What are the students doing? This question is crucial to our understanding of effective teaching. As principals and central office administrators, we need to focus not on what the teacher is doing, but what the students are doing. Recently, a teacher wrote me that we have spent so many years training teachers to be the "doers" that we have forgotten the role of the student.
Phillip Schlechty's, Working on the Work, provides us with a clear picture of the types of student engagement. Schlechty illustrates five types of student responses to a given task. At any time throughout the day we can find students that are authentically engaged or immersed in a value added activity that they see as beneficial to their lives. Students can be ritual engaged to simply get the grade. Extending effort to complete a task simply to avoid negative consequences is the description of the passive compliant response. Students can respond to a task by disengaging or creating their own task while disrupting each other. These students are responding by retreating or rebelling.
This month I would like to shift from Working on the Work to The Three Minute Classroom Walkthrough. While I find any type of prescriptive solution to be contrary to successful instruction, I do appreciate those researches that give me a way of looking at things with a new pair of glasses.
Take a look at the 3C's presented in the The Three Minute Classroom Walkthrough, content context and cognitive type. Take away references to teacher action and acknowledge the 3C's as crucial components of student engagement.
Content: Do the students know what they are learning? Are they aware of the skills, knowledge or concepts they are going to be learning?
Context: What are the students doing? Under what type of conditions are they pursueing understanding of the content?
Cognitive Type: What level of understanding are the students going to reach with the content? Knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis or evaluation.
I agree with Scheltchy, that no one can sustain an authentic response level throughout the entire day. Nor is it reasonable or sound instruction to assume all understanding takes place at the top of Bloom's Taxonomy.
I have to ask myself how I would respond if I shadowed a student throughout any given day. What percentage of my day would I spend authentically engaged at a high level of understanding and interest?
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We have great teachers who inspire our students to accomplish great things; looking in classrooms, however, reminds me that there is much left to be done. If we delay incorporating the components you mentioned above, our charge will be insurmountable.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do not want to sound pessimistic, I recently visited a regular pre-k class and was alarmed at the number of non-speakers. I left both disillusioned and anxious knowing the relationship between oral language and early literacy. Time has run out.