Other Forms of Evidence of Engagement
“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, 31) “Students who are engaged persist, despite challenges and obstacles, and take visible delight in accomplishing their work.” (Strong, 1995) While calling it “involvement” instead of “engagement” (for the purposes of this essay these terms are synonymous), Richard Strong and the authors of Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students’ Motivation to Learn explain that physical evidence is not the only determinant of engagement. Researchers have veered away from non-physical types of assessment since it is so complicated and gets into the ambiguous “how the teacher feels” about engagement at that time. While assessing non-physical evidence of engagement such as this cannot be quantified like most physical evidence can (it is easy to count how often a student participates, raises his/her hand, etc), the quality of this engagement and subsequent assessment thereof cannot be discounted. The element of seeking assistance, as written about in Increasing High School Students' Engagement and Motivation, is the non-physical evidence of student engagement I would like to focus on that cannot be ignored.
Many students struggle in class to understand concepts and ideas for any number of reasons. For whatever reason (fear of being wrong or thought of as stupid, embarrassment, not paying attention at that point in time) students often times fear seeking assistance after, or even during, class. But doing just this, seeking assistance, is exactly what the book Engaging Schools is all about; students who are engaged in a class but aren’t active participants as seen through physical evidence. When active students (by active I mean students whose engagement is physically evident in nature) ask questions in class they are afforded the opportunity to externally process the information. But this is not how all students tick. “Reflective” students often times process internally, which is not engagement that is physically assessable. It is especially for this reason that students seeking assistance after class must be regarded as evidence of genuine student engagement. A danger in not regarding non-physical evidence, such as students seeking assistance outside of normal class hours, is that reflective students will be regarded as disengaged from the lesson. Believing, and treating, reflective students as disengaged from the lesson is not only unfair, but inaccurate.
I taught a lesson on Unions in IB American History. The students struggled to understand why working conditions were so poor because they just weren’t capable of removing what they know about working conditions today based on their own experiences. To clarify this point because it is fundamental to this analysis of non-physical evidence of engagement, most of my students in the class hold part time jobs and because of their own work experiences, they kept asking questions like: "how can a boss treat employees that way?" or "why don't the employees just quit and get a better job?" The active students in the class asked question after question and I was able to explain that working conditions during the late 1800s were not what they are today. At the end of class I made sure to leave 10 minutes open for discussion and clarification. None of the students asked anymore questions on Unions so I believed they grasped the ideas and concepts on how working conditions are different today than they were back then. After school that day, a student from that class came to my room because she still didn’t understand the unions we covered. We talked about it for 45 minutes and she asked question after question (all of which she had prepared in advance so as not to forget them) and drew conclusions on why some unions were strong and some were weak. Through this experience it became obvious to me that this student internally processed the information from the lesson and only after organizing her thoughts and questions, came seeking assistance after class for what she still didn't understand.
She is a quiet student in class but that doesn’t mean she is not engaged. Not every student is an active learner, which means that other evidence of assessing levels of engagement in the classroom must be utilized. Students seeking assistance after class is just such evidence. The authors of Engaging Schools write, “[…] students who complete assignments because the material captures their interest or because they experience a sense of pride in accomplishment are more likely to go beyond the minimal requirements and become [...] deeply engaged." (Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn, 32) This was certainly the case with the student who sought assistance after school because if she weren’t engaged in the lesson in the first place, she wouldn’t have come after school for clarification. For whatever reason, whether it be that she's too shy to speak in class or because she needed time to process the information internally, her engagement in the lesson is evident by her seeking assistance. Attending class can be thought of as the "minimum" a student needs to do educationally. This student seeking assistance after class is most definitely "[going] beyond the minmal requirements [...]" expected of her. (Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn, 32)
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Many students struggle in class to understand concepts and ideas for any number of reasons. For whatever reason (fear of being wrong or thought of as stupid, embarrassment, not paying attention at that point in time) students often times fear seeking assistance after, or even during, class. But doing just this, seeking assistance, is exactly what the book Engaging Schools is all about; students who are engaged in a class but aren’t active participants as seen through physical evidence. When active students (by active I mean students whose engagement is physically evident in nature) ask questions in class they are afforded the opportunity to externally process the information. But this is not how all students tick. “Reflective” students often times process internally, which is not engagement that is physically assessable. It is especially for this reason that students seeking assistance after class must be regarded as evidence of genuine student engagement. A danger in not regarding non-physical evidence, such as students seeking assistance outside of normal class hours, is that reflective students will be regarded as disengaged from the lesson. Believing, and treating, reflective students as disengaged from the lesson is not only unfair, but inaccurate.
I taught a lesson on Unions in IB American History. The students struggled to understand why working conditions were so poor because they just weren’t capable of removing what they know about working conditions today based on their own experiences. To clarify this point because it is fundamental to this analysis of non-physical evidence of engagement, most of my students in the class hold part time jobs and because of their own work experiences, they kept asking questions like: "how can a boss treat employees that way?" or "why don't the employees just quit and get a better job?" The active students in the class asked question after question and I was able to explain that working conditions during the late 1800s were not what they are today. At the end of class I made sure to leave 10 minutes open for discussion and clarification. None of the students asked anymore questions on Unions so I believed they grasped the ideas and concepts on how working conditions are different today than they were back then. After school that day, a student from that class came to my room because she still didn’t understand the unions we covered. We talked about it for 45 minutes and she asked question after question (all of which she had prepared in advance so as not to forget them) and drew conclusions on why some unions were strong and some were weak. Through this experience it became obvious to me that this student internally processed the information from the lesson and only after organizing her thoughts and questions, came seeking assistance after class for what she still didn't understand.
She is a quiet student in class but that doesn’t mean she is not engaged. Not every student is an active learner, which means that other evidence of assessing levels of engagement in the classroom must be utilized. Students seeking assistance after class is just such evidence. The authors of Engaging Schools write, “[…] students who complete assignments because the material captures their interest or because they experience a sense of pride in accomplishment are more likely to go beyond the minimal requirements and become [...] deeply engaged." (Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn, 32) This was certainly the case with the student who sought assistance after school because if she weren’t engaged in the lesson in the first place, she wouldn’t have come after school for clarification. For whatever reason, whether it be that she's too shy to speak in class or because she needed time to process the information internally, her engagement in the lesson is evident by her seeking assistance. Attending class can be thought of as the "minimum" a student needs to do educationally. This student seeking assistance after class is most definitely "[going] beyond the minmal requirements [...]" expected of her. (Committee on Increasing High School Students’ Engagement and Motivation to Learn, 32)
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