Achieve Better Student Engagement And Learning
Colin Klupiec Chats With Richard Andrew
Achieving improved student engagement is easier said than done. In this chat, Colin and I tease out some important keys to achieving student engagement.
The text below is an improved representation of the interview. The podcast audio is provided at the bottom of the article.
The text below is an improved representation of the interview. The podcast audio is provided at the bottom of the article.
Student engagement, student-centred learning and
the elephant in the classroom!
Colin: The discussions that we have had in the past seem to suggest that if you have students who are more engaged, then they will want to be more at the centre of their learning. Or if you have students that you are not spoon-feeding all of the time, they will say, "All right. Well, I can spoon feed myself. Thanks very much. And therefore I will be the centre of my learning." Is that a safe, logical deduction to make?
Richard: I don't think that's how it works. It is interesting, as I reflect, the one thing I was always chasing as a classroom teacher was engagement. It is interesting to reflect that if I didn't have the students fully on my side, I wasn't happy. And I had several years where I was frustrated. So, I was always looking for ways to engage, and a lot of that was in the area of mathematics.
Regarding engagement - and we have talked about this quite a bit - there are clever ways to get concepts across which are more effective than just drilling and rote-learning. So in my early years, I was chasing engagement and early on it was obvious that I needed to switch from a lecture format, traditional kind of ‘teacher in control’ / ‘I am the centre of all knowledge’ model to a student-centred model. But the reason I made the change was that I knew that that was going to go a long way to solving my student's management and student engagement problems.
Colin: If I can just briefly cut in there because you told me off mic in a previous discussion that you every early in your career where you came to that realisation about engagement, but then, later on, you went to a conference where you were wondering "Am I the only person in the room who doesn't have classes of fully engaged learners?" Can you tell us about that experience?
Richard: Yeah. So, we were talking about the elephant in the room. I think there is an elephant in the room and it is called 'Lack of Student Engagement'. So I was at my first state Mathematics conference. Maths conferences might sound scary to people who do not teach mathematics. However, they tend to be full of inspired people who have lots of great ideas to share. And so I'm sitting in these sessions at my first maths conference mostly run by teachers showing the latest ideas that they are using in their classrooms. I was an experienced teacher in a new school but you know what it is like when you change schools - the first couple of years can be quite tough because you are trying to change the culture or you are developing a culture of learning with your classes because you have to win the students over to your side.
This was a point in time when I wasn't happy with where my students were at, regarding being on the same page. They weren't engaged in the way that I wanted. So I was sitting in these conference sessions at the mathematics conference thinking “This is fantastic, but I can't implement these ideas yet because I don’t have my students engaged" And then I’d attend another session, and would think “Wow, this is awesome. I’ll take notes here, but I can't use these ideas yet because I don't have my students engaged.” And I'm thinking "Am I only the person in this whole conference that thinks like this; am I the only teacher here who has disengaged students?” These were all activities that will work fantastically with engaged students, but I didn't have my students engaged so I couldn't run any of these activities.
Colin: Did you get a chance to ask any other people there whether they had similar experiences to you?
Richard: No, of course not! (laughs), because I felt quite inferior being in these sessions and everyone else appeared to 'have their ship in order'! But I knew I wasn’t alone because I’d been in 100+ classrooms from 30+ schools across Australia, many as a casual teacher and many of them maths classes so I knew that student disengagement was a common issue.
And so I had that classic sense of “There is an elephant in the room, and no-one is talking about it". As time went on, I became confident that there was a need for support with student engagement and I realised how weird it was having all these highly skilled people at Mathematics conferences, running great sessions yet never talking about student engagement, just assuming that the teachers in their sessions all had engaged learners.
A few years later I had begun delivering some sessions at conferences and then I thought, “I’ll run a session on student engagement in Maths and see how it goes down.” I did run a couple of those sessions over the years, and they were well received. And I tell this story, referencing the “Am I the only one at conference sessions who doesn’t have all his students engaged?” moment, which receives a great deal of head nodding, so I realised that indeed I was not alone! People do think about this, and it is an issue but that it is not talked about enough.”
At least I had a crack. I mean there are very few such sessions run at these conferences! I just find that strange, because, if students aren't engaged then you can't do anything other than standard, "Open your text to page 123, we will answer these next two pages of questions", and you have to ‘crack the whip’ to get the work out of them. And that has to be the most basic level of Maths teaching around, I think, and not very inspiring.
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Colin: So, the issue that I find interesting as well is we like to talk about things like students centred learning but what if the student doesn't want to be at the centre of their learning?
Richard: Well, if you ask students “Do you want to be at the centre of your learning?” they will likely say “No!” But we have talked about this before. If you look at a toddler or a pre-schooler you will see a fully engaged child, but a child who is at the centre of their learning. Parents are not explicitly ‘teaching’ them how to walk, how to talk, how to build with blocks. All that happens through desire and exploration. And parental encouragement goes a long way, but none of it is explicit. So you don't have to worry about engagement with toddlers. It doesn't matter what they are doing. They are into it. But it seems that when institutionalised learning takes over - especially when it is very prescriptive and top-down, i.e. teacher-directed, this tends to knock a lot of the engagement and enthusiasm out of children. They become ‘schoolees’ where they have to learn the system. Some students become very good at earning ‘brownie points’ from their parents and teachers - gaining A’s and good marks. And that is the game they learn to play. Which is sad because education could be much more than that. Of course, many students don't cope well with that system and falsely learn that they are a poor learner, a failure.
Colin: Well let's park what we think the system offers for a moment and look at a definition of Student-Centered Learning - what's your take on it?
Richard: Well, before exploring a definition of Student-Centered Learning I should say that I’ve been listening to some of your podcasts and I’ve learned something quite amazing. It is obvious that the term ‘Student-Centered Learning’ means many things to many people. However, the one aspect we all agree on is that a student-centred approach requires the teacher to become a facilitator of learning. But I was astonished to discover that one of your esteemed guests is adamant that there is an issue with student-centred learning which is that the facilitation is passive. In other words, when a teacher uses a student-centred approach, the teacher becomes passive and therefore less of an influence on the students.
From my experience and regarding the guidance I provide teachers through the Learn Implement Share courses, this could not be further from the truth! The teacher’s role when facilitating student-centred learning, in my experience, is at the very least equally as active as for teacher-directed learning, and very often much more active. Student-centred learning can be like running a tutorial session but with 25+ students in it, many working on different stages of a unit!
Colin: Why do you say that?
Richard: Students can be the centre of their learning through a stand-alone activity. I’ll talk within the context of mathematics here. It could be the task of creating a detailed, worded problem, or creating a video to demonstrate understanding, or a card matching exercise in pairs. There is an infinite number of stand-alone student-centred activities.
However, in reference to what I was saying before about facilitation being active, not passive, I was referring to running a student-centred unit of work which allows students to progress at their own pace.
The Work Requirement Scheme
An example of this - and one I guide teachers through in a couple of the Learn Implement Share online courses - is the Work Requirement Scheme. In simplistic terms, the Work Requirement Scheme (WRS) is simply a way to inform students of the work which is required each lesson. There is a submission date which students must meet, and extension work for early finishers. Over a unit of work lessons will include text work, teacher instruction, whole class investigations, pair work, etc. So even though some lessons involve segments which are teacher directed, overall the approach is student directed because students can work at their own pace. It means the teacher spends more time helping students who need assistance and much less time in whole-class lecture ‘broadcasts’. The WRS in its most basic form is simply issued on paper. Obviously with the advent of online delivery of work it can be incorporated into a flipped mastery approach.
So the WRS is a highly scaffolded unit of work which is different because students can navigate through it much more in their own time. It is primarily student-centred and due to the in-built choice, much more engaging. Importantly it is a system which opens the door for students to take much more ownership over their learning. But here’s the thing - the teacher’s role is active. So, I am teaching things multiple times. It is really quite a busy approach and more demanding on a teacher than a teacher-directed approach. My point is that it is as far from a passive teaching role as I can imagine. So, I don't know what the word for that is - I always called this "Facilitation", but I am a bit loathed to use ‘facilitation' now due to some so-called ‘experts in the field’ stating that facilitation of student-centred activities is passive! Maybe I should call it ‘Active facilitation’.
Colin: It sounds to me like you have a highly structured and organised intent, but the outworking of that intent tends to be quite messy. And perhaps that's another one of the sticking points.
Richard: Well, it looks messy alright, but any teachers who go on this journey with me - and a lot do - realise this is a gradual process, and they start trialling some of these ideas and then say things like, "Oh I was bit worried because my class was a bit noisy, but then I listened more closely and saw that the students were really into the lesson asking questions and working together. I thought 'this is great'. This is not like the normal noise that I am trying to squash. This is actually good noise. But I was a bit worried because the head of department might walk past and think I was having issues!” So yes, everyone does comment that it looks messy.
Many high-functioning primary teachers operate in this way - they have 20 different things happening in the classroom at any one time, and it looks like organised chaos but the teacher knows what each student is doing, and the students are engaged.
Colin: Is it hard to assess?
Richard: No it is not; because there is no reason why this approach should dictate changes in the approach to assessment. I mean, there are many reasons for changes to assessment - if the assessment is primarily of the traditional pen-and-paper test type - but running a Work Requirement Scheme does not necessitate changes to assessment.
By the way, I also suggest the WRS to teachers in the engagement course for non-maths teachers (Create an engaged learning environment with your students) and many run with the idea with favourable responses.
Colin: What about Student Centred assessment? Can a student then decide as well have a choice about how they would like to be assessed? Can they come up with their own assessment task and show it to you?
Richard: Well, they could, and that's a beautiful idea. But, of course, that becomes problematic due to having to compare student’s results. One of the simplest and neatest assessment tasks which feature in a couple of the Learn Implement Share courses is the "I Can Do” assessment task. They are easy to run, and again this is most specific to Mathematics.
So if for example, you are looking at Pythagoras Theorem, the standard kind of test would be a series of questions asking them to determine lengths of sides of right-angled triangles from a diagram and (contrived) real-world situations.
But in an ‘I Can Do’ task, it is the students who make up the questions and answer them. For example, Question 1: “I can find the length of a short side in a right-angled triangle if I know the lengths of the other two sides”. And the student creates a question and answers it to demonstrate that they can indeed do this. Now the interesting thing with this is - when I was running these - I found there are certain students in my Maths class who I thought were kind of okay but they always ‘bombed out’ in (standard) tests.
Colin: Right.
Richard: But they performed really well with the ‘I Can Do’ tests - the stress wasn’t there. They are more imaginative, and they could work from their own understanding rather than working from their memory (of what I showed them in class). And where they had to draw diagrams - I had these macho guys with birdies falling out of trees and other amusing scenarios, and it caused me to laugh because they were so imaginative. The students enjoyed creating their scenarios. Importantly, the ‘I Can Do’ assessments were a much better predictor of what students understood! I think the ‘I Can Do’ is much better than asking them to ‘make up their own task’ because the structure is there and students can be compared via the rubric. (Not that I ultimately think students should be compared, but the system dictates that!)
Interestingly it was the students who did not want to show working who didn’t fare so well and some of these tend to be the so-called 'brighter' students - the ones with the better memory. But are these the better mathematicians? Not necessarily!
Colin: Sounds like a great concept Richard. Thanks so much for joining us.
Richard: It is always a pleasure Colin.
Colin: You have been listening to an episode of More To The Point. I am Colin Kulpiec be sure to join me in the next time because there is also More to the Point.
The audio of the interview is below ...
Richard: Well, if you ask students “Do you want to be at the centre of your learning?” they will likely say “No!” But we have talked about this before. If you look at a toddler or a pre-schooler you will see a fully engaged child, but a child who is at the centre of their learning. Parents are not explicitly ‘teaching’ them how to walk, how to talk, how to build with blocks. All that happens through desire and exploration. And parental encouragement goes a long way, but none of it is explicit. So you don't have to worry about engagement with toddlers. It doesn't matter what they are doing. They are into it. But it seems that when institutionalised learning takes over - especially when it is very prescriptive and top-down, i.e. teacher-directed, this tends to knock a lot of the engagement and enthusiasm out of children. They become ‘schoolees’ where they have to learn the system. Some students become very good at earning ‘brownie points’ from their parents and teachers - gaining A’s and good marks. And that is the game they learn to play. Which is sad because education could be much more than that. Of course, many students don't cope well with that system and falsely learn that they are a poor learner, a failure.
Colin: Well let's park what we think the system offers for a moment and look at a definition of Student-Centered Learning - what's your take on it?
Richard: Well, before exploring a definition of Student-Centered Learning I should say that I’ve been listening to some of your podcasts and I’ve learned something quite amazing. It is obvious that the term ‘Student-Centered Learning’ means many things to many people. However, the one aspect we all agree on is that a student-centred approach requires the teacher to become a facilitator of learning. But I was astonished to discover that one of your esteemed guests is adamant that there is an issue with student-centred learning which is that the facilitation is passive. In other words, when a teacher uses a student-centred approach, the teacher becomes passive and therefore less of an influence on the students.
From my experience and regarding the guidance I provide teachers through the Learn Implement Share courses, this could not be further from the truth! The teacher’s role when facilitating student-centred learning, in my experience, is at the very least equally as active as for teacher-directed learning, and very often much more active. Student-centred learning can be like running a tutorial session but with 25+ students in it, many working on different stages of a unit!
Colin: Why do you say that?
Richard: Students can be the centre of their learning through a stand-alone activity. I’ll talk within the context of mathematics here. It could be the task of creating a detailed, worded problem, or creating a video to demonstrate understanding, or a card matching exercise in pairs. There is an infinite number of stand-alone student-centred activities.
However, in reference to what I was saying before about facilitation being active, not passive, I was referring to running a student-centred unit of work which allows students to progress at their own pace.
The Work Requirement Scheme
An example of this - and one I guide teachers through in a couple of the Learn Implement Share online courses - is the Work Requirement Scheme. In simplistic terms, the Work Requirement Scheme (WRS) is simply a way to inform students of the work which is required each lesson. There is a submission date which students must meet, and extension work for early finishers. Over a unit of work lessons will include text work, teacher instruction, whole class investigations, pair work, etc. So even though some lessons involve segments which are teacher directed, overall the approach is student directed because students can work at their own pace. It means the teacher spends more time helping students who need assistance and much less time in whole-class lecture ‘broadcasts’. The WRS in its most basic form is simply issued on paper. Obviously with the advent of online delivery of work it can be incorporated into a flipped mastery approach.
So the WRS is a highly scaffolded unit of work which is different because students can navigate through it much more in their own time. It is primarily student-centred and due to the in-built choice, much more engaging. Importantly it is a system which opens the door for students to take much more ownership over their learning. But here’s the thing - the teacher’s role is active. So, I am teaching things multiple times. It is really quite a busy approach and more demanding on a teacher than a teacher-directed approach. My point is that it is as far from a passive teaching role as I can imagine. So, I don't know what the word for that is - I always called this "Facilitation", but I am a bit loathed to use ‘facilitation' now due to some so-called ‘experts in the field’ stating that facilitation of student-centred activities is passive! Maybe I should call it ‘Active facilitation’.
Colin: It sounds to me like you have a highly structured and organised intent, but the outworking of that intent tends to be quite messy. And perhaps that's another one of the sticking points.
Richard: Well, it looks messy alright, but any teachers who go on this journey with me - and a lot do - realise this is a gradual process, and they start trialling some of these ideas and then say things like, "Oh I was bit worried because my class was a bit noisy, but then I listened more closely and saw that the students were really into the lesson asking questions and working together. I thought 'this is great'. This is not like the normal noise that I am trying to squash. This is actually good noise. But I was a bit worried because the head of department might walk past and think I was having issues!” So yes, everyone does comment that it looks messy.
Many high-functioning primary teachers operate in this way - they have 20 different things happening in the classroom at any one time, and it looks like organised chaos but the teacher knows what each student is doing, and the students are engaged.
Colin: Is it hard to assess?
Richard: No it is not; because there is no reason why this approach should dictate changes in the approach to assessment. I mean, there are many reasons for changes to assessment - if the assessment is primarily of the traditional pen-and-paper test type - but running a Work Requirement Scheme does not necessitate changes to assessment.
By the way, I also suggest the WRS to teachers in the engagement course for non-maths teachers (Create an engaged learning environment with your students) and many run with the idea with favourable responses.
Colin: What about Student Centred assessment? Can a student then decide as well have a choice about how they would like to be assessed? Can they come up with their own assessment task and show it to you?
Richard: Well, they could, and that's a beautiful idea. But, of course, that becomes problematic due to having to compare student’s results. One of the simplest and neatest assessment tasks which feature in a couple of the Learn Implement Share courses is the "I Can Do” assessment task. They are easy to run, and again this is most specific to Mathematics.
So if for example, you are looking at Pythagoras Theorem, the standard kind of test would be a series of questions asking them to determine lengths of sides of right-angled triangles from a diagram and (contrived) real-world situations.
But in an ‘I Can Do’ task, it is the students who make up the questions and answer them. For example, Question 1: “I can find the length of a short side in a right-angled triangle if I know the lengths of the other two sides”. And the student creates a question and answers it to demonstrate that they can indeed do this. Now the interesting thing with this is - when I was running these - I found there are certain students in my Maths class who I thought were kind of okay but they always ‘bombed out’ in (standard) tests.
Colin: Right.
Richard: But they performed really well with the ‘I Can Do’ tests - the stress wasn’t there. They are more imaginative, and they could work from their own understanding rather than working from their memory (of what I showed them in class). And where they had to draw diagrams - I had these macho guys with birdies falling out of trees and other amusing scenarios, and it caused me to laugh because they were so imaginative. The students enjoyed creating their scenarios. Importantly, the ‘I Can Do’ assessments were a much better predictor of what students understood! I think the ‘I Can Do’ is much better than asking them to ‘make up their own task’ because the structure is there and students can be compared via the rubric. (Not that I ultimately think students should be compared, but the system dictates that!)
Interestingly it was the students who did not want to show working who didn’t fare so well and some of these tend to be the so-called 'brighter' students - the ones with the better memory. But are these the better mathematicians? Not necessarily!
Colin: Sounds like a great concept Richard. Thanks so much for joining us.
Richard: It is always a pleasure Colin.
Colin: You have been listening to an episode of More To The Point. I am Colin Kulpiec be sure to join me in the next time because there is also More to the Point.
The audio of the interview is below ...
