Academic, non-academic skills go hand in hand

I was watching short films produced by our high school video production students recently and found that each one was moving in ways that school work rarely is. Some were funny, some were quite serious. Each one told a story that resonated with me because each one represented experiences that I have had, that most of us have had. Students were able to integrate personal experience into the work they were doing at school which clearly made it engaging for them. This work was not about completion or getting a grade. Yet they were developing both academic and non-academic skills and getting recognition for it. This is important.

Why?

The first reason… non-academic skills are as important as academic skills for educational and professional success.

Manpower Group, a multinational human resource consulting firm, conducts an annual talent survey with more than 40,000 employers worldwide. In 2013, despite the fact more than 10 million people in the United States were unemployed, nearly 40 percent of U.S. employers reported having difficulty filling jobs due to lack of technical competencies (hard, academic skills) and workplace competencies (soft, non-academic skills).

Technical expertise depends on education, training, and experience, and it tends to be domain specific. In other words, the technical expertise required for success in film production (understanding camera systems, lighting, software, etc.) doesn't necessarily translate to other professional fields.

Non-technical skills, however, cross disciplines and are widely recognized as essential for success in the workplace and life in general. A recent article published in the Journal of Labor Policy asserts that the evidence on the respective roles of various types of skills required by employers indicates that workplace competencies "play a larger role in determining wages than academic skills at most jobs." The ability to self-regulate, motivate, work with others, and persevere has more to do with general success in work than anything else.

The second reason… non-academic skills directly impact academic success. Performance on most tasks depends on a combination of cognitive abilities (abilities traditionally associated with general acquisition of knowledge), non-cognitive abilities (conscientiousness, perseverance, sociability, and curiosity), and incentives. The Texas Education Agency and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board have indicated these skills are important for academic success and college readiness. The state's College and Career Readiness Standards represent a broad range of knowledge and skills that students need to succeed in entry-level college courses, as well as in a wide range of majors and careers, and they include a set of cross-disciplinary skills that emphasize the development of strong academic behaviors supported by self-regulated learning abilities and perseverance; general problem-solving skills; inquiry and dialogue; developing and considering arguments and evidence for learning; reading, writing, researching, collecting and using data, and applying technology across the curriculum. Establishing a clear connection between the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills and these cross-disciplinary, non-technical skills is a crucial component of preparing students for college and the workforce.

Finally, non-cognitive... non-academic... non-technical skills (whatever you want to call them) can be learned and developed. In other words, non-technical skills can also be influenced by education, training, and experience. They are often a byproduct of activities aimed at achieving other goals including rigorous curriculum in schools to improve educational outcomes, training to improve occupational skills, and participation in activities that facilitate discipline, practice, and teamwork.

The high school film production students' recognition came in the form of first, second, and third place ribbons at the state SkillsUSA competition held in Corpus Christi last month. SkillsUSA is a career and technical student organization serving more than 320,000 high school and college students and professional members who are preparing for careers in trade, technical and skilled service occupations, including health occupations. While the recognition might be nice, and can contribute to student engagement, ribbons don't incentivize high level, creative work. The film students' work was clearly motivated by something more personal. To know what that is, you just have to watch the films.

The students who produced these short films are learning a great deal about the technical skills associated with the film and media production industry, skills that will serve them well as filmmakers and producers. They are also developing other skills that will serve them well as filmmakers, sales representatives, financial analysts, teachers, engineers, skilled trade workers, software developers, event planners, managers, information security analysts, or most other jobs including many that don't yet exist.

• Heckman, J. & Kautz, T. (2012). Hard evidence on soft skills, Labor Economics, 19, 451-464.
• Lerman, R. (2013) Are employability skills learned in U.S. youth education and training programs?, Journal of Labor Policy, 2(6) 1-20. 

'Good-old fashioned' not enough

The French microbiologist Louis Pasteur and the British surgeon Joseph Lister made extraordinary contributions to the world in the 19^thcentury. Pasteur's work in microbiology provided support for the germ theory of disease and advanced the concept of vaccination. Lister was the first to develop antiseptic surgical methods. He introduced the use of carbolic acid to sterilize surgical instruments and to clean wounds, which made surgery safer for patients. Before the introduction of vaccination and antisepsis, people commonly died due to unsanitary conditions in the home, or following surgery, or even childbirth. These breakthroughs in medicine have saved millions of lives and are among the greatest discoveries of the 19^th century.

Today, when you need medical care you would want a practitioner whose training accounted for the contributions of these two men. My guess is, however, you would not actually want one of these two men providing your care, or anyone from the 19^th century for that matter. After all, much learning has taken place since then.

I read an article recently that suggests it's time to revive good, old-fashioned education. This makes me nervous. Not because good old fashioned is bad. It’s not. Pasteur and Lister are old-fashioned by today’s standards. I worry that good old fashioned education does not account for new learning, for today’s context.

Journalist Joanne Lipman asserts, in a piece published in the Wall Street Journal, Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results, that “a kinder, gentler philosophy” has errantly “dominated American education over the past few decades” and that "conventional wisdom holds that teachers are supposed to tease knowledge out of students…” and that “projects and collaborative learning are applauded…” while “...traditional methods like lecturing and memorization--derided as 'drill and kill'-- are frowned upon, dismissed as a surefire way to suck young minds dry of creativity and motivation."

She argues that this so-called conventional wisdom is wrong. The problem with this position?

First, projects and collaboration are not conventional. The individual's ability to recall, in fact, is still the most highly valued skill in most schools. Lecturing and direct instruction are still the most prevalent instructional methods. And memorization is still the most common cognitive student activity. So any conclusion that practices that include projects and collaboration are not working is, at best, incomplete.

But there is a bigger problem with her argument. She frames this discussion as an either/or proposition. That somehow we must choose between what we know and what we are learning. Ironically, her argument about learning does not account for, well, learning. While Lipman outlines a number of interesting discoveries across the social sciences, her synthesis does not support the argument that good old fashioned education is enough.

The reason?

It's not an either/or proposition. It's not memorization or inquiry. It's not lecturing or projects. It's not independent practice or collaboration. It's not having kind teachers or demanding teachers.

It's all of them.

Lipman’s argument is not wrong. It just falls short. Good old fashioned in education is not enough. Not anymore.

Here’s my two cents on some of what she presents:

Lipman writes about rote learning...
"Rote learning, long discredited, is now recognized as one reason that children whose families come from India (where memorization is still prized) are creaming their peers in the National Spelling Bee Championship."

My two cents...
Rote learning has not been discredited. It simply is one kind of learning, probably quite relevant if your goal is to win a spelling bee. Relevant, but not sufficient, if your goal is to develop the capacity to invent something, produce a great piece of writing, start a company, or pass a modern standardized test to graduate high school.

Lipman writes about memorization... 
"William Klemm of Texas A&M University argues that the U.S. needs to reverse the bias against memorization. Even the U.S. Department of Education raised alarm bells, chastising American schools in a 2008 report that bemoaned the lack of math fluency (a notion it mentioned no fewer than 17 times). It concluded that schools need to embrace the dreaded 'drill and practice.'"

My two cents...
Now, if not so much the U.S. Department of Education, I certainly do love Texas A&M University (Whoop! '95), but there is no bias against memorization in education. This doesn't even really make sense. Memory is a good thing. I'm using mine right now. Cognitively, memory is the residue of thought. The more you think about something, the more likely you are to remember it. Rote learning is a memorization technique. It's great if the goal is to recall. And recall is necessary if one is to think. But in schools, we too often stop at recall. We also need to ask students to think, to recall information for a larger purpose. By helping students acquire knowledge and then asking them to use it to analyze problems, research, and develop solutions, we are asking them to think, which in turn improves the likelihood they will remember what they are thinking about. Ironic, isn't it?

Lipman writes about praise...
"Praise makes you weak..."

My two cents...
This is an incomplete analysis. It is true there is good research to suggest praise that supports the fixed mindset (that you are what you are and you can't do anything about it) inhibits confidence building and self determination. But praise that supports a growth mindset (that you are what you work for) facilitates greater confidence. It's not whether you praise or not, it's how you praise. Praise can make you weak, but it can also make you strong.

Lipman writes about complex problems...
"...American students struggle with complex math problems because, as research makes abundantly clear, they lack fluency in basic addition and subtraction—and few of them were made to memorize their times tables."

My two cents...
This is a good point, an example of the necessity of rote learning and the reality that it is not enough. Solving complex math problems requires that students develop automaticity in basic mathematics functions. They need to be able to recall without working at it. Rote learning of the times tables is probably a good idea. But complex problems require critical thinking. You have to have knowledge to think critically; to analyze, to conceptualize, to create. So it's not either/or, it's both.

Lipman writes about creativity...
"The rap on traditional education is that it kills children's' creativity. But Temple University psychology professor Robert W. Weisberg's research suggests just the opposite. Prof. Weisberg has studied creative geniuses including Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright and Picasso—and has concluded that there is no such thing as a born genius. Most creative giants work ferociously hard and, through a series of incremental steps, achieve things that appear (to the outside world) like epiphanies and breakthroughs."

My two cents...
Right! Geniuses aren't generally born. Thomas Edison worked hard as did Frank Lloyd Wright and Picasso. But I doubt rote learning got Edison to the phonograph, or Lloyd Wright to the Prairie House, or Picasso to cubism, or Albert Einstein to the theory of relativity. Einstein, whose success was predicated on imagination, thought, and creativity, had his richest educational experience at a school in Aarau, Switzerland where rote drills, memorization, and force-fed facts were avoided and hands-on observations, visual imagery, and conceptual thinking were promoted. Now that’s a theory!

Lipman writes about grit...
In recent years, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth has studied spelling bee champs, Ivy League undergrads and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.—all together, over 2,800 subjects. In all of them, she found that grit—defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals—is the best predictor of success. In fact, grit is usually unrelated or even negatively correlated with talent.

My two cents...
This is good stuff. But the question is where does passion and perseverance--or grit-- come from? In the study referenced by Lipman, Angela Duckworth cites the work of Benjamin Bloom regarding the development of world class pianists, neurologists, swimmers, chess players, mathematicians, and sculptors. Bloom observed that in every studied field, high achievers had a strong interest in the particular field in which they excelled. In other words, it was meaningful to them. Self-determination theory helps to put grit into context. According to SDT, intrinsic motivation develops when people, in the pursuit of something, are able to feel competent, connected to others, and in control of their own behaviors and goals. When people experience these three things, they become self-determined and are able to be intrinsically motivated to pursue the things that interest them, to persevere in the face of difficulty… to show grit. Furthermore, while extrinsic rewards are strongly linked to low level tasks, intrinsic motivation is more strongly associated with complex, creative endeavors. In fact, extrinsic rewards can undermine creativity. Therefore, grit, in the pursuit of learning, seems most likely to appear when the work learners are doing is challenging and personally meaningful.

Duckworth closed her research findings about grit by reminding us that the goal of education is not just to learn a little about a lot but also a lot about a little. Not one or the other, not either/or, but both.

“Good old-fashioned” can get us a little about a lot, but that’s not enough. Not anymore.

• Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation in Education: Reconsidered Once Again. Review of Educational Research, 71(1), 1–27. 
• Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. New York, NY: Kappa Delta Pi
• Duckworth, A., Matthews, M., Kelly, D., & Peterson, C. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, (6), 1087–1101
• Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.
• Isaacson, W. (2007). Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster
• Kim, K. H. (2011). The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23(4), 285–295. doi:10.1080/10400419.2011.627805
• Mangels, J. A.; Butterfield, B.; Lamb, J.; Good, C.; Dweck, C. (2006). "Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success? A social cognitive neuroscience model". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 1 (2): 75–86.
• Schlechty, P. (2011). Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Wiley, John & Sons, Inc.
• Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom, San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.  

If we design it, they will come

While watching the movie, Field of Dreams, I could never quite put my finger on what the voice Ray Kinsella kept hearing meant when it said, “If you build it, they will come.” It was mysterious and alluded to something beyond immediate observation.

While it turned out the baseball field Kinsella (Kevin Costner) built represents second chances, it also represents the idea that baseball, in its essence, is aesthetically and substantively compelling, that its charm is inexplicable and has to be experienced.

The World Series Champion Boston Red Sox, featured in the movie when Kinsella dreams about and then attends a game at Fenway Park, have enjoyed record attendance at the historic park in recent years. Baseball, in general, as enjoyed high attendance, spurred by the designing of new ballparks intended to enhance the fan experience in terms of both aesthetics (vintage appeal) and substance (good baseball). While substance will always matter, teams recognize that the experience must also accommodate the needs and interests of the modern fan.

They must engage fans.

If baseball isn't your game, consider the video game industry. Market research shows video game sales rose to more than $1 billion in September, 27 percent higher than the same period last year. When I say video games, I mean complex games like, Civilization, which is one of the most popular strategy games of all time. Many of these games are extremely difficult to play yet engage millions of people, not only to play them but to pay for the right to do so. They have hundreds of variables, they challenge participants, and they reward persistence. They elicit learning. If they didn't, they wouldn't survive in the marketplace.

The games must engage players.

What's the point? Experience matters. It matters for engagement. It matters for learning.

I got to thinking about this after reviewing the first six week's attendance figures for our schools. The numbers across the district aren't bad. In fact, average attendance district-wide is above the state average. But at our junior high school, attendance the first six weeks is at 99 percent. That's a big number, and represents a two percentage point jump over last year. In fact, in looking at the previous five years, it's the highest number at this point in the school year by far. Attendance is critical for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its close relationship with student achievement. Attendance informs multiple measures of achievement including grade-point average and reading and math performance.

So what's happening at the junior high school?

Part of the answer may be in the instructional design approach teachers are taking to enhance student engagement. It's an approach that recognizes the importance of experience in drawing more students, more of the time into academic learning. It's an approach that allows students to become more active with content and more active with others in the learning environment, both of which are essential for facilitating long-term retention, comprehension, an application. While time devoted to instruction positively correlates with student learning, the organization of content and the level of engagement with content have even stronger connections to student achievement, especially when the goal is long-term learning rather than short term retention.

The challenge schools face, then, is similar to Kinsella's. He set out to design something that would attract others to a baseball experience. For schools, it's about engaging more students, more of the time in academic learning. It's about helping students achieve higher levels of learning; learning that is transferable, usable...in college or in the workforce. It's about experience.

By the way, I've been to Fenway Park. It's special. They designed a great ballpark. But I'm an Astros fan, and while the experience at Minute Maid Park is terrific, substance will always matter.

• Gottfried, M. (2009). Evaluating the Relationship Between Student Attendance and Achievement in Urban Elementary and Middle Schools: An Instrumental Variables Approach. American Educational Research Journal, 47(2), 434–465. doi:10.3102/0002831209350494
• Roby, D. E. (2003). Research on School Attendance and Student Achievement: A Study of Ohio Schools. Educational Research Quarterly 2003, 4–15.
• Strobel, J. (2009). When is PBL More Effective ? A Meta-synthesis of Meta-analyses Comparing PBL to Conventional Classrooms, 3(1).
• Summers, E. J., & Dickinson, G. (2012). A Longitudinal Investigation of Project-based Instruction and Student Achievement in High School Social Studies, 6(1).

What is college and career readiness?

Two primary goals of schools are 1) to help students attain the knowledge and skills they need to be successful when they leave school and 2) to help students learn how to learn because the knowledge and skills required to be successful in the world change over time.

In recent years, Texas has emphasized, through its curriculum requirements, the need to prepare students for a changing and increasingly complex world by developing standards for college and career readiness (CCRS) and integrating these standards into the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), the foundational content knowledge and skills students should master to graduate. During the most recent legislative session, state lawmakers reinforced the importance of college and career readiness standards in K-12 education, making indicators of college and career readiness part of the state's accountability system for schools and districts.

This raises a couple of questions for schools and their communities. One, what exactly is college and career readiness? Two, what kinds of learning environments will help students achieve college and career readiness?

As for the first question, Texas was the first state to adopt college and career readiness standards. The standards were jointly created through a process that included public education, higher education, and business stakeholders. The state's college and career readiness standards represent a broad range of knowledge and skills that students need to succeed in entry-level college courses, as well as in a wide range of majors and careers, and they require more active student participation in the learning environment. While the CCRS are organized into the four distinct core content areas of English/language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies, there are elements that cut across all four disciplines. According to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, these cross-disciplinary components of the CCRS are tools that college instructors in all areas use to challenge, engage, and evaluate students in each specific subject area. The CCRS include, but are not limited to, such things as:

• developing problem analysis and problem solving skills, 
• developing an ability to engage in inquiry and dialogue, 
• developing the ability to self-monitor learning,
• working collaboratively to complete and master tasks, 
• and conducting research including identifying topics and questions to be investigated, evaluating sources of information, and designing and presenting effective products.

So now the second question: What kinds of learning environments will help students achieve college and career readiness?

We know that school is often not very engaging for many students, particularly as they get into junior high and high school. Research strongly suggests that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become. We also know that student engagement positively correlates with grades, attendance, retention, graduation, employment, performance on standardized tests, and college and career readiness. The Texas legislature believes part the answer to this question is in addressing the problem of student engagement. In addition to making college and career readiness an indicator of student achievement in the accountability system, the state has also made student engagement a component of school district accountability. Navasota ISD also believes student engagement, the extent to which students actively participate in the learning process, is a key to achieving college and career readiness. So how do we engage students? We create opportunities for students to be more active in the learning environment through the very standards we are already required to use to help students attain the knowledge and skills they need to be successful when they leave school and that prepare them for college and careers (CCRS); more problem analysis and problem solving, more inquiry and dialogue, more interaction with others in the classroom, greater use of technology, and more emphasis on creatively demonstrating what is learned. With more than 80 percent of 21st century jobs requiring some post-secondary education, the risk is not in trying to engage students in more active learning. It's in not doing so.

• Texas College and Career Readiness Standards
• Donaldson, S., Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Nakamura, J.(Eds) (2011). Applied Positive Psychology: Improving Everyday Life, Schools, Work, Health, and Society. Taylor & Francis, Inc.  
• Gallup (2012). Gallup student poll, Retrieved from http://www.gallupstudentpoll.com/home.aspx
• Texas HB5, Legislative Session: 83(R)

What is student-centered?

If you've read this blog in the past year, it's probably evident that engagement has been a recurring theme. One of the things I've learned from this writing is that engagement is a fluid concept. It's ill-defined. It's ambiguous. Left to interpretation, engagement can mean different things to different people. It needs a framework for understanding, a way to think about it and use it to inform pedagogy.

In offering readers a framework for engagement in his book Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Phil Schlechty provides a language for how educators can design work that is meaningful to students and, thereby, engaging. Being student-centered in this framework means knowing your students, understanding the world as they see it, and considering the motives and values they bring to school when designing work for them that is intended to guide them to learn what they need to learn. 

But is this definition of student-centered enough to be useful?

Just like engagement, student-centeredness is a "complicated and messy idea that has encompassed a wide range of sometimes fundamentally different meanings," according to University of Texas Pan-American Professor Jacob Neumann in a recent article published in The Educational Forum. He notes that the research base on student-centered teaching and learning, as a whole, doesn't offer guidance for educators trying to create student-centered contexts in their schools and classrooms. Yet being student-centered is a common goal and, presumably, a prerequisite for engaging students. 

One of the reasons engagement is so hard to define is that it depends on many variables. Content. Context. People. Work. Especially, work. Schlechty notes that students are not typically motivated by what they learn but what they do. It's in the work. Design the work to account for those things that motivate people, and they participate. Neumann suggests the concept of student-centeredness also needs a well-defined conceptual framework that reveals the "nature and implications" of the various relationships among content, context, people, and work. 

Especially people. 

Neumann's framework moves the concept of student-centeredness away from the organization of content toward a greater understanding of the types of relationships that can exist between a teacher and a student in the work environment. Neumann's framework is valueable because it provides a way for teachers to think about students' roles in the learning environment and, by doing so, their own roles as well. 

Neumann asserts that three types of relationships can exist. One that puts the student at the forefront. One that puts the teacher at the forefront. And one in which the student and teacher become partners.

• In the first arrangement, learning centered in students, students make all decisions about what and how they learn. The teacher merely responds to student inquiry. 
• The second relationship reverses that role. In learning environments that are centered on students, the teacher essentially makes all the decisions about what and how students learn, albeit teachers don't generally have control over the "what" in today's standards-based environment. 
• Finally, learning centered with students puts the teacher and student in partnership with each other. Teachers "enlist students in a more reciprocal learning relationship" in which teachers and students collaborate in creating and studying meaningful problems. Students have some stake in both what and how they learn. 

Neumann recognizes that these are not discrete categories. His point in writing about student-centeredness in this way was not about identifying the right relationship but about revealing the implications of the various relationships between teachers and students. In a standards-based environment, the first option is perhaps not practical. The second option is perhaps too practical. In fact, Neumann notes learning centered on students is the norm in today's schools. The third part of the framework (learning centered with students) is interesting because it opens the door for students to become more involved in their own learning, even to the point of becoming co-creators of curriculum in Neumann's view. He also points out that this arrangement requires teachers to give up a certain amount of control of the educational process, event asserting that centered-with contexts call into question the value and purpose of mandated curriculum, externally imposed standards, and systems of accountability.

Whoa! That's like at least three different blog posts. Let's stay close to today's world. 

I think this is where Schlechty's engagement framework shows us that centered-with contexts can work in a standards-based environment. To Neumann's point about giving up control, Schlechty notes that how a teacher relates to students is one of only two things he or she has any control over anyway (design of work is the other). Giving up some control to allow students the space to attach personal meaning to what they are learning is an exercise of power, an expression of control. So how much control are they really giving up? Also, the research on motivation and learning has revealed the limits of tightly control learning environments; good for short-term recall, not so much for long-term learning. Finally, the question of value in content and what students ought to learn is an important one. But I also think it's a question for broad, democratic debate. And while each individual learner ought to be able to contribute to that debate, I don't see it as an issue that necessarily has to be resolved for this part of the framework to be relevant. Schlechty's engagement framework is principally about designing experiences (work) for students. But it has to be student-centered for it to be effective. It has to be about people first. 

So again, what is student-centered?

Neumann's framework perhaps doesn't provide a complete answer. And maybe there isn't one. But I think his framework tells us something. It's about space in the learning environment. The more space the teacher occupies, the less the student can. Perhaps part of the teacher's job is to make judgments about how to relate to students in the learning environment. And to make sure the relationship changes depending on the nature of the content, context, people, and work. To make judgments about when to step up and when to step back. When to center in students, when to center on students, and when to center with students. 

• Neumann, J. (2013). Developing a new framework for conceptualizing student-centered learning. The Educational Forum, 77(2), 161-175.
• Schlechty, P. (2011). Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Wiley, John & Sons, Inc.

Who should pose the questions?

In their new book, Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins re-make the case that questions drive learning. The book provides a framework for understanding what makes a question "essential" (Chapter 1) and, thus, supportive of profound learning and how to use essential questions to design learning environments that engage students (Chapters 3-6). 

While I made several dozen Post-It flag marks throughout the book, two references the authors cited from the education literature especially resonated with me. One referred to work that shows the importance of helping students frame their own questions (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) and the other to recent work that revealed the many instructional techniques - including high-level questioning - that have a greater effect on student learning than socioeconomic status (Hattie, 2009).

McTigue and Wiggins make the point that teacher questions ought to facilitate student questions rather than merely elicit answers. To be essential, teacher questions must be open-ended, thought-provoking, cannot be answered by recall alone, and raise additional questions. However, open-ended doesn't mean without purpose, and this is where deliberate design is critical. The authors make the point that good teacher questions help students inquire into the important ideas related to learning content. When students learn to frame their own questions, they more actively process and make meaning from information and are better able to check their own comprehension. It's the instructional designer's job to use questions to both facilitate student engagement and guide that engagement toward subject matter understanding. McTigue and Wiggins note that "if teachers merely elicit and run with student questions without framing overarching curricular goals and essential questions to support them, then there can be no guaranteed and viable curriculum"

The idea that instructional design can have a greater impact on student achievement than SES, the second important reference, is perhaps evident in a recent study in North Carolina that showed problem-based learning (PBL) environments can uncover previously unrecognized advanced academic potential in low-income students (Gallagher & Gallagher, 2013). PBL models require students to address a problem without sufficient knowledge at the outset to solve the problem.  These models generally include a driving question, focus on real-world issues, require student inquiry and collaboration, allow for student choice, and result in the completion of a product.  A consistent finding in the research is that PBL learning environments facilitate greater student motivation and engagement and improve students’ disposition toward learning. In the North Carolina study, not only did a PBL environment allow low-income students to use higher-order thinking skills previously undetected by fact-based, content knowledge assessments, students for whom PBL revealed advanced academic potential closely resembled traditionally-identified advanced academic students based on measures of student engagement and student product.

Why did it take a PBL environment to discover this potential?

The authors assert that part of the answer is that ill-structured problems or questions (essential, if you will) create situational interest. An inquiry-based environment, they argue, creates a context that supports the inquiring disposition of gifted students and reveals previously hidden advanced academic potential in low-income students who are often not engaged by traditional, fact-oriented instructional environments. Furthermore, the authors contend that engaging students with essential questions "opens the door to full participation, regardless of students' background knowledge."

Finally, McTighe and Wiggins, per their argument in Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, would approve of the fact that the inquiry in the student work this study analyzed was driven by student questions framed within a larger ill-structured problem (or essential question) designed by the teacher around specific standards.

"Thus the question 'Who should pose the questions?' is a false dichotomy," McTighe and Wiggins write. "It is not an issue of teacher questions versus student questions, but of how to blend both in a purposeful manner."

• Gallagher, S. & Gallagher, J. (2013). Using problem-based learning to explore unseen academic potential. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 7(1), 111-131. 
• McTighe, J. & Wiggins, G. (2013). Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, Alexandrai, VA: ASCD.
• Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge. 
• Palinscar, A. & Brown, A. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), 117-175.

Putting the pieces together

Understanding student engagement is about understanding the dimensions and depth of the relationship between students and the school community, according to the authors of an analysis of measuring student engagement published last year in the Handbook of Research on Student Engagement. The authors frame engagement as a three-dimensional construct that includes a cognitive component (engagement of the mind), a behavioral component (engagement in the life of the school), and an emotional component (engagement of the heart). And they assert that measuring the depth of each of these elements of engagement requires understanding students' perspectives.

"As in any social system, an understanding of the complexities of the system does not necessarily reside in those at the top of the system, who only have a narrow understanding and perspective on the ways in which the system operates; those at the bottom of the social hierarchy within a system often have the greatest insights into the whole system." 

The authors assert that educators must learn to conceptualize engagement as a cultural issue rather than a structural one. They describe cultures as interrelated, overlapping, nonlinear sets of relationships that, when viewed from a distance, appear as webs or sets of webs. In other words, a single student's engagement in the school begins from a perspective that is unique to that student but not independent from the perspectives of others nor from the structures upon which the school environment is based. This is why, the authors assert, attempting to understand engagement only as a structural issue and implementing top-down policies as a means to address it "does not have a direct and uniform impact on student outcomes." Cultures are way too complicated for that.

So is engagement.

For example, emotional engagement has been found to be fluid on any given day across learning environments for individual students, suggesting that engagement is context dependent (Park, Holloway, Arendtsz, Bempechat, & Li, 2012). While this may seem to complicate things from an educator's perspective, it is actually great news for schools because many elements of the learning context are within the control of educators: how we interact with students, the work that is designed for students, and how organizational systems are designed to support that work.

It also means we need students' perspectives. But how do we get them?

Again, complicated... and the best way is the most personal and hardest to measure; getting to know individual students and what motivates them. But an aggregate understanding of the students' perspective is important as well for schools, something that is communicable and practicable. There are student self-report surveys that have proven to be statistically reliable and valid measures of engagement as it relates to student achievement. Experience sampling has proven to help researchers understand engagement as it relates to context. Teacher ratings and student interviews also provide insight into students' interaction with learning environments. And observation is potentially useful for both research and practical purposes. The problem is that currently the most common, and too often the only, means of understanding the student experience is performance on standardized assessments. While performance data is important for understanding the full scope of a student's educational experience, it is not enough and does little to inform understanding about the educational processes that are linked to the outcomes the assessments measure.

The authors of the current analysis review the findings of the latest High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE), a student survey designed to assess the extent to which high school students engage in educational practices associated with high levels of learning and development. A statistically valid and reliable construct for data collection and analysis, the HSSSE is designed to collect information regarding all three aspects of engagement (cognitive, behavioral, and emotional). The latest administration of the HSSSE revealed three major themes: students feel they have little voice in the school community, teachers are powerful figures in the lives of students, and students crave activity and interaction in the learning environment.

These three understandings represent actionable data for schools in designing their learning environments. When combined with other data, including personal knowledge about what motivates students, interview and observation data, and a variety of student performance data, we can begin to put together the engagement puzzle. Warning, however, it's a really big puzzle. And it will take attention, commitment, persistence and a sense of purpose to complete it.

But if engagement is the key to learning... puzzle anyone?

• Yazzie-Mintz, E. & McCormick, K. (2012). Finding the humanity in the data: Understanding, measuring, and strengthening student engagement. In S.J. Christensen, A.L. Reschly, & C. Wylie (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, 743-761.
• Park, S., Holloway, S. D., Arendtsz, A., Bempechat, J., & Li, J. (2012). What makes students engaged in learning? A time-use study of within- and between-individual predictors of emotional engagement in low-performing high schools. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 41(3), 390–401. doi:10.1007/s10964-011-9738-3

Am I going to read or do something else?

That is the question.

Students whose reading instruction at school relates to their daily lives and appeals to their personal interests are making the choice to read and are performing better than less engaged students, according to the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). PIRLS is an international assessment of fourth grade reading comprehension that is conducted every four years. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) published the results for the most recent administration in December. The latest PIRLS collected information regarding the construct of student engagement for the first time. The report's authors indicate that student engagement focuses on the importance of the learning activity that brings the student and the content together (Mullis, Martin, Foy, & Drucker, 2012).

While reading is required for many school related activities, it is also something students can choose to do or not, according to the authors of a research review on students' engagement in reading and how classroom instructional practices influence reading engagement. In building a model that describes how instruction, motivation, engagement, and achievement are related, the authors assert that the effects of instructional practices on student reading outcomes are mediated by engagement. (Guthrie, Wigfield, You, 2012). 

That is, classroom contexts only affect student reading outcomes to the extent that they produce high levels of student engagement for reading.

The authors make the distinction between engagement and motivation. They assert that engagement is a multidimensional construct that includes behavioral, cognitive, and emotional attributes associated with being deeply involved in an activity. Motivation, which they assert relates to and informs engagement but is more specific, is what energizes and directs behavior and is often defined with respect to the beliefs, values, and goals individuals have for different activities. Motivation, the authors assert, is important for the "maintenance of behavior" with respect to cognitively demanding activities like reading in which a variety of skills are involved from processing individual words to generating meaning from complex texts.

Basically, it boils down to student choice and, once students arrive at school, how their instructional environments influence their choices.

The authors outline some instructional practices and their connections to student reading outcomes, both directly and indirectly through their influence on engagement and motivation. The authors' goal was to describe how instruction, motivation, behavioral engagement, and achievement are related. They attempted to identify and document the engagement processes that serve as links between the practices of teachers and the reading outcomes of students.

Some of what the authors' literature review found includes:

• Engagement positively influences reading competence for elementary and secondary students when potentially confounding cognitive and motivational variables were statistically controlled, including past achievement, socioeconomic status, and self-efficacy.
• Motivations such as self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and valuing are related to an increase in student engagement and reading behaviors including effort, attention, time spent reading, concentration, and long-term persistence in reading. Motivation not only influences the amount of engagement but the quality as well by activating "cognitive strategies that are productive for full comprehension of complex texts."
• Intrinsic motivation, measured as enjoying reading, was associated with reading engagement for elementary and secondary students over and above students' prior knowledge, past achievement, and self-efficacy.
• Classroom practices are "a sword that cuts in two directions." Practices most associated with high levels of student motivation and engagement for reading include: 
• providing autonomy support (choice and self-direction in reading context and reading related activities) 
• relating reading activities to students' personal interests and goals, and providing students opportunities for collaboration and interaction with the teacher and other students regarding what they are reading
• avoiding practices that are not student-centered. Negative feedback, a lack of protection from adverse consequences, or requiring students to use materials outside of their zone of proximal development can have deleterious effects on students' motivation for reading.  

• Guthrie, J., Wigfield A., & You W. (2012). Instructional Contexts for Engagement and Achievement in Reading. In S.J. Christensen, A.L. Reschly, & C. Wylie (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, 601-634.
• Mullis, I., Martin, M., Foy, P., & Drucker, K. (2012). Chestnut Hill, MA: TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, Boston College.

Transformation through engagement

"In class, bored."

This was a Tweet one morning from one of our students that several colleagues and I noticed while participating in a regional school district meeting, ironically, about embracing technology's potential to capture the hearts and minds of the first digital generation. As an advocate for putting social media to work for learning, this was not exactly how I had envisioned its use by students. However, our student was not expressing something that is unique to our school district nor do I believe it was a reflection of how hard his teachers are working. It's the system. I heard it the day of this writing, and it deserves consideration:

A great teacher in a bad system will lose to the system every time.

Gallup research shows that engagement in school declines as students get older, a trend that Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education, calls a "monumental, collective national failure" resulting from too much standardization and not enough experiential and project-based learning in schools. Perhaps an interesting frame through which to see this is the nation's primary standardized assessment of student learning, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The most recently reported NAEP trend data shows that today's students perform better than students 40 years ago, but it also shows that improvement for high school students over that time is minimal compared to the improvement of younger students, taking on a similar pattern to Gallup's measure of student engagement.

When the full construct of what Gallup measures in its student poll is included (hope, engagement, and well-being), the research shows that student engagement considered this way positively correlates with grades, attendance, retention, graduation, employment, college and vocational readiness, and, by the way, performance on standardized tests.

In other words, engagement distinguishes between high and low performing schools.

Gallup's research helps to frame the argument that determinants of student academic and professional success transcend intelligence and aptitude and underscores the need to have a larger framework for thinking about how instruction, and its supporting systems, should be designed to help students pursue and reach educational and vocational goals; about how to increase student engagement. Busteed's assertion that there is too much standardization and too little experiential and project-based learning in schools deserves some consideration. Both experiential and project-based learning share fundamental characteristics with other contemporary instructional models that form a transformational teaching framework that defines a broader approach to "understanding the overall instructional environment and how key players in that environment can interact to maximize students' intellectual and personal growth" (Slavich & Zimbardo, 2012). Transformational teaching, rooted in the principles that learning is active and should be student-centered, gives educators a way to reconsider traditional notions of instructional design. Common to transformational teaching models are strategies to facilitate student mastery of knowledge and skills, increased opportunities for collaboration and discovery, and the promotion of positive attitudes about learning.

One of the interesting connections between Gallup's student poll results and transformational teaching is the concept of student hope. Hope is one of the most potent predictors of student success and is measured in Gallup's research in part by students' self-efficacy to solve problems, do quality work, reach goals, and graduate from high school. Gallup's criteria for measuring hope aligns with one of the theoretical underpins of transformational teaching, social cognitive theory, which asserts that people exert intentional influence over events in their lives in accord with their self-efficacy beliefs. Efficacy beliefs influence optimism, resiliency, coping, and persistence. The goal of enhancing student self-efficacy is among aspects of transformational teaching that are associated with promoting positive student attitudes about learning.

Using a transformational teaching framework to think about how schools can help students pursue and reach educational and vocational goals helps to simplify the complexities of how curriculum, instruction, teachers, and students can interact in schools to redefine traditional notions of teaching and learning. It also gives us a way to think about how to design the organizational systems that govern how schools operate and in which teachers do their work. For whatever reason, our student was not engaged at the moment he sent that Tweet, and while no one can be engaged all the time, Gallup's data shows that too many students are engaged too little of the time. As Phil Schlechty writes in Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, how public schools address the problem of student engagement will determine how relevant they remain in the future.

• Donaldson, S., Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Nakamura, J.(Eds) (2011). Applied Positive Psychology: Improving Everyday Life, Schools, Work, Health, and Society. Taylor & Francis, Inc.  
• Gallup (2012). Gallup student poll, Retrieved from http://www.gallupstudentpoll.com/home.aspx
• Rampey, B., Dion, G., & Donahue, P. (2009). NAEP 2008 trends in academic progress (NCES 2009–479). National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.
• Schlechty, P. (2011). Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Wiley, John & Sons, Inc.
• Slavich, G., & Zimbardo, P. (2012). Transformational teaching: Theoretical underpinnings, basic principles, and core methods, Educational Psychology Review, 24(4), 569–608. 

But what about the test?

Would it be right to take the position that creating inquiry-based, authentic learning environments for students is not mutually exclusive to preparing them for standardized tests?

I recently asked this question of Phil Schlechty, author of Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work and founder of the Schlechty Center, a nonprofit organization focused on school transformation. Schlechty's answer was a resounding yes. He said he knows of no place where students are participating in engaging work and not performing better on standardized tests. While Schlechty asserts that standardization in general is an inhibiting factor in education and should be reconsidered, the risk for schools, he said, is not in designing authentic learning environments for students... it's in NOT doing so! He explained that the type of instructional environment that is adequate to ensure students perform on standardized tests is not the same type of environment that will inspire the development of the skills, attitudes, and habits of mind that are required for the 21st century workforce. Furthermore, learning environments dominated by direct instructional approaches and rote memorization are only partially successful in preparing students for standardized tests since these models don't engage many students in school work at all. While traditional instructional methods can be valuable within a larger, student-centered instructional design, they simply aren't enough.

In Engaging Students, Schlechty cites project-based learning (PBL) as an example of an instructional model in which there is potential to design work for students that is more intrinsically motivating and honors the abilities of students not accounted for in designs that rely solely on traditional instructional approaches. Furthermore, research indicates there is great potential for PBL in helping students realize greater long-term retention, comprehension, application, and skill development than traditional approaches.

But what about the test?

In one diverse, rural Texas school district in which the scores on the state's standardized social studies assessment of students in a PBL learning environment were compared to those of students in a traditional environment, students working in a PBL setting performed significantly better than students working in a traditional setting. A higher percentage of PBL students scored at the pass and commended levels for all three years studied than their counterparts in traditional settings. Furthermore, the PBL setting had more positive achievement growth on the state assessment for all sub-populations of students as categorized by the state, including those coded as socioeconomically disadvantaged. Finally, the authors found that students working in PBL settings had higher rates of grade promotion and that PBL better facilitated the realization of College and Career Readiness Standards as measured by the state's accountability system (Summers & Dickinson, 2012).

While the best reasons for creating authentic learning environments for students have nothing to do with standardized testing, standardized testing should not be used as a reason to avoid it.

• Schlechty, P. (2011). Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Wiley, John & Sons, Inc.
• Summers, E., & Dickinson, G. (2012). A longitudinal investigation of project-based instruction and student achievement in high school social studies, Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 6(1), 82-103.

What about teacher engagement?

In Todd Whitaker's parable, The Ball, teacher Annie Erickson realizes she has forgotten what is most important to her in her work. She realizes she is not connecting with her students, and she recognizes the students are not invested in the work she creates for them.

"When I first started teaching," she began, "I loved coming to school every day. Every aspect of my work was fun. I especially loved teaching students about life, and I tried to bring that into the  classroom whenever I could. We had some wonderful lessons. 

"But the best part of the day for me didn't take place in the classroom at all. It was recess! It wasn't that I wanted a break from teaching. I just loved going outside with the children to play...I loved interacting with my students."

While participating in a discussion about this book with colleagues recently, I recognized that what Annie was describing in the parable relates to the psychological needs we all have to feel autonomous, competent, and emotionally connected to others in our work. Ms. Erickson was talking about the elements of self-determination that predict engagement, especially the need for relatedness. Ms. Erickson seemed to no longer be engaged. 

While Annie Erickson's description of her problem reflected issues related to all the needs addressed by self-determination theory (the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness), her greatest regret seemed to be what she perceived as a diminishing personal relationship between herself and her students.

A study published this year in the Journal of Educational Psychology sought to understand the influence of relatedness with colleagues and relatedness with students on teacher engagement. The authors, believing that teaching is unique among professions due to its reliance on the establishment of "long-term, meaningful connections with the 'clients' of the work environment" because of the amount time they spend with students each day, conducted three related experiments analyzing teachers' relatedness with their colleagues and teachers' relatedness with their students.

The authors found that autonomy support (climates in which principals encourage teacher empowerment) was positively related to teacher's relatedness with colleagues and students. Furthermore, all three experiments, using three different measures, found relatedness with students was a significant predictor of workplace engagement among teachers and facilitated higher levels of enjoyment and lower levels of anxiety, anger, and emotional exhaustion among teachers. Also, it was the connection with students rather than with colleagues that was more strongly associated with teacher engagement. These results were true among both elementary and secondary teachers.

The idea that teacher engagement can be enhanced by their connections with students is not surprising and is found throughout the research. However, in addition to losing focus on connecting with her students, Annie Erickson expressed frustration with greater demands on her time due to school, district, and state mandates. She had lost a sense of autonomy in her work. The idea that autonomy support is strongly correlated with relatedness between teachers and students is new in the research and, if true, has implications for those designing the various systems of educational workplace environments, since the research also shows that the relationship between teachers and students is the most significant factor in student learning once students enter the school building.

• Klassen, R., Frenzle, A., & Perry, N. (2012). Teachers' relatedness with students: An underemphasized component of teacher' basic psychological needs. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(1), 150-165.
• Whitaker, T. (2010). The Ball. Bloomington, IN: Triple Nickle Press.

How can educators identify engagement in their students?

I served as a judge recently in our school district's junior high National History Day competition, and while the projects we evaluated were all very good, I was most impressed by the work of students who were able to connect their learning to personal experiences. National History Day is a curricular program that involves students in discovery, critical analysis, interpretation, and creativity. Students operate within a theme to produce dramatic performances, exhibits, multimedia documentaries, websites, and research papers - all elements of academic work that most parents and educators believe is important for students. The students I talked to found meaning in the work they were doing. They were emotionally invested in their projects. They were engaged. How do I know this? They told me.

There is much to be learned from the National History Day framework when thinking about how to design engaging learning experiences for students. However, research, analysis, collaboration, independent study, creating products, and reporting findings are learning activities. They represent conceptual, pedagogical elements of a learning environment that can potentially be cognitively engaging for students but do not, in and of themselves, facilitate student engagement. The authors of a recent study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence that analyzed factors that facilitate student engagement would refer to them as objective indicators. They argue that learning environments are evaluated differently depending on "a variety of psychological and ecological characteristics of the student and the setting" so that any consideration of engagement must include the student's perceptions of the learning environment.

The authors use self-determination theory (SDT) to analyze engagement. SDT asserts that self-regulation and self-motivation are driven by psychological needs to feel autonomous, competent, and emotionally connected to others. In other words, there is an emotional aspect to engagement that requires educators to understand how students will interact with the objective indicators of instructional design. Defining emotional engagement as students' affective response to learning activities and the people involved in those activities, the authors sought to understand the connection between students' perceived fulfillment of their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness and their engagement in particular learning contexts. The authors used the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to collect data from individual students while they were participating in various learning environments over a three-year period to better understand how engagement may fluctuate depending on a student's environment.

The authors found that emotional engagement was unstable across learning environments when analyzing individual student variation. For each student, perceptions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness within a particular setting informed their level of engagement. To the extent that these needs were perceived by students to have been met within an individual learning context, they were engaged in that context. The authors also found this to be true "over and above the effects of students' gender, race/ethnicity and achievement level."

I think this study has some implications for schools that are seeking to find ways to engage their students. First, engagement is not an objective measure but depends heavily on subjective concepts like meaning, confidence, and connection. The fluidity of emotional engagement across contexts suggests that the inclusion of only objective indicators of engaged learning (the actual activities) is not enough. The work of instructional designers should also account for the subjective elements of emotional engagement. Education is a people business not a product business.

Second, an encouraging implication is the idea that the design of learning contexts that account for student needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are relevant with diverse student populations and among students at various levels of achievement. While there are variables that are outside of the school's control, this finding is encouraging because it suggests that many of these variables may be less powerful than the contextual factors over which schools do have control.

Finally, this study is a great process model for showing educators how they can identify engagement in their students. The long and short of it? Just ask them.

• Park, S., Holloway, S. D., Arendtsz, A., Bempechat, J., & Li, J. (2012). What makes students engaged in learning? A time-use study of within- and between-individual predictors of emotional engagement in low-performing high schools. Journal of youth and adolescence, 41(3), 390–401. doi:10.1007/s10964-011-9738-3

How do we "cause someone to become involved"?

The United States ranked second in creativity among five of the world’s largest economies in a study published this spring by the software company Adobe. The State of Create Study, which includes participants from the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, France, and the United States, shows that people believe creativity is critical to economic growth and valuable to society but also that many people in these countries feel their current education systems may not be cultivating enough of it anymore.

This position has some empirical support after a study published last year revealed American scores in creative thinking measures have declined in the last 20 years with the greatest declines occurring among elementary and early secondary aged children. The study, The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking by Kyung Hee Kim of the College of William and Mary, found that children’s ability to produce ideas significantly decreased from 1990 to 2008. Kim found that children have become less verbally expressive, less imaginative, less perceptive, and less able to connect seemingly irrelevant things.

Kim posits that both school and home environments contribute to the effect and suggests the causes include children’s diminishing freedom to participate in the mental processes required for creativity and their diminishing ability to assess themselves apart from the assessment of others (internal locus of evaluation). He asserts that emphasis in schools on knowledge gathering to the relative exclusion of the mental practices through which children use that knowledge toward higher level thinking has contributed to the problem and suggests the data implies that students need more time to engage in reflective abstraction, or the mental process of building knowledge.

But exactly what does Kim mean by engage?

A couple of clues lies in his assertions that students need opportunities to generate their own problems for solving and that the adults in the lives of children must provide them with meaningful interactions and collaborations that are receptive, accepting, and supportive.

In Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Phil Schlechty offers a definition of student engagement that depends on students finding meaning and value in the work they do in school. To achieve this, he asserts students need autonomy and choice in their work and they need an environment in which that work is valued by those who are important to them. These two things reflect Kim's findings but are also grounded in decades of research that has revealed that things like autonomy and choice help to facilitate intrinsic motivation for work, especially work that requires great commitment and persistence.

• Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation in Education: Reconsidered Once Again. Review of Educational Research, 71(1), 1–27. doi:10.3102/00346543071001001
• Kim, K. H. (2011). The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23(4), 285–295. doi:10.1080/10400419.2011.627805
• Schlechty, P. (2011). Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Wiley, John & Sons, Inc.
• Strategy One (2012). State of create: Global benchmark study on attitudes and beliefs about creativity at work, school and home. Adobe Systems, Inc. 

Those who teach, can

One of the first insights I had as a young teacher was how much more confident I was with the content I was teaching after I had been teaching it for some time. I got into education as a journalism teacher, and while I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism and had some experience as a news writer prior to becoming a teacher, I became a better writer and gained a fuller understanding of the principles of journalism after I became a teacher.

In his new book, Who Owns the Learning? Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age, educational technology consultant Alan November asserts that learning how to learn is a critical skill for excelling in today's world. One way November suggests to help develop this skill in students is to allow them to use communications technologies to become teachers of fellow students. Through the development of digital tutorials, students find a “sense of ownership, autonomy, mastery, and purpose” in designing and publishing something intended to be meaningful for others.

There is considerable support for the efficacy of peer tutoring in the research literature, for both tutors and tutored students. Tutoring facilitates a better understanding of content and a more positive attitude toward the subject matter being covered. Also, tutoring is effective in a variety of formats and content areas and among diverse student populations. However, the literature also suggests that good design and implementation are critical for tutoring to be successful. Effect sizes tend to be larger when students have more autonomy, when they use constructivist strategies for teaching the material, and when assessment is designed around program content rather than in the form of standardized tests. November argues that the process of tutorial design is a higher level activity, a creative process in which students become committed to the work because someone else will be depending on it.

Also, we know from cognitive science that if and how people think about something determines whether they retain it. Paying attention to something is essential but not enough to ensure it becomes part of long-term memory. People must think about the material in some meaningful way. Therefore, teachers should always seek to get students to think about the meaning of what it is they are studying. Having students design instruction for someone else could be a great way to get them to do this.

Who Owns the Learning? contains other ideas for providing students opportunities to make meaningful contributions in school. In the book, November shares the real experiences of teachers and students including initiatives in which students produce shared notes using cloud computing applications like Google Docs or in which teachers help students to understand the architecture of information on the Internet and how to navigate and validate it or in which students reach out beyond their own schools, and even communities, to collaborate with others around the world. All of the ideas, however, focus more on what students, not teachers, are doing with content and include digital communication as a means for establishing more purpose in school work.

The importance of November’s Who Owns the Learning? is less in the specific ideas he presents and more in actually asking the question, who really does own the learning?

• Cohen, P. a., Kulik, J. a., & Kulik, C.-L. C. (1982). Educational Outcomes of Tutoring: A Meta-Analysis of Findings. American Educational Research Journal, 19(2), 237. doi:10.2307/1162567
• November, A. (2012) Who owns the learning? Preparing students for success in the digital age, Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press
• Roscoe, R. D., & Chi, M. T. H. (2007). Understanding Tutor Learning: Knowledge-Building and Knowledge-Telling in Peer Tutors’ Explanations and Questions. Review of Educational Research, 77(4), 534–574. doi:10.3102/003465430730992 
• Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom, San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 

The potential for service learning

Three articles on civics education and citizenship were published in the April edition of Educational Leadership Magazine, and all three articles cited the most recent results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in which only 24 percent of high school seniors performed at or above a proficient level in their knowledge of citizenship. These articles cite an increased focus on math and reading in schools—to the detriment of the social sciences that were once a primary rationale for the development of a public school system—as the culprit for deteriorating performance in civics. 

So, how can we enhance our student’s understanding of civics and citizenship, preserve our democratic way of life through our educational institutions, serve students more effectively within the confines of a high-stakes testing environment, and address the achievement gaps that exist among various student groups?

One recent study (reference below) published in the Journal of Experiential Education found that community service and service learning were linked to reduced gaps between high and low SES students in many indicators of academic success including achievement motivation, school engagement, bonding to school, homework, and reading for pleasure. Low SES students with service integrated into learning had higher or equal levels in measures of the above indicators of academic success when compared to high-SES students without integrated service experiences. Furthermore, low-SES students with service had higher grades and better attendance than low-SES students without service experiences.

Service learning is a teaching strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities and is supported by a substantial research base that suggests its integration into curriculum and instruction, in a wide range of content areas, has great benefits for all students including those most often marginalized by narrow instructional approaches.

While the authors of this study admit to being unable to statistically show causation, they assert that their findings, in the context of the greater research base about experiential learning, support the notion that service learning is effective. They cite one longitudinal study that found that emerging volunteers (those who began in grades 7-9 rather than 6-8) had significantly higher grade point averages than those who had never volunteered or faded in their volunteering after eighth grade.

Furthermore, the authors recognized the wide range of research that links SES to educational outcomes including the correlations between stable family life, exposure to violence, and cognitive stimulation outside of school to student academic performance. However, they also cite research that indicates other factors can be just has influential including the components that comprise a “developmental attentiveness” approach to teaching and learning as a compliment to the standards-based approach. This research, they note, shows that participation in extracurricular activities, the use of cooperative, active student learning methods, a caring school climate, and community service can have an equally impactful influence as SES on student achievement.

• Scales, P. C., Roehlkepartain, E. C., Neal, M., Kielsmeier, C., & Benson, P. L. (2006). Reducing Academic Achievement Gaps: The Role of Community Service and Service-Learning, 29(1), 38-60.