Levels of Engagement

Getting compliance from children is easy -- the real challenge is resisting the temptation to resort to rewards and punishments and carrots and sticks that will only get us compliance at the cost of engagement. 

Here are a couple posts on engagement vs. compliance:

Everything I know about engagement I learned in kindergarten

Folly of Coercion

Discipline is distracting

Rhetoric of Rigor

Compliance vs Engagement

Disengaged kids are inconvenient

3 Major Shifts Public Education needs to make

Everything I know about engagement I learned in kindergarten

This was written by Doug Johnson who is a K-12 teacher who is the Director of Libraries and Technology for the Mankato, Minnesota Public Schools. Johnson blogs here. This is an excerpt from a post found here. For an entertaining read, check out Johnson's freely admitted personal biases.

by Doug Johnson

In kindergarten you get:

• Show and tell. You got to do something or bring something and then tell others about it. Secondary skill attainment measurement needs to be less about testing and more about show and tell performance-based assessment. Oh, and listening to other students is a lot more involving than listening to the old person in the room.

• Choices. As a little kid you often got to choose - your library book, your reading buddy, your activity, the subject of your drawing. People tend to choose things that interest them and interesting things are engaging. How often do we let older students choose?

• Play. Elementary teachers can make a game out of almost anything - and make just about every task feel like play. The older we get, the less we get to play and more we have to work. Just why is that? Gamification is a fancy term for putting play back into the curriculum. Look it up.

• Naps. Most adolescents I know are tired - and not because they've been up all night texting. (Well, maybe that's part of it.) We've long known that teens do better when school starts later in the morning. Tired people have a tough time staying engaged.

• To go outside. The best learning takes place in the "real world" not in the classroom. Whether it is studying bugs and leaves in first grade, marching with the band in junior high, or doing service learning as seniors, we all are more interested when it is the real world with which we are dealing.

• Colors. A blank sheet of construction paper and some crayolas have always let young learners be creative. Creativity is inherently engaging. What's the high school classroom's equivilant to scissors and paste? 

• To do it together. Reading groups. Play groups. Science groups. It's better with other kids. Social learners are engaged learners.

• Reading for enjoyment. Our elementary teachers and librarians want us to practice reading so much they let us read what we like! Do our secondary teachers want us to write so much, know so much, experiment so much, and solve problems so much that we get to do it for enjoyment?

• Learning that's important. Nobody needs to convince a little kid that learning to read, to add and subtract, or to know about firemen is important. And that you should pay attention when being taught these things. Calculus, world history, the Romantic poets, the atomic structure of non-metals, not so much. If you can't convince me what you are teaching should be important to me, teach something that is.

• Care. OK, this should have been the first one. I really believe a lot little kids are engaged because they know someone cares that they are. Yeah, the littlies are cute and cuddly and all that, but the gangly, awkward, homely teens need to know adults care too. When someone else is paying attention to you, you pay more attention yourself.

There you are - 10 simple steps to keep the engagement level from tanking.

Folly of Coercion

Grant Wiggins wrote a post on how distant authorities can bastardize good ideas with their thoughtless interpretations and heavy-handed mandates. He defines stupidification as:

Stupidification (n): 1. A deadly illness in which perfectly good ideas and processes are killed as a result of thoughtless interpretation and implementation. 2. The reducing of intricate issues and processes to simplistic, rigid, and mandated policies, in the impatient quest for quick fixes to complex problems.

Wiggins goes on to explain that the key to avoiding stupidifcation is to never stop asking why. And then he points out that "when practice becomes unmoored from purpose, rigidity sets in."

I know too many teachers who have become compliant and mindless agents of the state who expend blood, sweat and tears trying to find an ounce of good from a boatload of mandated sludge.

If educators resign themselves to being nothing more than agents of the state for delivering top-down mandated, prefabricated, content-bloated, scripted curriculums then it makes sense to do whatever it takes to manipulate, bribe, threaten, bully and harass kids into doing whatever it is we want them to do. If this is our perspective, then as long as the kids do what we want, even begrudgingly, we consider compliance our mandate.

But...

...if educators see their responsibility as engaging every learner in a personalized journey in discovering and constructing their passion, we come to see authentic engagement as infinitely more important than compliance.

Ultimately the best educators come to see school not as something done to kids, but something done by them and with them.

This isn't just good for children -- it's good for all people, and teachers are people, too. Forcing people who have less power than you to do whatever you want isn't only objectionable when your objectives are faulty. Regardless of the quality of your objectives, coercion is as objectionable as it is unsustainable.

In his post Change by Decree, Alfie Kohn writes:

[T]rue leaders are those who recognize that the quality of an idea doesn’t justify an attempt to shove it down people’s throats. Nor does it increase the likelihood that such an effort will be successfully digested. The idea will eventually just be, um, coughed back up.

This is why the best administrators and policy makers come to see education policies not as something done to teachers, but something done by them and with them.

Discipline is Distracting

To focus on discipline is to ignore the real problem: We will never be able to get students (or anyone else) to be in good order if, day after day, we try to force them to do what they do not find satisfying.

-William Glasser

Often we express sincere frustration when we can't get someone (who usually has less power than us) to do what we want them to do.

When we catch ourselves or others making this complaint, we need to resist engaging in carrots and sticks -- instead we need to first reflect on the task that we are demanding be done. 

If it is sincerely something that no one would ever want to do willingly, then we shouldn't be surprised that we are met with resistance.

If it is something that we would sincerely wish others to be inherently interested in and authentically engaged with, then we must move away from doing things to people to gain compliance and shift towards working with people in an effort to encourage engagement.

The real problem isn't that you can't get them to do what you want - the real problem is that they don't see why they would want to, and force won't solve this problem; in fact, it will only make things worse. 

Which is why discipline is distracting.

Rhetoric of rigor

Tougher standards.

Higher standards.

Raise the bar.

Rigor.

For too long education systems have bought into the rhetoric that confuses harder with better. It's as if some brainiac woke up one morning and decided we can "save our schools" by ratcheting up standards for kids that educators already have a hard time coercing into learning what distant authorities believe to be important.

The underlying message here is that school is something that must be done to kids. When we see learning like this, is it any surprise that we justify the use of what Frank Smith called "the intrusive mass of unnecessary external controls in which teaching and learning have become embedded, including testing, grading, and contrived competitiveness"?

Under the tyranny of this system, the adults tend to focus mostly on what the students fail to learn, rather than on what they are learning, which likely has more influence on their lives. In other words, we are drowning in the deficiency model of Schooling (with a capital S).

Under the tyranny of this system, children come to learn that learning is a chore, or as Frank Smith puts it:

The main thing we learn when we struggle to learn is that learning is a struggle.

It's time we put rigor in the grave where it belongs and liven up our vocabulary for learning with a more preferable word: vigor.

Where rigor may demand compliance, vigor brings engagement. And where there's interest, achievement follows.

Compliance vs Engagement

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Susan Ohanian and Home Education Magazine

What is your view of compulsory attendance? Has that view changed since the Standardista-movement took hold?

Ohanian: Throughout my career, I was a teacher who sought out every student listed on my rolls. Since I always taught 'difficult' students, there were always several who didn't show up. I pestered truant officers into tracking them down, because I wanted to prove to kids that school could be a positive place. I like to think I did prove this. 

The current abusive curriculum mandates have caused me to make a 180-degree turn. Philadelphia psychiatrist Robert Kay, who is opposed to compulsory attendance, and I have reached a compromise position: compel kids to come to the schoolyard. Then it's up to the teachers to offer an enticing enough experience that will get the kids through the door. I am a staunch supporter of public schools and the good they do; but with aching heart, there's no way I would compel kids to subject themselves to the test prep mania and the standards driven curricula that currently infect our schools.

If educators resign themselves to being nothing more than agents of the state for delivering top-down mandated, prefabricated, content-bloated, scripted curriculums then it makes sense to do whatever it takes to manipulate, bribe, threaten, bully, harass kids into doing whatever it is we want them to do. If this is our perspective, then as long as the kids do what we want, even begrudgingly, we consider compliance our mandate.

But...

...if educators see their responsibility as engaging every learner in a personalized journey in discovering and constructing their passion, we come to see authentic engagement as infinitely more important than compliance.

Ultimately the best educators come to see school not as something done to kids, but something done by them and with them.

What did you do in school today?

The Canadian Education Association (CEA) asked 67,000 students what did you do in school today?

From their website:

What did you do in school today? has provided CEA with insights into how more than 63,000 Canadian students feel about their experiences of engagement in school and learning. CEA has created an infographic of these student engagement results in Canadian schools. We invite you to take a walk through a school to see the national picture of intellectual, social and institutional engagement in elementary, middle and secondary schools and classrooms.

Click here to see their cool infographic.

Disengaged kids are inconvenient

If you are a teacher, it should be fairly easy to picture a student who learned a lot in your class. They were thoughtful and attentive. They showed creativity and an intrinsic desire to participate in class discussions. They asked follow-up questions on their own time, and said 'hi' with a smile when they saw you in the hallway.

Then you go to a staff meeting with your teaching colleagues and you hear how this same student does not learn much in other classes. They are thoughtless and inattentive. They show little creativity and no desire to participate in class discussions. They never ask questions, and are generally disengaged, bordering on rude.

But this is the same kid.

It's easy to blame the kids, but we have to acknowledge that there has to be some other variable that is influencing such a difference in behaviour. 

The misbehaviour is not the problem - rather it is a symptom of a far larger problem that has more to do with forces external of the student. But if this is true, teachers, parents, schools and whole systems might have to look at their own practices and that, for the most part, is more than a little inconvenient.