What is the #1 Influencer for Student Engagement?

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~ estimated 19-minute read ~

In my 18 years in education as both a computer science teacher and educational technology instructional coach, I have seen patterns of powerful influencers that have a tremendous positive impact on encouraging student engagement.

After seeing these patterns, I created The ENGAGE Framework, built on the six influencers that I see make the biggest impressions on getting students to engage in our instruction, their learning, or our assessment. I created a 6-week secondary teacher professional development online course, titled, Engagement is the Name of the Gain. This month will be the first launch of the course, and I am offering secondary teachers who enroll for the course ($99 PD price), to become a Founding Member! As a Founding Member, teachers will receive when they complete the course a FREE FULL-YEAR group coaching membership to EdTechEnergy Momentum. Each month you’ll get an EdTech tutorial, action plan, strategies, and community to learn more and share. If you are interested in getting in on the Waitlist, here is a link to join. I’d love for you to learn with me. The goal of my course? To transform the student engagement in your classroom for the rest of your career in education. Yes, I’m that confident you will see the change because the teachers whom I coached, witnessed those kinds of changes.

My framework, The ENGAGE Framework, is based on the human nature of your students. True student engagement is not based on a student’s IQ, interests, socio-economic level, or gender. It all really comes down to what influencers help engage a human being. And it’s more like, what influencers impact the decision to engage or not to engage.

Did you guess it? The influencer I’m going to write about today is Community.

First, let’s define “community”. To me, community in the classroom is about a group of like-people, in this example, the students in one of our classes, who are inside the same purpose, place, and people. The commonality of purpose, place, and in people, connects those in the group, whether they want the connection or not. The “like-people” usually share demographics, and in the classroom, it is mostly age and the grade level of our students. That identifier is #1.

To begin our exploration of what engages the students in our classes, we need to do some research on what the physical, emotional, and social development is of a child the age of our students. However, keep in mind, every child grows and develops differently and at the child’s own pace. Check out the grades and stages or the milestones at different grade levels from TeacherVision.com. After we teach the same grade level for three years, we have a very good sense of the development of our students, but I do like to go back and remind myself about the natural tendencies of our students in our classroom.

Knowing these stages and milestones give teachers a “heads up” on the dynamics inside of a community of students to watch and prepare for in our instruction, student learning, and assessment. Again, our mission is to encourage students to make the decision to engage in our classrooms inside a lesson, or assignment, or quiz. If we consider where our students are at in their human development, it makes some decisions for us in our instruction, student learning, and student assessment sensible to make.

Community, being with others, is a human being preference. It’s in our DNA. So, given the inclination to want to be with others and not alone, we can use the community energies to help your students decide to learn. The essence of community, group, or even a pairing, does one special thing for students—it makes them feel like they belong to something outside of themselves. And if they belong, they are going to interpret that belonging that they are accepted. THAT presumption is the key driver to why community is such a powerful influence to get students to want to engage.

If students get along with the people in their community, they will want to be in the community because they like the way being a part of the community makes them feel. Now, lets’ go back to creating a safe haven for our students in the classroom. If the culture in our classroom allows for trial and error without judgment, takes into consideration different perspectives, ethnicities, and prior experiences, and not only accepts the diversity but celebrates the diversity, you have a very rich culture that is giving even more power to your community. Students feel good being in your class because the community and culture that it lives in makes them feel confident, supported, accepted, and that they belong.

Keep in mind the main ingredients for a nurturing community:

1. A connectedness and trust is present

2. Students are interactive with one another inside learning activities

3. Students have shared interests, values, and goals

4. Students depend on one another for things that the class community brings them

When students create relationships with the other students in their classroom, that is when the engagement really exponentiates. They not only want to be in class with their friends, but they want their friends’ experiences in class to be good and fruitful in happiness. This is why it is super important to have teamwork skill builders and ice breaker activities. The closer your students are to one another and the more they get along, engagement will flourish organically.

For example, let’s think about online discussions with our students. If your students have close relationships with other students in your class, or that your students get along well with each other, they will naturally want to exchange in an online discussion; read and reply to other students as they answer the prompt. Think about when we as teachers are inside online discussions in our professional development classes. For the most part, we do not know the other teachers in the professional development course so there is no natural inclination to exchange in online discussions with other teachers. However, if we were all teachers from the same school, and inside a training where we needed to answer a question and reply to other’s replies, that would be a how different feeling we would have about participating in the online discussion.

Relationships make a difference. I recommend having at least one team-building activity with your students each week. No, not everyone will get along with everyone. That realization, too, is superhuman of us. But, if most of our students get along with each other, the community has superpowers to get our students to engage in our class lessons, class discussions, small group projects, and pair and share. Never underestimate the collective aspect that can comfort, console, and connect our students. And when students feel that comfort, console, and connection during difficult times, the appreciation for the community is something the students feels, which buys the student into the community even more.

The sense of familiarity your class community gives students is especially important for our teenage students. At a time when most of what is going on in their bodies is very unfamiliar, this comfort our class community can provide to your students can balance out what is going on inside their adolescent development.

Do your students know what you value in the community? What do you work to build in the community? What is the core of the community? Having a lesson on “community” and what it means to be in and belong to a community is information that will not only help build community with the right intentions in your class of students, but it will also help them embrace the community in their other classes and in higher ed, the workplace, enlistment, or in their career one day.

Then, building community should be an ongoing adventure. Here are some suggestions I have that I have seen work in my class as well as the class communities of the teachers whom I coached:

1.       Have your students work together toward a reward.

2.       Or do even better and set class weekly goals and keep a scoreboard so students know how they are doing in meeting their goals before the final day.

3.       Create a welcoming space. Your course homepage is a great place to start! Every time the student logs into your course, he’ll feel welcome before he even starts to interact with others.

4.       Come together at the beginning of the school year and create class norms as a class. Also, decide as a group what will be the consequences if norms are not followed. Believe me, when students create the consequences, there is more buy-in for following the norms. Guaranteed!

5.       Get in a circle and share compliments. Hold class meetings where students may discuss what is on their minds.

6.       Ask students to pair up and work on charting a Venn diagram about what are the same and different. Students can create Venn diagrams in Canva.

7.       Have students give shoutouts to one another with sticky notes. You can do this easily using Padlet if you are virtual learning.

8.       Hold attendance goals for LIVE virtual classes.

9.       Play Get to Know Bingo. I did this during the first week of class when I taught Computer Science. Students find other students in the beginning of the school year or semester that share the same tendencies, situations, or likes. In each square, I had text like:

1.       Have siblings

2.       Live with Mom OR Dad

3.       Love the skateboard

4.       Reading is my thing

5.       I live so close to school

6.       I have a pet

7.       My favorite sports team is __________. I placed the closest major league team here.

8.       My favorite place to eat is __________. I placed a favorite school town eatery here.

9.       I prefer to be on the quiet side

10.   I’m a morning person

If you are inside your physical room, this next tip is a BIGGIE with me. When I had my own classroom, I liked to make my computer labs feel like home. I did it with pictures, plants, area rugs, and lighting. And guess what, incandescent lighting is better for learners than fluorescent lighting. Yep! There is research that proves it! Here is another source. I got THE BEST compliments about my room’s feel from students, colleagues, parents, and guests. Believe me, when you can make a computer lab feel comfy, you’re probably doing it with lighting. Presently, my computer lab has 8 incandescent lights, and all the shades are different hues.

Making lessons relevant to your student's interests is a strong engager. Making lessons relevant to interests your students share is an exponential engager! When your students share interests and fascinations, you can view it a positive or negative. Yes, those fascinations can be distracters, but if you give them a place in your lesson, student engagement is a given. And it seems like you are “speaking their language”!

Having your students’ parents as guest speakers also is a great way to increase the community your student feels in the classroom. Once students have some “inside information” about other students, and in this case, what another student’s parent looks and sounds like, that type of information makes the student of the parent feel more familiar with the other students. And students seem to feel a kindred spirit with the students’ parents who come in to talk to the class about the parent’s career or expertise. All depending on the ages of your students, they may feel for the student whose parent came into class. Certain ages of students sometimes do not like the initial feeling of their parents coming to their classes to speak. But in the end, it’s a sure WIN for the students, as well as the other students in the class.

With our concern about the social-emotional wellness of our students, creating a community feel inside our classrooms is more important now than ever. Good social-emotional wellness helps students feel empowered and invested since they feel safe, physically, emotionally, and socially, in our classrooms. It is also extremely important that as we navigate through the complex issues students are hearing on the news and in social media, we do it responsibly and with neutral views. We never want to make anyone’s parents sound wrong for their views by speaking our views to students. It is more important when these views come up in our classroom from students, to listen and facilitate the exchange. Just being supportive in some of these complex issues gives students calmness and security around the uncertainty they may bring.

Lastly, you want to find ways to give students a voice. Yes, they are free to express themselves in our class and online discussions, but where else in your classrooms can student express their ideas, input, or questions?

Having a Q&A Discussion built in your online class that is ongoing throughout your course is a great way for students to ask questions, and for other students to answer their peers’ questions. Again, a sure way to give students their voice, but it is a valuable community builder when students are the ones answering the questions. Ask students for their input when going into a new unit, or ending a unit, to find out what worked for the student and what may not have worked. Using students’ input to keep improving your content, assessments, and teaching style is a beneficial way for you the teacher, and to your students who feel their voice is making a difference.             

Building community in our classes is the MOST important engagement influencer in our classrooms. When students feel safe and that they belong, their motivation to engage becomes intrinsic given their warm feelings they get in our community that make humans feel good as well as the relationships they have in the class with their peers and the community culture of the class.

Create your class community with engagement in mind and I promise you, you’ll never look back.

Want to learn more? One way I aim to support teachers with technology inside activities and assessments is providing many different tried-and-true EdTech strategies, tutorials, templates, action plans, and a whole lot more in a 6-week (or at your own pace) online professional development course for secondary teachers.

My six-week course, Engagement is the Name of the Gain, provides your EVERYTHING to increase your students’ engagement to heights you’ve never seen before!

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Engagement is the Name of the Gain
EdTech Secondary Teacher PD Online Course

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Begins February 7, 2022, and ends March 20, 2022!
OR complete the course at your own pace!

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Please comment below—How will you build community in your next school year’s classes with engagement as one of your intentions? What are one or more strategies you read today that you already do in your classes, and you have evidence it works?

Share your ideas in the comments below. Or share them on social media and tag @edtechenergy. I would love to read all your community-building ideas.

Next week’s blog topic: How does instructor presence encourage student engagement?