MWSubstack 013: The Engagement Issue
We hear it everywhere. Today's students are harder to engage. Are there effective ways to break through the detachment – to motivate and excite them?
Welcome to MiddleWeb Substack. It’s a twice-monthly, two-topic, five-minute read for middle grades educators, featuring several of MiddleWeb’s most popular and influential articles, a book review, and a noteworthy 4-8 resource or project we’ve spotted. That’s it!
Student engagement is a problem so pressing and so much on the minds of teachers that we've decided to devote an entire issue of MiddleWeb Substack to the topic.
Teacher educator and frequent contributor Curtis Chandler summarized the research in his resource-rich MiddleWeb post Can Teachers Measure Student Engagement? (a must-read for engagement insights):
"Higher levels of student engagement consistently lead to a range of short and long term positive outcomes – improved learning, achievement, persistence, retention, cognitive development, and a reduced risk of dropping out of high school or college."
Here are some of our most helpful articles about ways to engage. Pick out a few to read this summer! (Apologies if we’ve stretched our five-minute promise.)
► Engage them with teaching strategies
The Five Rules of Student Engagement
Teachers who fail to actively involve students in learning experiences are mired in mediocrity, says noted author and teaching coach Barbara Blackburn. She shares five rules for student engagement she’s discovered – with multiple examples from real classrooms.
How We Use Book Clubs to Empower Our Readers
Working together in small groups using a book club model has helped sixth graders in Sara Kugler’s K-6 school shift from passive and disinterested to engaged and self-reliant. They’re eager to read and ready to “talk books,” writes the literacy coach and co-teacher.
4 Keys to Engagement in Social Studies Class
Award-winning social studies teacher Ron Litz shares some of the ways he makes student voice a top priority in his history classroom – using teaching strategies that focus on engaging students with the past and allow them to demonstrate their learning in a variety of formats.
Cris Tovani: Use These 6Ts to Deepen Learning
Teacher, author and adolescent literacy consultant Cris Tovani guides us through her 6Ts of deep engagement (Topic, Target, Task, Text, Time, and Tending) as she tells the story of a workshop with 7th graders who are studying the Sahara Desert. Tovani's step-by-step work with them is a master class.
What Kind of Feedback Best Motivates Students?
Teachers are feedback machines – “we do it all day long!” – writes classroom teacher and popular blogger Larry Ferlazzo. Here he focuses on ways to give feedback that’s particularly effective at enhancing students’ sense of competence and encouraging intrinsic motivation.
Engagement Strategies That Just Don’t Work
Although some teaching strategies have been around for a long time, not all the “classics” are actually effective at engaging students in authentic ways. Bryan Harris and Lisa Bradshaw, the authors of Battling Boredom, explain why some common practices are more likely to disengage.
► Engage them by meeting their needs
8 Ways to Help Tweens Take Academic Risks
Students in the middle grades think in polarities and will go to great lengths to avoid embarrassment, writes school counselor Phyllis Fagell. But with the right supports, they can learn to engage and take risks – asking questions, joining discussions and learning more.
Teaching Stunts Offer Choice, Challenge, Play
Stunt teaching is, most simply, a focus on engaging students through the element of novelty or surprise, then maintaining engagement with the qualities of choice, challenge, and play. Stephanie Farley shares a story from her classroom that began with a misty apparition and led to an eight-week unit with engagement at full throttle.
Five Lesson Plan Tweaks That Will Boost Engagement
How is teaching like marketing? In student-centered classrooms, relatable lessons motivate students because they meet needs and have emotional appeal, writes teacher and former marketer Kelly Owens. In turn, engagement leads to purposeful work, supporting more on-task behaviors.
For New Teachers: How to Keep Kids on Task
Effective class management begins with dynamic planning and engagement, writes instructional specialist Miriam Plotinsky. Teachers who focus not just on delivering information but responding to student feedback in the moment can avoid “helicopter teacher” syndrome.
►Engage them heart-to-heart
Seeing and Celebrating Each Learner’s Gifts
Once teachers see, value, and capitalize on a learner’s unique talents and strengths, it changes the student and it changes us, writes Regie Routman. “Possibilities override limitations. Pride of accomplishment replaces failure. Effort leads to excellence. Joy is present, the best gift of all.”
1 Sure Way to Make Your Students Instantly Smile
After 20+ years of teaching, Dina Strasser has found one thing almost never fails to connect with adolescents: the positive reaction you get when you genuinely compliment a kid. Check out the strategy she’s developed to help reap smiles and build rapport and engagement.
Regie Routman “believes that we are most fully ourselves when ‘teaching, learning, and living are interwoven and seamlessly integrated.’ To show us this full self, she shares stories that might help us navigate our own worlds.“ – Read Sarah Cooper’s review of The Heart-Centered Teacher.
►ELSEWHERE
Edutopia's engagement resources
Browse Edutopia's curated collection How Learning Happens, updated for 2024. Edutopia is the premier free (and ad-free) platform for K-12 teaching resources. This compilation of past articles "explore(s) how educators can guide all students, regardless of their developmental starting points, to become productive and engaged learners." Be sure to see How to Engage Students the Moment They Enter the Classroom, which borrows from MiddleWeb!
►OUR BOOK REVIEW
Let’s Stop Teaching and Start Designing Learning: A Practical Guide by Jason Kennedy.
Jason Kennedy believes that planning on the front-end will result in better learning for students and more enjoyment for the teacher. Cathy Gassenheimer recommends his no-frills, how-to book that’s full of ideas about effective engagement through instructional design. Read the complete review.
►REVIEW THIS SPOTLIGHT BOOK
Frame Shifting for Teachers: Developing a Conscious Approach to Solving Persistent Teaching Dilemmas (Brianna L. Kennedy, Amy S. Murphy). Routledge/EOE, 2024
The authors show how adopting habits of mind, including curiosity and an asset-based teaching approach, is necessary for tackling teaching challenges more effectively and equitably. GO HERE to see the free book and our reviewing guidelines.
►NEXT TIME
Ever go to a party, tell folks you are (or soon will be) a middle school educator, and watch a look of pity or compassion cross their faces? We have the antidote for that kind of thinking – a collection of articles about middle schoolers...why we love 'em and how to teach 'em.