the work and how students are truly progressing. Check out the teacher?

Here I see different student activity. By design, students are encouraged to talk and mix it up. I see students working at their own pace. What is the teacher doing?
Again, there are some assumptions with these pictures. But the difference in student activity can clearly be seen.

Power of Empowerment

I took this picture Friday afternoon two minutes before dismissal. This student’s 7th grade ELA teacher, Mrs Brawley, has embraced Genius Hour, or as her classes like to call it ‘Radical Research’ [same concept]. Mrs Brawley builds in time amongst their requirements for students to explore some personal interests and later present some findings. This young lady was so engrossed in her research topic [her research area was outside the door of her classroom] she was unaware the time [2 minutes before school dismissal], afternoon announcements [earbuds and search engines] the world around her [hallways filling with kids at lockers].

Empowered students:

• have choice for what to dive into;
• don’t have deadlines, they have learning goals;
• can speak intelligently about their learning outcomes;
• make presentations on what they have learned;
• have a personalized path agreed upon by teachers, parents and themselves;
• can apply their passion for learning to all subject areas;
• understand how to overcome barriers;
• communicate and collaborate at high levels.

Engagement is a crucial step by not the last.