The Art of Engagement

To actually “teach,” someone has to learn. To learn, there needs to be engagement.  How do we engage students?

                                         http://www.uvu.edu/studentinvolvement/student/actionlearningcoordinators.html

This is the missing link that alluding our congress people. They delegate the responsibility of teaching our country’s young people to the teachers with a linty of requirements and regulations. Sir Ken Robinson shared a compelling talk on TED Talks and spoke eloquently to this very thing.

(Please take some well spent time to view his talk here)

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html

Being a teacher that is actually teaching students requires knowing how to engage them. Engaging students is an art. Teachers do this in slightly or drastically different ways. The more rote our teaching becomes, the less engaged students are and test scores begin to plummet.  The critical piece here is that this is an art. To be artistic there needs to be room for creativity. The more defined each aspect becomes in education, the less room there is to be creative. When I slightly stretch my imagination, I picture congressmen wanting to have school scripted so everyone is teaching the same thing in every school.  I realize that this is the epitome of the one-size-fits-all approach, and that it is unrealistic. As teachers, the more constrained we become, the more this feels like a possibility.

                                           http://menknowpause.fooyoh.com/menknowpause_lifestyle_living/8274514

The more content we are squeezing in, the less depth we can express. True learning takes place in the depths of exploration. So where does this leave us in education with standards screaming past us on a highway intended to take us to the top of the performance scale? Not in the fast lane, that’s for sure. In some cases it might feel like the harder we try to teach all of the content and standards, the poorer the students perform.

                                                                                         http://outofboxcoaching.com/

We need to get out of the box of dispensing information and begin being true facilitators. Who likes to just sit and receive information? Talk about boring. We want to discover it, do something with it and feel it stretch its wings inside us as it helps us sore to new heights of understanding.  We need to remember that our students are no different. Some have lost their motivation, why? Perhaps because they have not been engaged for far too long. How do we pull them back?

How do we get, or keep, the art of engagement in teaching?

Teachers are not against teaching students meaningful information to increase their success in and out of school.  We need to realize that this is not by stuffing their brains full of information that in this day and age they can access with a click of a key. We need to teach them how to evaluate the information they come across and understand how they can apply it to their lives.

There are movements in education pioneering more meaningful approaches to climb the mountain of requirements and stretching our educational creativity to consolidate standards. This results in deeper experiences to cover much that has been prescribed. However, there are some drawbacks to this approach. It is not only labor intensive to create these experiences, but it takes a level of skill that is not necessarily taught in teacher’s education courses.  Beyond that, this approach is not going to work all of the time. There is still time spent going over what has to be gone over. This is not often terribly meaningful.

                                        http://www.bamradionetwork.com/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=entry&id=12&itemid=209

Making learning relevant is critical and should go without saying. Making students efforts count towards something more tangible than a letter grade is even better. Let’s stop teaching them what to think and start teaching them how to think. This will bring them much more success in an ever-changing world.