As I head back to school in a brief two weeks, Art & Science of Teaching Chapter 5 ("What Will I Do To Engage Students?") falls open and asks me to consider the basic question: How can I get students hooked on what's going on in my classroom? Marzano suggests some time-honored traditions backed up by research: using games, inconsequential competition, physical movement, pacing with a logical pattern that kids understand, providing unusual information, allowing kids to discuss themselves, and the kicker for me: teacher enthusiasm.
Stuck in My Head:
Marzano lays it out in the very first few sentences of the chapter. Engagement is "capturing students' attention in a way that enhances their knowledge of academic content"—and this becomes both the gold standard and the big prickly burr in my side for the entire conversation. It sent me scurrying back to a lively conversation I had last year with educator bloggers dy/dan and TMAO on content versus delivery:
Dy/dan: "Engaging a classroom on a daily basis requires more than just some superficial adjustment to classroom form. You've gotta bring great, diverse content daily and, unfortunately, there exists no tool, no shortcut, nothing else to do the job but the blunt application of profound creativity in the direction of challenging content standards."
TMAO: "[but] a lot of the time my content ain't that great. I'm teaching 14-year-olds short vowel sounds. That content sucks. But I can change the form to make it engaging, change the product so you don't feel like you're dumb when you're 14 and still spitting out short-e, and so on."
Dina: "If I scan a page of a vocabulary workbook into the computer, convert it to PDF, and add digital fill in the blanks, my kids may be "motivated" to work on it—but it's still the same damn workbook that has no basis in effective teaching practice, flexible problem solving, or language acquisition research."
My point: games, TPR techniques, unusual responses and so on are indeed useful for creating engagement, and especially useful when you need to teach thrilling content like "short e" vowel sounds. But they never, ever, take the place of finding and creating relevance. Relevance self-generates the student engagement we seek.



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