Disengaged Students

Encouraging engagement in students

The topic of disengaged students has been a focus for my assignments since the very beginning of Mindlab. What is engagement? What motivates ākonga to be engaged? 

Engagement is complex and it is a cognitive process. When we think of ākonga we need to consider 1) how invested are they in their own learning and 2) their personal learning strategies, Hattie (2009).

Once we define engagement it can be measured. 
It has multiple layers:
1. behaviour
2. emotional 
3. cognitive

According to Hattie (2009) what we need are practical strategies to encourage positive outcomes and promote engagement.

Engagement = connected with learning 

Cognitive:  Engagement depends on a student's psychological investment in their own learning

"When cognitively engaged, students concentrate, focus on achieving goals, are flexible in their work and cope with failure" (Hattie, 2009, p. 2)

Behaviour: Engagement looks like students' participating in learning and classroom activities. Behavioural engagement is the easiest to measure. This means that students who able to control and regulate themselves look like they are "physically ready and willing to learn". 

Emotional: We can develop emotional engagement through relationships between students and their teachers, classmates and school. This has also been called 'identification' with school and learning practices.  Students are engaged when they feel included in the school and feel an emotional bond with the school, its teachers and their peers.

Ākonga need to be connected to their learning in a holistic way. They need to believe in what they are doing, feel safe and respected and be psychologically ready to learn.


The challenge is to measure all of these types of engagement (p. 5)

Hattie (2009) also goes on to explain different types of student and teacher questioning.

• Active answering – students voluntarily answer questions 
• Passive answering – students answer questions when requested by teachers 
• Question raising – students voluntarily ask the teacher questions

Do teachers identify engagement?  (p. 6)

More attention is needed for the "quietly" disengaged. 

"teachers are observed, and observe other teachers, with the aim of improving teaching and student learning outcomes." but what is the focus of this appraisal?

• learning outcomes of students 
• teachers’ verbal attention to students’ work (encouraging and recognising positive performance; continually asking questions and instructing students) 
• teachers’ non-verbal attention to students (eye contact, body language) 
• teachers’ individual instruction to students (provides personal instructions to students when they are involved in activities) 
• students’ involvement (answering questions, raising questions, engaging in activities)

These are important as they recognise the role that teachers can play in stimulating the engagement of students.

Dimensions of student engagement:

• participation in activities (behavioural engagement)
• asking questions (cognitive) and
• responding to teachers’ feedback (emotional).

Ultimately too, these positive learning behaviours recognise the impact that they should have on the learning outcomes of students.

What are the consequences of disengagement?  (p. 7)

learning outcomes?  achievement?

How to promote engagement?

Some studies have shown that engagement is increased through flexible, individualised teaching in a supportive learning environment. 

Project-based learning, for example, allows students to own their own task. 
Strong student-teacher relationships create a classroom where students feel safe and engaged. 
Student monitoring is a key step for teachers to assess whether they are having an impact on students.

Project-based learning  (p. 8)

Many disengaged students feel that school is not relevant to them. Engaging teaching is personalised and motivating for students.

Student-teacher relationships

Hattie (2009) finds that strong classroom management and student-teacher relationships have a significant impact on engagement and achievement

This means providing students with a safe environment: physically safe, and a place where students feel able to make mistakes.

Motivation is a fundamental part of engagement that is difficult to encourage where students are cautious about contributing and dispirited when corrected. 

Mutual respect drives high expectations. 

This leads to self-regulated learning where a student is able to shape their own goals.

Effective and engaging teachers ensure they are implementing approaches that will work for their students.

In this keynote speech John Hattie talks about not caring about how you teach but rather how your teaching impacts learners and what you think about your teaching.

https://visible-learning.org/2017/08/john-hattie-how-you-teach-video/

References:
Hattie, J. (2009) Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement, Routledge

Learning to teach technology

Technology is an area of the curriculum I am developing my knowledge of.

 As I was writing a learning narrative about a baking experience I needed to look up the technology curriculum to set goals for an student. I found this site with examples: Teaching Snapshots Technology  This seems like a good resource to explore further when I plan my next creativity & design workshop.

I was feeling a bit stuck as my last few design workshops have not gone to plan. What I expected from the ākonga was different than they either wanted to do or were capable of. I summarised real student issues for ākonga to work with but they still struggled with the concept of design thinking. I need to revise my approach again. I decided to observe another kaiako to see how they introduced a topic and scaffolded ākonga. I asked if I could observe another teacher's problem solving workshop last Thursday and I wrote some notes. 

My main reflection about this was I need to start simple and specific. Most students who come to my workshops are either expecting a free play exploration of hands-on materials or to be given a step by step guide. I am going to implement strategies to support this range of student learning styles and learning preferences. I am currently using a google classroom called Creative Kids where I put lesson pans, resources and links to expected activities. 

I believe the majority of ākonga who are struggling to be engaged in this workshop series are uncomfortable its open-endedness and loose structure. There's too much choice for them and their confidence is not high enough for them to be playful with materials or perhaps they don't see the point.

Online Part of Mindlab

Planning for Essay 1

bibliography

guide to making a video

These are some good suggests for research topics
inspiring teacher inquiry questions

My first initial brain storm about my inquiry topic:

Literature Review Research 1
The next step is using the literature review to inform my action plan.
My action plan Research 2 

Design for Learning

Design for Learning

Following on from a previous blog I thought I would add more thoughts on the design for learning process. After reading this article:  designing learning that offers a reason for being. I was reading a comment and this person discussed Project Wayfinder so I followed this link:   https://www.projectwayfinder.com/

Unfortunately it is an overseas provider and it costs to do the training and buy the toolkits. I really like the concept of a wayfinder and I wonder if we could develop our own Haeata model.

This is what I discovered from their site:

I feel like I have made a start with this by using a few pages from my drawing book. I used these on Wednesday's workshop "Creativity through design". 






Ākonga were able to either use the google form I made (using the questions/activities in the book) or write directly onto a photocopy of the book.  

After the ākonga completed this task I shared their answers and discussed having a growth mindset e.g. it's okay to say you don't know! One of the most powerful things about this was that the kids seemed to find it empowering. I believe they found it engaging which helped them with the next part. 



One of my successes from this workshop was also having 3 students who started with wanting to be outside the classroom and then make their way into the room to use the hot glue guns.

Earlier this week I wanted to stop this series of workshops as I felt the structure was too loose and I felt out of my depth. However doing these tasks first helped provide a direction for solving student problems at Haeata.                                                                      

I think this is where I want to direct my teaching as inquiry. This relates well to my assignments through Mindlab as well as the Mental Health Education book we are reading as part of book club.

I am going to start by reading this chapter: "Wayfinding our Purpose" by Patrick Cook-Deegan. 

It's from: "Purpose rising: A Global Movement of Transformation and Meaning" (2017) Emanuel Kuntzelman (Editor)

WEIRD - learning by design

WEIRD - designing for learning

Will Richardson from Modern Learners discusses design for learning in this article  https://modernlearners.com/designing-for-learning/

In this he first discusses the acronym WEIRD - which means western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. Then Richardson shares Carol Black ideas about western Society and how it is weird. Black states there is "appalling personal lack of freedom" in a democracy and Western education is an outlier. Here's a video of her presentation: Carol Black: "Alternatives to schooling"

Richardson discusses how educators make broad generalisations about kids and seem to ignore the nature of learning. Students are being trained to succeed in artificial environments which aren't connected to the world around them and they might not be able to succeed in the real world. Things that connect people to learning is passion, interest, making and fun. Real learning is learning by doing and emulating others.

Design thinking 

We need to start with the 1st element of design - empathy

To flourish in democracy students should be learning in ways activities that interest them and teachers should design learning around this. Adults are learning from the process of teaching as well.

There shouldn't be a disconnect, we have to think about what's is best for our students.

Ira Socol asks the question, "what do you want our children to be?"  greatest aspirations Ira Socol  it defines everything about what a school is.

We should be designing learning with our greatest aspirations in mind not what's an efficient way to teach and deliver knowledge to students.

We want our students to be creative, collaborative, communicators, make choices, to build their own work or learning environments, curious, kind, learn from the great wide world throughout their lives, have healthy relationships, engage with technology well and live healthy lives etc.

This should be the focus of our designs moving forward.