Engagement is a Tool, not a Goal

I was scrolling through Twitter and found this tweet.  Before I clicked on the video to watch it, the title put me off.  "What message is this guy sending to students?" I thought, "that they have to be entertained for learning to be valuable?"  I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I thought maybe he means something different by the word engaging.  Maybe he means engaging in a way I might agree with (like valuable or interesting), so I clicked on the video and realized why Tom Bennet had commented that it looked exhausting.  Tom was right.  This video is an ad for the guy's professional development seminars, and it is filled with teachers in training, doing a lot of energetic dances at the instruction of the trainer.  There is not a single moment (at least as portrayed in this ad) where anyone has a chance to sit and reflect on what they have learned.  They may be energized; they may be having fun (although I imagine the introverts among us would be miserable).  I'm not sure they are learning.  I'm not sure what they will take back to their classrooms that would add anything other than motion.

This causes me to ask the following question.  What's the sweet spot?  Where is the line between fun for the sake of fun (which is fine for recreation) and fun that actually enhances learning (which is what I want if I am going to spend class time on it)?  Are there times when having students dance while learning might be useful?  The research is clear that some movement while learning is good.  But, where is it just movement for the sake of movement?  I fear that is happening because well-meaning teachers hear "Movement is good" at a conference and don't take the time to find the nuances of what kind of movement is good and whether it should be connected to content.  

So, let me start by exploring what we mean by the word "engaging." I did a quick google search and found the first definition was "occupy, attract, or involve someone's interest or attention."  I'm on board with that.  I want to have my students' attention and interest.  Next question.  What do I want them to pay attention to?  What do I want them to be interested in?  The answer should obviously be "the thing I want them to learn."  I can put on a good show without teaching them a dang thing, and that is the opposite of what I want.

If you follow me on social media or have read a few blog posts, then I hope you know I am not in favor of boring students to death and just telling them to deal with it.  I believe strongly in involving students in their own learning and teaching with appropriate hands-on activities and technologies.  I assign projects to deepen learning in a way that my talking in class might not achieve.  But, teachers, please hear me - We must be intentional to choose activities that engage students in learning, not just in class.  When I tell my students about the time my cat ran up a tree and would not come back down, it is a little bit to get them to view me as a real person, but it is mostly to give them a visual image of gravitational potential energy transforming into kinetic energy so that when I give them similar problems to work on, I can say, "It like the cat in the tree," giving them something to connect to.  The seeming aside of that story doesn't just engage them in hearing a silly story; it has an educational payoff.   I show a lot of short videos in my class, often those that demonstrate things I cannot, but I have very few that last a full class period.  When I do show one of those, it isn't just because it's fun and engaging to watch videos (otherwise I would show them Marvel movies).  It's because the videos I have carefully chosen give them a view of something more effectively than I can.  For example, Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now: Glass shows students how their lives would be very different today without mirrors, lenses, phone screens, fiber optics, etc. and they leave with a different view of a seemingly mundane thing.  When I take kids into the lab to electrolyze salt water, I am aware that it is not going to involve fire or explosions or other things they might find more engaging, but I also know it is the most valuable lab we do because I refer back to it during the bonding chapter, the solutions chapter, and the electricity chapter (and tangentially in the acid/base chapter).  I have chosen it because while it is less engaging than another lab might be, it has more academic value.  When I blow something up, it is to demonstrate pressure and Boyle's law or synthesis reactions, not just to blow something up.  Are those things engaging?  You better believe it.  But what makes them valuable is the lead-up to and the reflection after the explosion.

We cannot out-entertain their phones, and we should stop trying.  It doesn't make us engaging; it highlights how lame we are compared to the entertainment industry.  I like to think I'm a pretty entertaining speaker, but they aren't going to choose me over Disney or Batman.  They have a budget that allows them to be immersive, but it is more than just that.  The end goal of the entertainment industry is, not surprisingly, entertainment.  Ours is learning.  For us, engagement is a means, not an end.  Learning is the end.  We're educators who use entertainment, not entertainers who might teach you something along the way.

As you lesson plan, choose activities that engage students in the thing you are trying to teach, but don't waste time on dancing and jumping around and taking laps around the room if they don't connect in some way to what you are teaching (that's possible, by the way, if you plan it well - I have a "States of Matter Dance").  Ask yourself how it will benefit your students, and if the answer is engagement with no objective or learning words after that, choose something else.  Engagement is a tool, not a goal.

The Men Who Look Over My Shoulder

I don't know how well you can see this, but this is the wall behind my school desk.  I believe it is important to establish credibility, so I hang my college diploma and my certification.  The thing at the bottom was added after the yearbook staff managed to surprise me with the dedication during the lockdown.  The two photos are of the two men who taught me what I now teach.  Mr. Sandberg, who taught me physical science 31 years ago, is the man in the color photo on the right; he is holding a Bible that I gave him as a goodbye gift we both left the school in which he taught me.  The man in the black and white photo was my physics teacher, Mr. Barbara.  (Incidentally, I took both photos, but for the black and white one, I not only took that photo, but I also developed the film and printed it in a darkroom.  I don't know why that matters to me so much, but it does.). Since the real first day of school is Monday, I thought it was a good moment to reflect on the power of these pictures.

These men look over my shoulder as I plan to teach students the same content that they taught me.  I've written about both of these men on this blog before and why they are meaningful in my life, so you can click the links at their names if you wish to read about them.  That isn't what I want to write about today, even though I would be happy to talk about them all day long.

What struck me this week as I pointed to these pictures as part of my orientation speech is the connection education provides to all of us, like a game of Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon.  

Education is a lot of things.  For some narrowly focused people, it is simply job training.  Those are the "When am I ever going to use this in life?" people.  They are the people who don't recognize they use algebra every day.  I'm glad that we can use the things we learn in school in our jobs, but if I thought that was the point, I wouldn't find it very compelling; so I am grateful it is more than that.  Others, including myself, have a view of education that is about knowing God.  As I told my students this week, "Education makes you a fuller human being.  We are made in the image of God, and He has given us all of this to help us know Him better, and learning it helps us to reflect that image more fully."  And, of course, there is a range of thoughts in between these two extremes that are also true of education.  But when I looked at these pictures before leaving on Friday, I thought about the fact that my students are being taught, in part, by these two men, which led me to think of education in a different way than I had before.  It is a connection to both the past and the future.

This isn't a new idea.  I just hadn't thought about it much before this week.  There are many examples of how people pass down knowledge to multiple generations through teaching. 

• Socrates mentored Plato, who passed philosophy on to Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great.  
• Yoda taught Luke Skywalker who then trained Rey.  
• When Newton built on what Galileo had established; he called it "standing on the shoulders of giants" and credited it with his ability to "see farther than other men."  

Some of my students have become teachers, which means that it is possible there is something happening in their classroom because it happened in mine, which is true only because it happened in Mr. Sandberg's or Mr. Barbara's (and many others as well).  And the chain could go farther back and farther forward as they were taught by people before and my students will also have students who teach others.  I don't know if I am adequately conveying how powerful I think this is because I feel like I am rambling, but in my brain, this is really awe-inspiring.  

The world of education has been rocked in recent years.  The pandemic was tough and amplified some of the problems that were already evident.  Public education is experiencing a profound teacher shortage.  We are all exhausted.  But this - this idea that education perpetuates knowledge so we don't have to discover everything in every generation - this has not changed because it cannot.  

Thank you to these men who look over my shoulder.  Thank you to those not pictured who are also part of my teaching.  Thank you to those who taught them.  Thank you to Sal Kahn and Hank Green and others who teach online to provide a horizontal connection as well.  Thank you to all whose teaching has informed my own.  Your influence will carry farther than you or I can ever know.

Back to Normal and Moving Forward

About three weeks into the lockdowns of 2020, I saw it for the first time.  It was a tweet that said, "Before we reopen schools, we have to reimagine them."  I remember reading that tweet and thinking, "Oh, crud, here it comes.  A lot of agendas are about to get pushed."  A couple of weeks later, a video was made for teachers to watch, purporting itself to be about best practices for assessment in remote learning.  The first two minutes of this video mentioned remote learning, but after that, it was clear that this man had a decades-long beef with grades and had given this lecture a hundred times.  He took advantage of the fear of educators when it came to uncertainty about assessment during the pandemic to make money pushing an agenda he had clearly always had.  This is reprehensible.

A year later, most of what I saw online was a desire just to "go back to normal."  A spring of remote learning and a year of either remote or masked hybrid learning had exhausted people, and we were feeling nostalgic for "precedented times" again.  The next year was supposed to be better, but the Delta and Omicron variants ensured otherwise, resulting in tired educators being even more exhausted than before.  Few people have had the energy to reimagine anything.  We just wanted this to be over and to return to something familiar.

As with most things, the views on the extremes are not ideal.  They might even be damaging.  To turn education upside down, throwing out everything from the past in the name of change is a terrible idea.  It would be bad for both teachers and students, experimenting with kids on a large scale, not knowing what the results would be for a decade or more is reckless and wrong.  In the same way, pulling out our 2018 lesson plans and moving on as though we have not learned anything in the past three years is equally irresponsible.  Teachers have learned to use tools in ways we had not before, and we should continue to use them (even if we use them in different ways).

Prior to the pandemic, I had taught for 20 years.  I know which things were working.  I will continue to do those things.  One of the things remote and hybrid teaching confirmed for me is that paper tests are superior to digital tests.  I used digital platforms from March 2020 to May 2021 because it was necessary.  While it made grading easier, it was not good for kids.  Since they couldn't write on the tests, they couldn't do the things we have always advised them to do, like underlining keywords, crossing out answers they know to be wrong, and skipping questions to return to them later.  I was using GoFormative for tests.  It is a great tool, and I will use it in other ways, but I hope it is never my testing platform again.  Digital labs have some value, in that it is programmed to work correctly, but it is hardly the same as doing a lab.  Since it does work correctly every time, there is no troubleshooting involved, which is one of the soft skills taught by lab experiments.  Direct instruction by me as the expert in the room works.  I'm sorry for those of you that believe it isn't learning if the kids aren't discovering it for themselves, but the research doesn't support that.  I believe in labs and projects and group work and all of those things, but only after I have taught them a concept and before I follow up with reflective practices about what they have observed.  I knew that was true prior to the pandemic, and it is still true.  

As important as knowing what was working pre-pandemic, I also know what wasn't working.  I wasn't doing nearly enough formative assessment and had just begun engaging in regular retrieval practice.  Finding a tool like GoFormative during hybrid learning will now help me to solve that problem.  This year, my students will use it daily to retrieve something from the last lesson, the last week, and the last chapter (interleaved and spaced retrieval).  I used FlipGrid for open-ended questions during remote and hybrid learning.  My students used it creatively and well, and they showed me things in ways they could not have on paper because they could demonstrate things live.  I will use that for more homework assignments than I did before so students could make their learning visible.  These tools were used one way during the pandemic, but as I evaluate the ongoing practice of teaching, I will use them in a different way this year.

Are we going "back to normal"?  In most ways, thank God, yes we are.  We will be seeing each other's faces this year rather than masks or screen icons, and I am grateful for that.  I can return to well-established tried and true practices this year, and I am grateful for that.  But should I just return to those things and make no changes?  Of course not.  Any good teacher should be self-reflective all the time.  We should always be examining what worked and what didn't in the lesson we just taught, separating the wheat from the chaff, and finding new ways to improve on what we did.  This year provides the opportunity to evaluate it with more potential tools than we have had before.  So, as we get back to normal, we can keep moving forward.  

Known, Valued, Loved

I returned to school this week.  I was a little nervous the day before in a way I'm not usually.  I think, because last year was supposed to be "normal" and then was not, I was afraid to hope for this year to be normal.  But, when I got to school, saw my friends, and started listening to the creative and passionate professionals with whom I work, I got my energy back.

Our head of school always gives a speech about where we are, where we are going, and what will be our focus for the year.  He always starts with our mission statement, which I have written about many times, so search for it in the archives if you wish.  We pray through our vision statement, something you can also find in previous posts.  This year, his focus was on a sort of motto we've had for four or five years.  We started using it in meetings where we discussed what we hope our students got out of being at GRACE.  Then, it started coming up in open house tours.  What we have come to realize is that it is, in our head of school's words, GRACE's secret sauce.  It is that our students will be Known, Valued, and Loved.  

There is much in the world of education right now about relationship building.  There are those who say, "Relationships are EVERYTHING."  I'm not one of those people, though I do recognize that they are important.  If they are "everything," you have ceased to be a school.  Then there are others who say, "Relationships FIRST."  They are those who would spend the first two weeks of school playing getting-to-know-each-other games in order to build relationships.  I'm not on board with that either.  You can get to know your students while simultaneously teaching them content.  I would be more likely to say, "Credibility first" because you can't build a relationship without credibility, to begin with (and perhaps I'll expand on this in a future post, but you establish credibility, in part, by taking your job seriously).  

So, if there are a lot of people building relationships, how is GRACE's Known, Valued, and Loved motto any different from other places?  Well, it starts with the belief I mentioned above - we can get to know students WHILE teaching them.  We can ask questions as it relates to our content area.  What's your favorite poem?  Who runs track?  Name your favorite sport (because we are about to talk about projectile motion).  We can chat with kids while we do lunch duty.  And, then of course, there are the games, school plays, band concerts, dances, etc. that every school has; but you would be amazed at how many teachers are in attendance at those GRACE events.  We find a lot of ways to get to know them and to make sure they feel known without sacrificing academic time.

Making students feel valued is relatively simple, and it takes just a little bit of time.  We send emails to students to say, "Hey, I noticed (insert positive thing) about you, and I wanted to let you know I appreciate it."  It could be a positive classroom attitude that makes your day better.  It could be that they helped a friend who dropped their tray in the lunchroom.  It could be that they didn't give up on the race in which they came in last.  "I'm proud of the way you persevered to the end and finished strong" will mean more to a student than we can imagine.  I know what you are thinking - that you teach 130 students or more and don't have time for sending extra emails.  Let me help you.  We aren't talking about a Jane Austen novel, so it goes much faster than you think it will.  We are talking about three sentences.  The first sentence (I am so happy to have you in my class) and the third sentence (I really appreciate that about you) are the same for all of your students, so you can save them in a template.  Then, you write the middle sentence for the specific student, but it's pretty short too.  "I've noticed how excited you are about fractions."  I would also advise that you not try to do all of them in a day or a weekend.  You can do this with 2-3 students a day during your planning period, which means it will take 9-10 weeks to get through your roster without taking much time each day.  I would recommend starting with the students who get appreciated the least.  That way, if you do run out of time to finish, you have covered the kids who most need the connection.  By the way, if you do have some extra time, take an extra two minutes and the price of a stamp and send the note to the student.  It is worth those extra minutes because they will keep it forever.  While I love writing because of its permanence, you can also let kids know you value them verbally.  I love when kids read for pleasure, so I like to comment on the books they are reading and let them know of an author they might like.  When you have a student doodling in your class, you can say, "Wow, you drew that person's hands really well.  I've heard that's really hard to do."  Even something like, "Hey, man, I really like your socks" lets a student know that you find something positive in them worth mentioning.  

If you don't love your students, I'm not sure why you chose this profession.  But loving them is different from letting them know they are loved.  You can tell them outright without coming off creepy.  I had a student last year who enjoyed saying strange things just to get people's reactions.  One day, I said to him, "Dude, you are so weird, I just love you."  I knew that he would appreciate being called weird because of the way he was, and it wasn't a mushy weird moment, which would have made us both uncomfortable.  It was a silly moment in which he knew his weirdness was valued and appreciated.  That worked for him, but it would not have been right for everyone.  Sometimes, it is about silently mouthing the words, "You OK?" to a student who looks sad or under the weather.  It may be wordlessly putting the tissue box on their desk when you hear them sniffing during a test.  Once you know your kids, you'll know what the best way to express love is for them.  At GRACE, it is also about praying for them and with them.

When we talk about this being the distinctive characteristic of GRACE, it is because it isn't part of an initiative or plan or program. We aren't instructed to do these things and fill out a form saying we've done it.  It's in our DNA as a community.      

Strong academics are a given.  They are what make us a school.  Our mission statement includes the words "spiritually equip, challenge, and inspire" and "impact their world for Christ."  That's what makes us a Christian school.  Making sure our kids feel Known, Valued, and Loved is what makes us GRACE.