Week 8: Understanding Engagement

1. aitsl. “Engagement in Australian Schools.” Austrailian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, n.d. http://www.centralrangesllen.org.au/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Engagement_in_Australian_Schools-Background_Paper.pdf
2. “Student Engagement: Overview” Educational Leaders, Ministry of Education, 1 May 2019. http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Pedagogy-and-assessment/Building-effective-learning-environments/Student-engagement
3. “Student Engagement.” The Glossary of: Education reform, 28 Feb. 2016. Student Engagement Definition - The Glossary of Education Reformhttps://www.edglossary.org/student-engagement/

(1) "What is engagement?
Engagement is an ambiguous term; poorly defined and difficult to measure. Engagement is not simply about good classroom behaviour or attendance, but a connection with learning.2
The student who is quietly sitting at the back of the classroom not participating in discussions or completing their work is as disengaged as a child who is talking with friends or the child who did not show up at school."

"A number of high--‐performing systems around the world have behavioural change at the heart of their school education strategy. Improvement comes from first identifying effective

learning behaviours, and then the teaching behaviours that develop the desired learning behaviours. All policies and programs are then aligned to monitor and develop the behavioural change process."

"Emotional engagement includes how students identify with school and the enjoyment they get from learning. Positive associations with school are associated with students continuing with further study, immediately post-school or ongoing throughout adulthood.38 Emotionally engaged students are more likely to complete Year 12: 96 per cent of those who completed Year 12 said they were happy at school, compared to 85 per cent of non-completers.39However, it must be noted that even this measure is an inexact proxy for emotional engagement, demonstrating the scope for greater research on the link between engagement and outcomes."

(2) "Cognitive engagement is difficult to measure but it aims to look at "something that goes on in young people’s heads". The paper describes that cognitively-engaged students concentrate, focus on achieving goals, are flexible and cope with failure.

Behavioural engagement ensures that students are physically ready and willing to learn. It is the most frequent style of reported engagement, however it tends to be used to comment on students’ negative behaviours only.

Emotional engagement refers to the relationships between student and their teachers, classmates and the school. As results from the Te Kotahitanga research show this can be particularly important for Māori students as well as students in general."

(3) "In education, student engagement refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education. Generally speaking, the concept of “student engagement” is predicated on the belief that learning improves when students are inquisitive, interested, or inspired, and that learning tends to suffer when students are bored, dispassionate, disaffected, or otherwise “disengaged.” Stronger student engagement or improved student engagement are common instructional objectives expressed by educators."

(3):

• Intellectual engagement: Educators may use a wide variety of strategies to promote positive emotions in students that will facilitate the learning process, minimize negative behaviors, or keep students from dropping out. To increase student engagement in a course or subject, teachers may create lessons, assignments, or projects that appeal to student interests or that stimulate their curiosity. For related discussions, see authentic learning, community-based learning, differentiation, personalized learning, project-based learning, and relevance.
• Emotional engagement: The basic theory is that students will be more likely to succeed if at least one adult in the school is meeting with a student regularly, inquiring about academic and non-academic issues, giving her advice, and taking an interest in her out-of-school life, personal passions, future aspirations, and distinct learning challenges and needs.
• Behavioral engagement: Teachers may establish classroom routines, use consistent cues, or assign students roles that foster behaviors more conducive to learning. Research on brain-based learning has also provided evidence that variation, novelty, and physical activity can stimulate and improve learning. For a related discussion, see classroom management.
• Physical engagement: Teachers may use physical activities or routines to stimulate learning or interest. For example, “kinesthetic learning” refers to the use of physical motions and activities during the learning process. Instead of asking students to answer questions aloud, a teacher might ask students to walk up to the chalkboard and answer the question verbally while also writing the answer on the board (in this case, the theory is that students are more likely to remember information when they are using multiple parts of the brain at the same time
• Social engagement: students may be paired or grouped to work collaboratively on projects, or teachers may create academic contests that students compete in—e.g., a friendly competition in which teams of students build robots to complete a specific task in the shortest amount of time. Academic and co-curricular activities such as debate teams, robotics clubs, and science fairs also bring together learning experiences and social interactions. In addition, strategies such as demonstrations of learning or capstone projects may require students to give public presentations of their work, often to panels of experts from the local community, while strategies such as community-based learning or service learning (learning through volunteerism) can introduce civic and social issues into the learning process.
• Cultural engagement: Schools may take active steps to make students from diverse cultural backgrounds—particularly recently arrived immigrant or refugee students and their families—feel welcomed, accepted, safe, and valued. The general goal of such strategies would be to reduce the feelings of confusion, alienation, disconnection, or exclusion that some students and families may experience, and thereby increase their engagement in academics and school activities. For related discussions, see dual-language education, English-language learner, multicultural education, and voice.