There are many moving pieces when it comes to student engagement from the littlest of littles to our oldest of learners. However, even though it may look different depending on what age group you are looking at, the same concepts ring true over and over again. The Learning Process and Student Success It is the … Read more
If we’ve learned anything since spring 2020, it’s that not only can life change on a dime, but as teachers, we will need to be able to adapt quickly. In that adaptation came virtual learning (or what I like to call “crisis learning” because what we were all expected to execute is not true distance … Read more
If developing a student engagement strategy seems more daunting than helpful, then you’re in the right place. As teachers, we aren’t necessarily taught how to create a student engagement formula that works for us; rather, we are taught that if x, y, or z is “good enough”, engagement will happen on its own. While that … Read more
I remember, vividly, standing mid-lecture in 2009, and everything looked perfect. My 28 students sat quietly; notebooks were open; nobody was on their phone or whispering to a neighbor. Any administrator walking through would have nodded approvingly. About fifteen minutes in, I asked a question requiring them to connect that day’s material to the previous … Read more
As a teacher, you know how magical it is when all of a sudden you realize that every student in your classroom is actively participating in the lesson you have crafted. You know that on that day, you won the battle, and the information is sticking as you watch the class engagement all around you. … Read more
Click above to listen to Podcast Episode 56: “How to Spot Behavioral Engagement in the Classroom“ Student engagement stands as one of the most critical, yet complex, constructs in the field of education today. It is a multidimensional construct widely recognized as the cornerstone of effective learning and a primary driver of academic success. For … Read more
Click above to listen to Podcast Episode 20: “Classroom Engagement Ideas for Easily Adapting the Classroom with Steph Sperber” Steph Sperber, a 14-year teaching veteran, said something in our Student-Centered World mastermind group back in 2020 that stopped me mid-scroll. She mentioned that when her school shifted online, she actually found herself with more time on her … Read more
If you’ve followed our series on the importance of brain breaks in the classroom (especially brain break games), you know how passionate we are about the need for them. Not the fact that they’re nice, but that they’re a need. I’ll never forget the afternoon my students were slogging through a heavy document analysis, and … Read more
The room was too quiet, and I knew that wasn’t a good thing. It was right after lunch, and I was standing in front of my high school juniors, watching their eyes glaze over as I walked through what I thought was a perfectly fine lesson on primary source analysis. Then one student raised his … Read more
The best collaboration project I ever ran started with a message on ePals. I created a profile seeking an international partner class to compare World War II family narratives, and a teacher in Germany reached out. He taught a similar age group and was covering the same period. We decided to have our students write … Read more
My good friend, Dr. Joe Lizza, runs campus activities at Rowan University, and we chatted on my podcast about student life a while back. He told a fascinating story during the interview. It turns out, during the first months of COVID, when everything shut down, his team discovered that a surprising number of college students … Read more
I remember sitting at my desk during planning period, staring at a stack of unit tests on the causes of World War I. For weeks, I’d watched my sophomores confuse long-term causes like militarism and the alliance system with short-term triggers like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I’d seen it in their document analyses, … Read more
Most of us are trying to tackle the wrong one…and we’re starting the school year at a deficit instead of our nervous systems being back to 100%.
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