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Understanding student

engagement: exploring

perspectives and approaches

M. Datoo, Session with BC Encounters Teachers

October 15, 2010

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Exploring perspectives from theory and research

Today, effective teaching practices centre on the importance of learning opportunities that are thoughtfully and intentionally designed to engage students both academically and intellectually.

While academic engagement draws our attention to on-task behaviours that signal a serious engagement in class work, intellectual engagement refers to an absorbing, creatively energizing focus requiring contemplation, interpretation, understanding, meaning-making and critique. Learning that invites students to engage intellectually awakens the human spirit’s desire to know. The result is a deep, personal commitment on the part of learners to explore and investigate ideas, issues, problems or questions for a sustained period of time.

It is relatively easy to identify curriculum outcomes for relevant programs of study, but often much more difficult to link these outcomes to the larger disciplinary concepts required to make connections to the disciplines, students’ lives and the world. Recent research from the learning sciences have highlighted the importance of these connections and identified three considerations that are particularly important when designing learning for academic and intellectual engagement:

1. start with students’ prior knowledge,2. organize and use knowledge conceptually, and3. build assessment into the fabric of study.

PRINCIPLE 1: TEACHERS ARE DESIGNERS OF LEARNING“What did you do in school today?: Teaching Effectiveness Framework and Rubric”

(Canadian Education Association, May 2009)

From “How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School”John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, editors

“Even young infants are active learners who bring a point of view to the learning setting. The world they enter is not a "booming, buzzing confusion" (James, 1890), where every stimulus is equally salient. Instead, an infant's brain gives precedence to certain kinds of information: language, basic concepts of number, physical properties, and the movement of animate and inanimate objects. In the most general sense, the contemporary view of learning is that people construct new knowledge and understandings based on what they already know and believe (e.g., Cobb, 1994; Piaget, 1952, 1973a,b, 1977, 1978; Vygotsky, 1962, 1978).”

From “How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School”John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, editors

“A logical extension of the view that new knowledge must be constructed from existing knowledge is that teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings, the false beliefs, and the naive renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to a given subject. Teachers then need to build on these ideas in ways that help each student achieve a more mature understanding. If students' initial ideas and beliefs are ignored, the understandings that they develop can be very different from what the teacher intends.”

From “How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School”John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, editors

“A common misconception regarding "constructivist" theories of knowing (that existing knowledge is used to build new knowledge) is that teachers should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves. This perspective confuses a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a theory of knowing. Constructivists assume that all knowledge is constructed from previous knowledge, irrespective of how one is taught (e.g., Cobb 1994)—even listening to a lecture involves active attempts to construct new knowledge. Fish Is Fish (Lionni, 1970) and attempts to teach children that the earth is round (Vosniadou and Brewer, 1989) show why simply providing lectures frequently does not work. Nevertheless, there are times, usually after people have first grappled with issues on their own, that "teaching by telling" can work extremely well (e.g., Schwartz and Bransford, in press). 2

However, teachers still need to pay attention to students' interpretations and provide guidance when necessary.

There is a good deal of evidence that learning is enhanced when teachers pay attention to the knowledge and beliefs that learners bring to a learning task, use this knowledge as a starting point for new instruction, and monitor students' changing conceptions as instruction proceeds.”

From “How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School”John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, editors

…key characteristics of learning and transfer that have important implications for education:

Initial learning is necessary for transfer, and a considerable amount is known about the kinds of learning experiences that support transfer.

Knowledge that is overly contextualized can reduce transfer; abstract representations of knowledge can help promote transfer.

Transfer is best viewed as an active, dynamic process rather than a passive end-product of a particular set of learning experiences.

All new learning involves transfer based on previous learning, and this fact has important implications for the design of instruction that helps students learn.

STOP and Reflect…What are your preconceptions about accessing prior knowledge?How do you think this could be done?

-Consider Unit 2.2

STOP and Reflect…In your suggested approach:•Are you building on previous knowledge?

•Do students have sufficient background knowledge to build on?

•Is your approach leading to the development of conceptual and abstract understanding – does it leads students to understanding the larger disciplinary concepts?

3 approaches

Working with text Working with concepts Working outside text

Approach #1: working with text

How does this activity access prior knowledge?

How does it build on prior knowledge?

How does it connect to the larger disciplinary concepts of the unit or module?

How do these images represent “caring”?

How do these images represent “caring”?

How do these images represent “caring”?

What concepts emerge from this sequence?

Approach #3: Working beyond text

image

image

And an astronomer said, "Master, what of Time?"

And he answered:

You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable.

You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons.

Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.

Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness,

And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.

And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.

Who among you does not feel that his power to love is boundless?

And yet who does not feel that very love, though boundless, encompassed within the centre of his being, and moving not form love thought to love thought, nor from love deeds to other love deeds?

And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless?

But if in you thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons,

And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.

Time XXI by Khalil Gibran poetry

Narrative