How I arrived at my question
Why are schools becoming arenas for students to try and beat the education system instead of being a place of true learning? Why is information learned in classrooms more or less being considered by students as “irrelevant” to “real life”? Arguably most importantly, why are teachers consistently standing up in front of classrooms and lecturing for 50 minutes, seemingly proving they are okay with the state of education today and the lack of engagement in the classroom? These three questions were and continue to be what drives my inquiry into student engagement in the classroom. When I first began thinking about what I wanted to research I focused on the concept of “student buy-in”. What does that mean? What does it look like? How can it be assessed, IF it can be assessed? Is it possible to achieve for all students who possess different learning styles and skill sets found within the typical classroom?
When I began my student teaching at Northeast High School I continued to look at “student buy-in”. I looked at the students who seemingly did “buy into” their own education and I tried to figure out why. I attended Personal Development meetings that focused on engagement in the classroom. The things I used to assess true buy-in were very subjective in nature I came to realize. Ideas like body language, eye contact and participation became what I was basing this idea of student buy-in off of, not realizing that those are just physical expressions of engagement. The more I looked at students’ behavior in the classroom the more I realized that student buy-in is not a causal element, but an effect. Students don’t buy into their education TO become engaged in their studies, they buy in to their education BECAUSE they are engaged in their studies. It was at this time I realized I was looking at an effect of a much deeper issue in education, student engagement.
When I began my student teaching at Northeast High School I continued to look at “student buy-in”. I looked at the students who seemingly did “buy into” their own education and I tried to figure out why. I attended Personal Development meetings that focused on engagement in the classroom. The things I used to assess true buy-in were very subjective in nature I came to realize. Ideas like body language, eye contact and participation became what I was basing this idea of student buy-in off of, not realizing that those are just physical expressions of engagement. The more I looked at students’ behavior in the classroom the more I realized that student buy-in is not a causal element, but an effect. Students don’t buy into their education TO become engaged in their studies, they buy in to their education BECAUSE they are engaged in their studies. It was at this time I realized I was looking at an effect of a much deeper issue in education, student engagement.
My inquiry as it is, “How can I create environments that foster genuine student engagement and how do I assess that engagement?” is rooted not solely in my desire to be a better, more relevant educator but also in how I was as a learner. When I think back to the teachers that made a lasting impact on my life, as different as they were I can see one common denominator; they all taught me, not the content. As simple as that sounds, the implications in a classroom are deep and lasting. Teaching content means one knows the subject matter. Teaching students means one knows the subject matter AND the students, and knowing those students as individuals not as a cumulative mass of sorts. The teachers that made lasting impressions on me taught ME, not the content. As true as it was when I was a student, it is still the fact today; teaching students instead of content, as defined above, has a great deal to do with student buy-in.
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The term buy-in is a large topic. After reading Alfie Kohn, Richard Strong and Johnmarshall Reeve I realized it was too big to succinctly analyze for this inquiry. What I defined student buy-in as, “what makes students become engaged and enjoy Social Studies”, really had more factors than I was aware of. Things like: external factors the students bring with them to the classroom, learning styles, pre-existing skills, prior knowledge, good days and bad days, teaching styles and personality clashes, are just a few examples that would need to be researched and analyzed so as to justly cover buy-in as a topic. But studying these examples so as to examine student buy-in, while important, was not the direction I wanted to go in.
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Cori Brewster writes, “In general terms, student motivation ‘refers to a students willingness, need, desire and compulsion to participate in, and be successful in, the learning process’.” (Brewster, 2000) As clear as this definition is, it is not so clear how to achieve it. From administrators at the federal level down to the teachers in the classroom, this topic has been at the forefront of education. How do you get students to believe in the importance of education when the rewards are not immediate outside of the classroom? On the same level is the idea of student disengagement and their subsequent lack of motivation which can lead to anti-intellectualism. At its core, anti-intellectualism is really fear of what one doesn’t have; the ability to think or comprehend at a certain level only defined by the person fearing it in the first place. Anti-intellectualism is often times a result of an educator who places an emphasis on content over the student, for when the student believes he/she is only worth the information they retain or the grade they receive on a seemingly arbitrary exam, their success and worth is wrapped up in the evaluation, not in the process. I chose to study this not only so that I could know it, but so that I could prevent it.
What guided my research at the outset were physical behaviors and visual assessments. By this I mean things like eye contact, participation, and positive body language to name a few. After reading Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students’ Motivation to Learn I expanded my research parameters. The authors write, “It is important to consider mental or cognitive behaviors as well as observable behaviors (active participation in class, completing work, seeking assistance when having difficulty, taking challenging classes) […]” (Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn, 2004) So many more things go into student engagement than just observable elements, which relates to the premise
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that to effectively assess evidence of engagement in the classroom, the student must be placed above the content. Suffice to say that as much as my inquiry guided my research, my research guided a lot of my questioning.
From the outset of my desire to study student buy-in to the final refinement of my inquiry, "how can I create environments that foster genuine student engagement and how do I assess that engagement?", one reoccurring fact has been true: the process for me as a teacher/learner has been more beneficial than the desired and acquired results. To explain further, I began my research with guiding questions. I asked things like, “how do students participate when I do x?” or “how does where I stand in the room affect participation?” and other questions along those lines. While this was productive, it wasn’t nearly as beneficial as assessing student engagement when I recognized it. To explain further, the questions I asked at the outset were a means of looking to create student engagement, whereas the most productive analysis came when I assessed student engagement when it happened naturally. This turned out to be dually beneficially as while assessing student engagement caused my inquiry to be deeply reflective, it also kept my students from being proactively placed in a situation where I treated them as test subjects and continually tried new things in a forward thinking manner.
Student buy-in can be a positive effect of genuine student engagement. This effect is what drove me to find and study the causal element. “Most students will not do their best in classes when they feel that teachers do not have an interest in them or care about their future. Students can sense whether the teacher cares or is simply “going through the motions.” (Jones, 2009) As cliché as it sounds, genuine student engagement is rooted in the fact that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
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From the outset of my desire to study student buy-in to the final refinement of my inquiry, "how can I create environments that foster genuine student engagement and how do I assess that engagement?", one reoccurring fact has been true: the process for me as a teacher/learner has been more beneficial than the desired and acquired results. To explain further, I began my research with guiding questions. I asked things like, “how do students participate when I do x?” or “how does where I stand in the room affect participation?” and other questions along those lines. While this was productive, it wasn’t nearly as beneficial as assessing student engagement when I recognized it. To explain further, the questions I asked at the outset were a means of looking to create student engagement, whereas the most productive analysis came when I assessed student engagement when it happened naturally. This turned out to be dually beneficially as while assessing student engagement caused my inquiry to be deeply reflective, it also kept my students from being proactively placed in a situation where I treated them as test subjects and continually tried new things in a forward thinking manner.
Student buy-in can be a positive effect of genuine student engagement. This effect is what drove me to find and study the causal element. “Most students will not do their best in classes when they feel that teachers do not have an interest in them or care about their future. Students can sense whether the teacher cares or is simply “going through the motions.” (Jones, 2009) As cliché as it sounds, genuine student engagement is rooted in the fact that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
NEXT