Ten Steps To Better Student Engagement: by Tristan de Frondeville 3/11/09 - Edutopia
Ten Steps To Better Student Engagement: by Tristan de Frondeville 3/11/09 - Edutopia
Ten Steps To Better Student Engagement: by Tristan de Frondeville 3/11/09 - Edutopia
By Tristan de Frondeville
3/11/09 - Edutopia
As a teacher, my goal was to go home at the end of each day with more energy than I had at the
beginning of the day. Seriously.
Now, as I travel the country coaching teachers on how to successfully use project learning, my
goal remains the same. And I try to teach educators the strategies they need to achieve this goal in
their own classrooms.
A teacher in one of my workshops said, "When my students and I are in the flow, then I don't feel
like I have to work as hard." I heartily agree. When 90 to 100 percent of my students are excitedly
engaged in their tasks and asking deep and interesting questions, I experience joy, and joy is a lot
less tiring than the frustration that comes with student apathy.
Project-based classrooms with an active-learning environment make such in-the-flow moments
more common. Yet these same classrooms require many teacher and student skills to work well.
As teachers, we can feel overwhelmed when we try something new and experience chaos instead
of flow.
The good news is that the strategies for creating and managing high-quality project-learning
environments are productive in any classroom, whether project learning is a central part of the
curriculum or not. Here are ten ideas that you can start practicing in your classroom today to help
you create more moments of flow.
1
Teachers tend to get the first response when they scaffold challenging tasks so that all students are
successful.
For example, take the typical task of interviewing an adult outside the classroom. Some teachers
assign the task on Monday and expect it to be done the following Monday, confident that by
including the weekend, they are providing sufficient support. Other teachers realize that finding,
cold calling, and interviewing an adult are challenging tasks for most young people, so they
create intermediate steps -- such as brainstorming, searching online for phone numbers, crafting
high-quality interview questions, and role-playing the interview -- that train all students for
success.
8. Use Questioning Strategies That Make All Students Think and Answer
Pay a visit to many classrooms and you'll see a familiar scene: The teacher asks questions and,
always, the same reliable hands raise up. This pattern lends itself to student inattention. Every
day, include some questions you require every student to answer. Find a question you know
everyone can answer simply, and have the class respond all at once.
You can ask students to put a finger up when they're ready to answer, and once they all do, ask
them to whisper the answer at the count of three. They can answer yes, no, or maybe with a
thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or thumbs-sideways gesture. That also works for "I agree," "I
disagree," or "I'm not sure."
2
Numerical answers under ten are easy to show with fingers, but don't limit yourself to math
questions. For instance, if you're teaching time management, have students let you know what
their progress is halfway through the class by putting up one or more fingers to show whether
they are one-, two-, or three-quarters done with the assignment, or finished. Do these exercises at
least two or three times per class.
Tristan de Frondeville, a former teacher who has also coached educators and written
curriculum, heads PBL Associates, a consulting company dedicated to project learning and
school redesign.
This article originally published on 3/11/2009