Student Engagement: more than being busy

Educators in our school district are focused on increasing student engagement. We intuitively know that if students are going to learn, they must be captivated by what they're learning. But being engaged is more than just being busy. So how do we define student engagement?

The Science House at the Science Museum of Minnesota uses this formula to define engagement:

Talking on Task + Manipulating Materials = Student Engagement

They surmise that if students are engaged, students will learn.

Our Teacher Growth, Development, and Evaluation System plan relies on the following components of the Charlotte Danielson's 2013 The Framework for Teaching to define and measure student engagement:

• Domain 2 
• Component 2A: Creating an Environment of Respect and Rapport 
• Component 2C: Managing Classroom Procedures 
• Component 2D: Managing Student Behavior 
• Domain 3 
• Component 3B: Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques 
• Component 3C: Engaging Students in Learning 
• Component 3D: Using Assessment in Instruction 

These components give educators helpful parameters and strategies to engage students in "discussion, debate, answering 'what if?' questions, discovering patterns and the like," (p. 69). I acknowledge that if teachers implement such strategies, specifically Visible Thinking Routines that I have relentlessly promoted on this blog, students will be more engaged and more will be learned. However, if teachers want to truly engage students, it will take more than teaching strategies and techniques aimed at captivating student attention. For students to be authentically engaged, curriculum must be relevant, challenging, and significant.

Currently, in our the elementary school, students are often asked to learn literacy and mathematical ideas outside the contexts that these ideas are really for. Getting all students to engage at high levels proves to be extremely difficult, no matter the engagement strategy, when we teach these complex ideas in abstract, decontextualized terms.

Ron Ritchhart, in his book Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It, tells the story of teachers who connect their course activity to big ideas to enhance the purpose and meaning of the work for students. He writes that by doing this, "students become clear about the larger purpose of the class and what the teacher wants them to understand and learn more about. This makes it easier to engage students in thinking because the work itself demands thinking and active exploration." He continues, "the thinking demanded of students is authentic in that it serves particular ends, unlike certain one-size-fits-all thinking-skills programs that might introduce a thinking skill in a discrete context disconnected from anything else students might be doing," (p. 150-1).

Ritchhart thus is advocating for curriculum that is based on students constructing understanding of relevant, challenging, and significant ideas, not delivering insignificant curriculum using engaging activities.

So, if we can agree that to authentically engage students, we need the right combination of engagement strategies and relevant and significant curriculum that is based on understanding big ideas, what are these ideas that are worth knowing about?

In the International Baccalaureate's (IB) Primary Years Program (PYP), the answer is to design a concept-driven curriculum; a curriculum where the understanding of significant ideas is more important than the memorization of isolated facts. H. Lynn Erickson writes in her book Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom that concepts are timeless, abstract, universal, and transferrable (p. 31). But there are many big ideas worth knowing that fit this description. How are we to know which ones to teach?

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe suggest a list of transferable concepts in their 2005 book Understanding by Design (p. 74). They also give tips for finding big ideas within the state academic standards. Erickson echoes this idea by suggesting using the stem, "The student understands that ..." to identify concepts in state standards. She notes that this lead-in phrase "sets up the structure for a generalization sentence - two or more concepts stated in a relationship," (p. 52).

The more I work with teachers at identifying concepts - that is, ideas worth teaching - the more I think that another way to "test" to see if the idea you're considering is a concept is to consider how important the idea is to adults. If adults are continuously wrestling with the particular idea, chances are you're working with a concept.

The bottom line is this: as long as our elementary curriculum is exclusively delivered separately in reading and math blocks with little time dedicated to learning literacy and mathematical processes and strategies in the context of constructing understanding of key and related concepts within the PYP units of inquiry, our students will never truly be engaged with any of it and standardized test scores will continue to lag.

Engagement is more than students paying attention and being busy. In order for students to internalize literacy and math processes and knowledge concepts, they must be taught in the context of learning real-world big ideas; ideas that are timeless, abstract, universal, transferable, and still being discussed by adults.

When we begin to deliver this kind of engaging, authentic curriculum, coupled with employing engagement strategies designed at getting students actively and meaningfully thinking, talking, and working, we will start to see increases in levels of authentic student engagement and increases in standardized test scores soon will follow.

Making Visualizations Visible

The ultimate goal of literacy instruction is to arm students with the literacy processes, strategies, and skills that they will be able to intuitively and independently use to extract meaning from text. "Text" can include the written word, videos, interviews, speakers, field trips, conversations, discussions, and more.

The teaching and learning of these literacy strategies is best done in authentic contexts. On page 70 of Making the PYP Happen, the authors state that "it is the school's responsibility to provide authentic context for language teaching and learning in all areas of the curriculum," [emphasis added].

In a Primary Years Program (PYP), the program of inquiry provides the authentic, engaging, challenging, and significant context for learners to develop and use language. In other words, teachers should situate literacy instruction right inside the units of inquiry. However, it should be clarified that although comprehension and metacognitive strategies are to be taught within the unit of inquiry, it cannot be assumed that learners will implicitly pick up on these strategies while studying content concepts. PYP teachers still must provide specific time and opportunities for their learners to explore, discover, practice, and construct understanding of these literacy strategies. When we teach literacy in this way, students are learning literacy processes and content concepts simultaneously.

Recently, I took the opportunity to teach a first grade reading lesson from our school's literacy curriculum. The objectives of the lesson were that students would retell story events and visualize & analyze characters during reading. Rather than use the text provided by the series, which would not have been authentic, challenging, or significant for the first graders, I choose a text that would help the learners understand their current Unit of Inquiry's Central Idea: Responsible choices promote balanced living.

A List from Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel.

In the story A List, Toad creates a list of all the things he'll do during the day. I selected this story because the list he makes contains many responsible choices that would represent a balanced lifestyle. (SPOILER ALERT: Toad never completes all the items on the list because it blows away in the wind and he subsequently goes melodramatically ballistic, which should not come as a shock for those of you who know Toad well.)

Before reading the story, I discussed with the students the importance of being able to really understand a story while we read. "After all," I said, "that's the point of reading! To understand what you read." In their book Strategies that Work, Harvey and Goudvis say that "different readers rely on different strategies to help them gain better understanding." One such strategy is visualizing. "Visualizing strengthens our inferential thinking. When we visualize, we are in fact inferring but with mental images rather than words and thoughts." The authors continue, "When we visualize, we create pictures in our minds that belong to us and no one else," (p. 130-2).

However, if we let students keep their visualizations locked up in their minds, students may become mentally overwhelmed. Rather, my goal of the lesson was to get students to make their visualizations visible so that they could more fully engage in thinking. "...it is difficult [for students] to do their best thinking because of cognitive overload, that is, because the thinking demands exceed their capacity. When our thinking is distributed, when we do not have to rely solely on our internal mental resources, we free ourselves up to engage in more challenging thinking," Ron Ritchhart in Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It, p. 100-1).

I prompted students to visualize what was going on in the story as I read, but then to draw those pictures from their mind on a blank sheet of paper. After reading, we talked about what their pictures should include, if they really, truly understood the story. Together, we decided that students would need to have the characters of the story, the setting (time and place), and what went on in the story (the events).

To show students how to self-assess their understanding of the text, one student showed his visualization to the group while I modeled the kinds of questions the students should ask themselves.

Did I understand the story?
Did I include the characters?
Did I include the setting?
Did I include the important events of the story?

By reviewing all the students' visible visualizations (I included other examples below), the classroom teacher and I could clearly and quickly see who was able to adequately extract meaning from the text and who was not. Using this powerful information, the classroom teacher could form guided reading groups to support students' unique and specific literacy needs.

After reading about making students' thinking and understanding visible by having them draw out their mental visualizations, how could you make your students' visualizations visible with the "texts" they read, listen to, and view?

The Micro Lab Protocol

For students to learn life's big ideas (key and related concepts), they must be engaged in thinking that allows them to construct meaning. In order for kids to be engaged and thinking, they must be participating in the learning engagements we have set up for them.

Students must be actively writing, conversing, manipulating, explaining, using, doing, reading, asking, sharing, listening, discussing, investigating, demonstrating, problem-solving, searching, finding, taking charge, THINKING, discovering, challenging, connecting, and synthesizing.

All too often though, many of our students do not engage in the kinds of behaviors that they need to for deep thinking and thus true learning to occur. Instead, those with high status tend to dominate groupwork activities and leave those with lower status to take on a more passive role. (To learn more about status in the classroom, see Elizabeth Cohen's book Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom).

The Micro Lab Protocol (p. 147-151 of Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison) is "a simple structure for ensuring that all voices are heard and ideas attended to before the topic of focus is discussed." The authors point out that this strategy isn't a thinking routine per se, but it is a powerful tool for making students' thinking visible and assuring that everyone is engaged, thinking, and learning.

This summer, I had the fortune of working with a small group of 6th graders. We were working hard on adopting a growth mindset (for more on mindset, check out Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck or this blog post from July 18, 2014) as well as providing feedback to others in a constructive manner.

After watching a video that one of their classmates had created to explain a math concept, students worked in triads to share their thoughts on the video. They took one minute each to share what they thought the video's creator did well and what he could improve on in the future. While each student shared, the other members listened attentively without comment or interruption. After 30 seconds of silence, the routine was repeated for the second and third members of the group. After everyone had a chance to individually share uninterrupted, the group of three was invited to discuss freely and collectively come up with the feedback they would eventually share with the math video's creator. 

To reflect on the Micro Lab Protocol, I asked the students what went well during their sharing and subsequent discussions and what they could get better at. The t-chart below shows their reflections.

After reading about how 6th graders used The Micro Lab Protocol to ensure that everyone was engaged and thinking, how could you or have you used a similar equity strategy to guarantee that all students, regardless of status, are able to participate fully? 

Visible Thinking ROUTINES

The book Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison is chalked full of thinking routines that can be used with students of any age, with any content to get their thinking visible.

Making students' thinking visible benefits everyone involved. When students are able to think about what's going on in their own heads (metacognition), they begin to actively take responsibility for developing conceptual understanding, instead of passively depending on teachers to provide them with information. 

Seeing students' thinking also is beneficial for teachers. When we are able to see how students are thinking about the key and related concepts of subject matter, we're able "to confront students' misconceptions and design experiences to advance their understanding," (p. 27 of M.T.V.). To confront students' misconceptions, we must give them appropriate, effective, and immediate feedback that will push their understanding further and deeper.

When learning about Visible Thinking Routines though, teachers often focus on the importance of making students' thinking visible and they miss the fact that these tools and structures are meant to be routines that should become patterns of behavior. On his site, Ron Ritchhart, defines Thinking Routines as "patterns of behavior adopted to help one use the mind to form thoughts, reason, or reflect. We see these patterns emerging as the routines that are used over and over, becoming ingrained in us, both teachers and students. Once these routines become second nature, flexibility can emerge."

One particular fifth grade teacher understands the importance of using a thinking routine over and over again. Recently, during the summer session, this teacher used children's books as a way to help students construct understanding of the PYP attitudes. To help make sense of what was going on in the texts, the teacher used the 4C's thinking routine (p. 140-146 in M.T.V.), where students read a text and identify connections, challenges, concepts, and changes (for more information about the 4C's thinking routine, check out this post dated May 1, 2014).

During the first week, the teacher read the text Officer Buckle & Gloria by Peggy Rathmann to the students and completed the 4C's as a whole group.

As the class continued to read about, investigate, and construct meaning of the PYP attitudes, they also continued to engage with the 4C’s thinking routine. It was the teacher's hope that the habitual use of the 4C's would allow the students to get used to the activity so that it would become routine.

After using the 4C's multiple times over the course of four weeks, the students collaboratively used the thinking routine one last time as they read The Lotus Seed by Sherry Garland, a text that focused on appreciation.  As they progressed through the 4C’s, the concepts section still seemed to be the hardest for the students to grasp, but the teacher was encouraged by the student work that was completed following the reading of the text.

After reading about how one class of fifth grade students used the 4C's thinking routine over and over, until it become ingrained in both teacher and students, how have you or could you use a routine over and over again until it became second nature to you and your students?

Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate

They're at it again!

I have now twice (April 25, 2014 and March 28, 2014) written about teachers in my school using the Visible Thinking Routine Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate (Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison) as a way to help students uncover and organize prior knowledge to identify connections.

In first grade, teachers used this Thinking Routine to help invite their students into the unit of inquiry Sharing the Planet. Students will investigate the changes that animals experience throughout their life cycle. Part of the invitation step in the inquiry process is to pre-assess what students already know, understand, and can do prior to the study to help plan and guide further learning.

Teachers began the thinking routine letting their students know that they were interested in seeing and hearing the students' thinking about livings things.

Students then generated a "collection" of living things, writing and drawing on slips of paper.

Together, students sorted the living things into categories that they created. Students were asked to explain their thinking throughout the sorting process. After the categories were established, the class labeled their categories.

Next, students made connections between the groups, again being asked to explain what they were thinking. Finally, students elaborated on their groups, by adding other living things to the categories they had previously established.

It should be noted that during this process, as students made their thinking visible through their explanations, many interesting ideas and misconceptions were brought to light.

Is a rock a living thing?
How about water?
What about love?
How about blood?
What makes a living thing living?
Should a shark go in the same category as a whale and a dolphin?
Is a dinosaur living, if there aren't any living now?
Should we sort animals by what they eat or by where they live? Or perhaps by how they act?

As students explained their thinking, teachers made mental (or in some cases written) notes on what their students were saying. These notes will help teachers plan future learning engagements.

Below are the products of the Thinking Routine Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate from different first grade classrooms. Note that each one is different, because it was constructed by the particular students in each of the different classrooms.

This is the same Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate as above, just a couple of days later. The pink panda paper in the upper right corner of the picture is research that a student completed at home on her own without any teacher direction. Also, note the difference between the two pictures, especially the number of connections students made between the groups.

Note how the students basically crafted the central idea of the unit of inquiry in the middle of their sort.

"Love" made it through the first round of the sort, as did water. In this version, those items were taken off.

  

After reading about how first grader teachers used the Thinking Routine Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate to invite their students into the unit of inquiry about changes and cycles, how could you or have you used this Thinking Routine with your students?

Flow maps

In an earnest attempt to teach more conceptually, teachers must give students tools with which they can make their conceptual thinking visible. For instance, students can use a circle map (a type of Thinking Map®) to investigate the concept of form while when working with the concept of connection, they can use a double bubble concept map (another type of Thinking Map®).

Making students’ conceptual thinking visible is beneficial for a number of reasons. Students benefit from having “a greater awareness of the significant role that thinking plays in cultivating their own understanding,” (Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison in Making Thinking Visible, p. 15). When students are more acutely aware of their own thinking skills and how they use those skills to construct understanding, they gain greater independence in the learning process. Furthermore, making students’ thinking visible is beneficial for the teacher because it “provides us with the information we as teachers need to plan opportunities that will take students’ learning to the next level and enable continued engagement with the ideas being explored,” (the Making Thinking Visible folks again, this time, p. 27).

The flow map (a type of Thinking Map®) is a tool that students can use to make their thinking visible when they’re working with the concept of causation. (Note: although Thinking Maps aren’t from the Making Thinking Visible text, they fit the definition of a thinking routine, as define by one of its authors here.) When teaching a lesson to fifth graders recently about the short- and long-term impacts of decisions, I decided to put that thinking routine to work with them.

I was teaching a lesson I had written for an economics class I took at the University of Minnesota. Our summative project is to write a lesson using children’s literature to teach an MN Economic Benchmark (2011). I selected this fifth grade benchmark to teach: Economic Reasoning Skills (5.2.1.1.1): Apply a decision-making process to identify an alternative choice that could have been made for a historical event; explain the probable impact of that choice. For example: Decision-making processes - a decision tree, PACED decision-making process (Problem, Alternative, Criteria, Evaluation, Decision). Instead of using a decision tree or the PACED decision-making process as the benchmark suggests, I elected to use a flow map, so that students could see the way that decisions caused subsequent impacts.

As I invited students into the inquiry, I asked them what they knew about Nelson Mandela and Apartheid in South Africa. Then, I showed a short video that gave students a (very) brief overview of what Apartheid was. Once students understood (very) generally the situation in South Africa during Nelson Mandela’s life, I read them the picture book Nelson Mandela by Kadir Nelson as a way to investigate the connection between decisions and their impacts. As I read, we worked together to create a flow map, showing how the decisions of his parents, and then later on his own decisions, impacted future decisions Mandela would make, which would ultimately impact South Africa, its history, and its people in dramatic ways.

This is the original flow map we created as a class. Please note that students used the abbreviation "N" for Nelson Mandela. Because we were running short on time, I skipped the part about how Mandela went into hiding and fled to Egypt. That is why that decision did not make the flow map that is shown above. Also, I realized after teaching the lesson that we should have added the ultimate impact to the flow map: that Apartheid ended, although that was a major part of our discussion.

Then, in accordance with the economic benchmark and to further investigate the connection between decisions and subsequent impacts, I instructed students to creatively and critically think of an alternative choice that Mandela could have picked at any point during his life, instead of one of the decisions he did make. Students then needed to use the flow map structure to show the probable impacts of that alternative choice (with a clean sheet of paper laying OVER the original flow map). Below are examples of the students’ thinking.

This student decided to change the third decision made in Mandela's life (according to the text). Notice that with this alternative choice, Mandela never became involved in the anti-Apartheid movement, nor did he marry Winnie as was detailed in the book. This student clearly understands how different Mandela's life would have been had he made a different decision early on in his life. 

This student decided to change the fifth decision made in Mandela's life (according to the text). Notice this student understood the impact his decision to give up protesting Apartheid would have had on that set of laws, the history of South Africa, and its people ("Apartheid continued to go on"). 

This student also decided to change the fifth decision made in Mandela's life (according to the text). It is interesting how this student recognized Mandela as a leader because when he decided to give up the anti-Apartheid protests as an "alternative choice" this student recognizes that others would have given up as well. 

Finally, as a way to give students the chance to demonstrate their conceptual understanding of the connection between decisions and their short- and long-term impacts, I asked the students if they could decide to take a break from reading over their 9-day spring break. Students were given the option of showing their thinking in paragraph form or in a flow map. I was checking to see if they understood that the decisions they make today have impacts that will last long into the future.

This student, who decided to demonstrate her conceptual understanding in paragraph form, was able to identify both a short-term impact ("if you don't read you might not be as fast as you could before") and a long-term impact ("I decide to read because it is good for you and later on in my life I will be a good reader") of a decision. 

This student used a flow map to show her conceptual understanding of decisions and their impacts. She too writes about short-term impacts of her decision to keep reading ("I won't get behind in reading") and long-term impacts of the same decision ("I decide to go to college after high school"). 

After reading about how fifth graders used a "flow map" as a thinking routine to construct conceptual understanding, how could you use or have you used "flow maps" in your instructional practice?

Chalk Talk

At the beginning of a unit of inquiry, a teacher has the important responsibility of creating a desire within her students to know about and understand a particular concept. During this initial “invitation” phase of the inquiry, teachers need to set up learning engagements where students can feel safe enough to take risks, ask questions, explore, be engaged, share their background knowledge, and to think outside the box. Yes, this initial step is a pre-assessment; it is essential that the teacher knows what the students know, understand, and are able to do as they dive into the unit of inquiry. However, this first step is more than just figuring out what students already know about a particular concept and collecting student questions. It is about capturing the hearts, brains, and spirits of the kids and igniting authentic interest in the concepts & topics being studied. (It is important to note that these ideas about this first step in the inquiry cycle are not my own. They all came from our school’s staff, when we completed the Visual Thinking Routine, “I used to think … Now I think” about the inquiry process at a recent professional development. I simply aggregated their responses to create our unique inquiry cycle: Invitation-Investigation-Demonstration.)

Because this first step in the inquiry process is so influential to the success of the study, the learning engagement that the teacher decides to complete with her students must be a significant and engaging one. Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison have included seven Visual Thinking Routines for introducing and exploring ideas in their 2011 book, Making Thinking Visible. Chalk Talk is one of those routines that teachers can use to “uncover prior knowledge, ideas, and questioning.” The routine is an “open discussion on paper; it ensures that all voices are heard and it gives students thinking time," (p. 51).

Recently, a second-grade teacher was preparing to begin a unit of inquiry with a central idea of: people influence the world in positive ways. During this unit of inquiry, students inquire into the characteristics of a hero, people who have made a difference, one’s own personal strengths, and how people can make a difference in the world. To spark her students’ interest in these particular concepts, she wrote several prompts on large sheets of chart paper and placed them on tables around the room. Her students had markers and she invited them to silently move freely from poster to poster, recording their responses to the prompts. Below are the "finished" products:

With these posters, the teacher not only excited her students about the idea of studying heroes who have made a difference both in the past and in the present, but she was able to efficiently collect valuable information about what the students already know, understand, and are able to do. She can now use this information to tailor future lessons to meet the specific needs of her students.

For instance, during a subsequent lesson, the teacher helped the students aggregate the information they wrote down from the "what is a hero" poster to create a working definition of a "hero".

Now, as students learn about heroes through reading, writing, and viewing a variety of multiple sources throughout the unit of inquiry, they can "test" their definition of what a hero is and continue to adapt it.

Building on the success she had with the original chalk talk routine, the teacher wanted to use the same Visible Thinking Routine, but in a different way. She knew the students already were familiar with the process, so they were ready to apply that familiar process to new content. 

As a way to continue to inquire into heroes, the teacher introduced the students to the poem "Lincoln", by Nancy Byrd Turner. Knowing that the poem was beyond the independent reading level of second graders, her plan to scaffold the activity was to copy each stanza of the poem onto a separate piece of chart paper. She even made the point to the second graders that she divided the poem into fourths (math connection). She then had the students read the poem, stanza by stanza, noting their ideas about what they thought the author was trying to communicate with each stanza.

Since learning about how this particular second grade teacher used the Visible Thinking Routine "Chalk Talk" in her classroom, other members of the team showed me how they have used it in the past with their students. Here are some examples of how other second grade classrooms used this Visible Thinking Routine as they studied communities last fall:

After reading about how members of the second grade team are using the Visible Thinking Routine "Chalk Talk" to introduce and explore new topics and concepts with their students, how could you use "Chalk Talk, in your instructional practice?