Join the conversation

Excellent post.

Yes, "engagement" is becoming the magic pill in education, and not only in struggling schools. Even top universities are abandoning the lecture format for a "workshop" approach, on the grounds that students will learn more if they help each other and immediately apply the concepts of the lesson.

Introductory physics course (such as the M.I.T. courses profiled in the NYT earlier this year) make use of the "personal response clicker," a gadget for answering multiple-choice questions in class. The professor can instantly see how many students got the right answer and can address misunderstandings. But many physics questions require hours of thought.

Workshop proponents are right about the value of reasoning out loud, applying concepts, and addressing misconceptions on the spot. They are wrong to replace the lecture with the workshop. The lecture allows a professor to present a topic in depth. It allows the student to listen and think. It challenges the student to go solve the problems independently.

If we abandon the lecture, we limit the kind of knowledge and insight that a teacher or professor can convey in class, and we encourage students to expect instant everything: instant application, instant activity, instant feedback. Learning, as you point out, is not instantaneous. Immediate engagement may impede deeper engagement. If we take this "workshop" fad too far, we may make quiet thought a relic of another age.

Human beings are natural learners. If left alone, most children and adults will become "engaged" in something that is interesting to them. If a teacher understands the developmental level of her students, it is fairly easy to engage them, or get them involved in the learning process. When that happens, there are few disciplinary problems, even in the toughest elementary schools. I have little experience with the secondary school, but I imagine it would be the same for most students.

I taught first-grade for many years. Towards the end of my career I was very experienced at getting the children involved in learning because I knew what appealed to them. I took pride in creating a joyful classroom, one that was filled with the things of childhood: beautiful books, puppets, markers, easels, paints, math manipulatives, puzzles etc. My goal was never to hear the words, "This is boring" but when I did, I always said, "Then let's do something else." With constant engagement, my disadvantaged students often did as well as the affluent children in my neighborhood school.

After NCLB, I was suddenly pressured to drill my students on discrete facts (i.e. test prep) for the entire day. The children became disengaged. Fortunately for me, it was time to retire, and that's what I did.

So, to answer the question more directly: Yes, I do think "engagement" is the "magic pill" of education; it was given to us by Mother Nature.

Diana--

Thank you for your kind comment. I also like lectures--if they're good lectures--but I have to admit that I never much liked them before I got to college. I had a couple of teachers in high school who tended to lecture, and they tended to lose the class. So, as long as we're talking about higher education, I agree with you that no one should banish the lecture. Incidentally, one very promising development in education technology is the availability of wonderful university lectures on line through iTunes U and other sources. I've been watching lectures by some of my favorite professors from college and graduate school. A small step towards democratization of learning!

Linda, thank you for sharing your own inspiring--though ultimately dispiriting--experience. I prize engagement very highly. "Engaging Environments" is, in fact, one of the categories of the "emerging vision for education" we promote on this website. My larger point is that people should be careful about how they use the word. Some policy discussions seem to be stretching it to the breaking point.

Schools like High Tech High are inspiring to see. They do not array students neatly in rows; They get them involved in thoroughly stimulating projects, and the effects are by all accounts astonishing. I wish my own high school, which was a great high school, had been more like High Tech High. I envy those students for what they do. Yes, it's a truism, but schools need to give many students new avenues into learning. The drill and kill approach adopted by some schools in response to NCLB will lose these students.

But I worry when "engagement" becomes a magic pill. Teachers can be much more engaging if they have the support of sound discipline policies and strong out-of-school supports for their students' well being, for example, they don't have to swim upstream in engaging their students.

I also worry when "engagement" comes to mean merely keeping students entertained. That surely isn't what happens at schools like High Tech High, which by all accounts challenges students through authentic projects that align with standards. Often, engagement devolves into mere entertainment when teachers become desperate--they have to work against so many of the damaging social and economic influences that pull their students away from learning.

If we attribute every classroom problem from poor discipline to high school dropouts to lack of student engagement, we're likely to create this kind of desperation. So, let's make student engagement one of our highest goals, but let's give teachers the conditions they need to engage students. And let's ensure that motivation, hard work and personal responsibility remain essential ingredients of our engagement strategies.

I share your concern with the topic of student engagement. When I first had a classroom back in 1970, I recall that one of my first priorities was student engagement. Perhaps it was because of my own experiences as a student. I was a straight A student but often thoroughly bored or disinterested in what teachers were presenting. I still work hard to create an environment and instructional program that interests students, but now I prefer the "minds on" term rather than engagement because, as you pointed out, it's not really about constantly entertaining your kids. It's about igniting their curiosity about a topic, using active strategies that encourage and support new learning, and encouraging risk-taking, ambiguity, and creative thought processes.

I had to quote the following text from President Obama's speech to school children. Very relevant:

"I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try."