ENGAGING OUR STUDENTS

Today's prompt for the TeachThought blog challenge is about engaging our students.  When we engage our students then by definition they will become more motivated.

This is a post I wrote in September but thought it would be appropriate to repost it as part of the TeachThought blog challenge

This post is based on this months Educational Leadership Magazine.

Picture from ASCD

I think we could all agree that today we want our students to be motivated and engaged in the learning process. Daniel Pink says "With engagement you're doing something because you truly want to do it, because you see the virtues of doing it. However Pink contrasts that with complaint behavior when do something because someone told to do it.

Many classroom by default are places that we see more complaint behavior than engaged behavior and in reality we need to shift this so that students are engaged and are given a sense of freedom.

Pink says it best; We need leaders, both in organizations and in schools, who create an atmosphere in which people have a sufficient degree of freedom; can move toward mastery on something that matters;and know why they're do something, not just how to do it.........As parents, as teachers, as entire organization, our instinct it toward greater control. We think control is going to make something better. But people only have two reactions to control: They comply or defy. We don't want defiant kids but we also don't want compliant kids. We want kids who are engaged. If you truly want  to engage  kids, you have to pull back on the control, and create conditions in which they can tap into their own inner motivations." 

To have engaged students we need to give up on the control and allow the natural motivation to shine. All students are motivated the only question is what is their level of motivation. By giving up control and allowing the motivation to come through we will end up with more engaged students.

Jackson and Zmuda in their article "4 Keys to Student Engagement" also make the the distinction between Complaint and Engaged. They point out the following:
  "Real engagements not compliance. We can't pine for engaged learners when our policies and practices tend to focus on producing compliant learners. If we want to grow capacity in our students;unearth student talents, dreams, and aspirations; and instill perseverance through a focus on doing hard work, learning from mistakes and revising one's work,we need to design classroom practices around securing real engagement. 

To sort of wrap things up Cossett and Gilmore in their article "10 Standards for Motivation " give us a top 10 list:

1.  The need for Active Learning
2. Lessons incorporate student autonomy
3. Learning is relevant
4. Frequent opportunities for collaboration 
5. Appropriate use of technology
6. Multiple learning methods
7. A balance of challenge and success the create independence. 
8. Differentiate 
9. Feedback and authentic assessment
10. Inquiry that promotes a sense of curiosity and desire to learn

To sum up : Motivation + Autonomy= Engagement and Compliance and Control reduce motivation and therefore limit true engagement.