Personal Development Meeting
I attended a "PD" (Personal Development) meeting on 2/27/12 hosted by John Ginotti, Director of the Penn Literacy Network at PennGSE. Briefly, the PD meeting was about creating spaces that produce genuine student engagement. He linked these 5 concepts together as what is most important in a classroom: 1. Engagement 2. Meaning 3. Language 4. Structure 5. Evidence. He told us that while all 5 are equally important, none of the 4 following engagement were possible unless you have engagement in the first place. He told us “Engagement is the student’s decision.” (John Ginotti, personal communication, 2/27/12)
Building relationships with students in a healthy way creates safe areas for students to engage in class. Outside of relationships, participation can be mistaken as authentic engagement when in some cases all it is, is a way to “get a teacher off your back”. This PD meeting highlighted a major fact about modern education techniques: the answer to student engagement is not the same as it used to be nor is it the same as it is going to be in 20 years. Student engagement is constantly evolving with the times. |