The Diamond Ring of Instruction: Student Engagement

Think about times when you were most engaged in a conversation, in a class, in a book, or in a movie. I bet you can remember it well. When we’re actively engaged, we learn and remember. The Minnesota legislature recognized the importance of engagement when it passed its teacher evaluation law in a special session in 2011. All teachers will now be evaluated not only on their skills in the classroom and on the achievement of their students, but also on the engagement of those students.  What leads to engagement? According to Dr. Robert Marzano’s meta-analysis, when students answer in the affirmative to these questions, they are most likely to be engaged in learning:

·         How do I feel?

·         Am I interested?

·         Is it important?

·         Can I do it?

In the 2013-14 school year, teachers in the Minnetonka Public School District learned teaching strategies to specifically address these questions.

The first two questions refer to attention-getting strategies. The core of how a student feels is the relationship the students feel with the teacher and their classmates and how they feel about the class itself. Humor, pacing, intensity and enthusiasm, and physical movement all have the potential to impact how a student feels in class. Interest can be increased through games, friendly controversy, unusual information, and questioning techniques.

The latter questions lead to cognitive engagement.  Students will believe that the learning is important when it is relevant to their own interests, when they have ownership of the learning through choice, and when they can see its relevance to other subjects or the real-world. Finally, students need to believe that they can be successful. If a student’s answer to “Can I do this?” is “No,” Dr. Marzano suggests that “students might lessen or abort their involvement – even if they have positive feelings about the task, are interested in the topic, and perceive it as related to their personal goals” (Marzano, 2013). Students need to believe that there is a correlation between effort and achievement.

The real challenge with the new requirement in the teacher evaluation law is not how to create engagement; it’s how to measure it. A student could be staring out the window, seemingly disengaged while actually deep in thought about a topic. Another student could be giving all of the right body language, smiling, nodding, and looking at the speaker, all while planning what she’s going to wear to the football game. And engagement looks different in PE than in English lit, and it looks different in kindergarten than 11^th grade. A one-size-fits-all measurement won’t work.

To accommodate different subjects, different age groups, different job roles, the Minnetonka Teacher Evaluation Team created multiple paths for measuring student engagement. The first path teachers could consider is using the third-party survey that the District has purchased. Or a teacher could choose to create and deploy a survey of their own making. Another option is for teachers to use the Marzano self-assessments on student engagement. Or teachers can create their own plan for studying their students’ engagement.

Measuring anything as abstract as engagement is complex. A single snaphsot is unlikely to reveal the entire picture. And it's a starting place.