Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Engaging Lessons

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, this is the fifth in a series of my own reflections of some sessions.  This is the last one, and it is very practical.  This is from the presentation of Dr. John Almarode, but he liberally references others, so the book you see pictured here is not his but one that he recommended.

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If you are a teacher of more than one year, you know we have an engagement problem going on with students.  You might know that if it is your first year as well, but you have nothing to compare it to.  If you can compare pre-pandemic, mid-pandemic, and post-pandemic classes, you know that we have lower engagement now than in any of the other two times.  It's weird, right?  One would think that we would have observed the lowest engagement during the fearful, hybrid, masked, socially distanced time, but one would be wrong.  This year, the one that should be "back to normal" is the one where we are struggling.  I wrote a little about this in my post on Chronic Stress Recovery, so I won't repeat it here.  But the point is, students are disengaged for a number of reasons, but teachers are also so tired it is hard to implement the tools we used to have for increasing their engagement.  So, we need some simple things from research that we can use to help our students engage.

Let's start with clarity.  Teacher clarity combined with student clarity has massive potential to increase student achievement (effect size 0.84 and 0.75 respectively), but it will also increase engagement.  Both students and teachers should be able to answer the questions:

• What are they learning?
• Why are they learning it?
• How will they know they have learned it (success criteria)?

We have all been in meetings or professional development seminars where we didn't know what we were supposed to be doing, and we definitely checked out until the leader came near our table when we bluffed some vague answers.  Is it surprising our students do the same if they don't know what they are learning?  I've also been asked to do tasks where I knew what to do but found it absolutely pointless.  I worked in a real estate company where I was meant to collect data and put it into a bar graph.  While it wasn't a difficult thing to do, I was not at all motivated to do it because I knew it was going to be stuck in a drawer and never used for anything.  And since success motivates, students will be more likely to keep at something if they can see at each step whether or not they have been successful.

In the early 2010s, researchers John V. Antonetti and James R. Garver wanted to study the aspects of a lesson that create sustained student engagement.  Rather than choosing one aspect to study and controlling for everything else, they performed walkthrough classroom observations.  They performed 17000 classroom visits before publishing their book, but they have continued the work and are now at about 24000 visits.  John Almarode, who was the presenter of this particular session, said that no book has changed his teaching more than this one.  (Considering how many books he reads, that is a big statement; so I ordered it from the conference, and it is sitting at the top of my "to be read" pile.  He said that every time he turned the page, he had an aha moment.)  They found 8 things that cause a lesson to be engaging.

1. Clear and Modeled Expectations - What does the target look like?
2. Emotional Safety - Can they recover if they take a risk and make a mistake?
3. Personal Response - Can they bring their own perspective into it?  Can they write about it as a response?  Can they tell you what they think?
4. Sense of Audience - Is it valuable to someone other than the teacher?  This could be knowing that the work will be hung in the hall or posted to the web.  It could simply be that their partner cares about their part of the activity.
5. Social Interaction - Can they tell someone else what they know?
6. Choice - Perception of choice, or appropriate and limited choice (Choose from a menu that the teacher has designed), not a student coming in and telling you what they want to learn about.
7. Novelty - Just because something is good doesn’t mean you want to do it 180 days in a row.
8. Authentic - It doesn’t mean real-world.  It means it COULD happen.  (Don’t build an imaginary creature and design an imaginary habitat.  Instead, have them be zookeepers that have to choose an exotic animal and design a habitat at the zoo where you live that will let them live in your climate.). They need to know someone uses this knowledge, but you do not have to make it apply to their current lives.

In case you are concerned about incorporating eight things into every lesson, simmer down.  Take a deep breath.  According to the research, having only three of these will result in 87% sustained engagement.  If you have only two, you will get only 17%, so that third one is huge.  And, let me quote John Almarode.  "If you have bought into the clarity thing, you already have #1.  If you are a halfway decent person who doesn't hate children, you should already have #2.  So you really only have to choose one more."  He advises looking at your goal to decide on the third.  There are times when "turn and talk" is great (social interaction), and there are times when you need quiet reflection.  There are times when choice is appropriate, and there are times when you need them to do exactly one thing (choice in the lab can be dangerous).   Trying a new tool is sometimes what you want (novelty), but it can also tax their working memory if you are simultaneously introducing new and challenging material.  The ones you choose should be based on your professional judgment in accomplishing the goal.

As you head into this new year, you are planning lessons for next week.  Be ready to communicate clarity and care.  The plan your learning experiences using this list.