Engagement is key focus for instruction. It has recently become even more of a focus Nationally. For those of you that know me and my personal passion, this is great news for me!!! I want to reiterate the importance of student engagement. Without an active involvement, it is impossible for learning to happen! I wanted to provide a structural description for the term and give educators a system for analyzing engagement throughout a lesson.
What is engagement? Well, for starters, it is another one of interpretable terms currently being used in education that has numerous definitions but is rarely agreed upon as a community. I believe that engagement is the critical staring point for the process of learning! Engagement is easily felt but difficult to assess. Let’s define the term and then provide tools that help engage all learners.
Engagement is the number of students actively involved in each and every classroom task. Engagement can and does change for every event throughout an instructional day and should be analyzed for ALL events in a lesson. Engagement is important enough that educators must analyze the number of students involved in EACH task in a given day.
It is important to look at each of the events in a classroom and work to increase the number of students actively involved in all of those events in order to achieve maximum engagement for a lesson. Let’s provide a sample lesson as an example:
SEE ATTACHED FILE!
In closing, the goal of this discussion is not to place blame or create a sense of accomplishment/failure but is intended to provide educators with a new way of thinking. I would invite each of you to assess your student tasks in order to identify moments of weak and strong student engagement. This assessment will help in finding new strategies that increase the number of students actively involved in ALL of your daily tasks.
