There was a disturbing feature in the UK Times Educational Supplement last week. (I’m sorry I can’t give you the link, as it’s subscription only). I say disturbing because, in general, I really rate the TES. As a trade paper for teaching, it generally reflects the innovative work teachers are often doing, and is usually a balanced read.
If, however, its feature on ‘Engaging The Disengaged’ is indicative of the profession’s approach, then I find myself at odds with much of it. The gist of the piece deals with the visible part of the iceberg – what to do with students whose disengagement is causing disruption in class. This immediately posits disengagement as a behavioural issue. But what about the far greater number of students – the ones below the water-line – who might be behaving themselves, may even be achieving good grades but have ‘switched off’? I once had an Australian Principal of an outstanding primary school, replay a conversation she had with a student who had succeeded in school, but had never felt stretched, or excited, in class. ‘So, how did you get through it?’, she asked. ‘I learned how to fall asleep with my eyes open’, came the reply. Do we not have a responsibility to these kids too?
Because if we class them as disengaged (and I do) then this becomes a pedagogical issue, not simply behavioural, and the strategies put foward simply don’t apply to the ‘disengaged achievers’ (and there are plenty of them in there). Here, the TES calls in a ‘behaviour expert, to tell teachers how to improve engagement: greet students as they enter the room; arrange seating so they can’t sit with their friends; remain in control; catch poor behaviour before it starts. This does nothing for the students who are well-behaved but bored, and it aspires to damage limitation, where the goal is compliance, not true engagement.
When I visit Musical Futures or Learning Futures schools (where the teaching is geared towards deep engagement) I see kids working with their friends – yes, even the ‘naughty’ ones – but i see a room buzzing with energy, excitement and a commitment to getting the job done: ‘in the task’, not s
imply ‘on task’. One of those schools, Matthew Moss High School in Rochdale, puts it like this: 90% of disciplinary issues are really pedagogical issues. If they had to wheel in a behaviour expert, they’d feel they’d not being doing their jobs properly. And these schools have shown that if you change your pedagogy, and set your stall out to get ALL your students engaged, not simply manage behaviour, you won’t have to worry about disruption.
Eventually, once the feature starts descibing what successfu schools have done, we begin to get into pedagogical matters, and strategies which bear a striking relationship to the four building blocks the Learning Futures programme argued were at the heart of engagement. Interestingly, what our schools discovered was that we had to stop seeing engagment as a student-focussed issue – create an engaging school, and you’ll automatically have engaged students. But, what does an engaging school look like?
A number of schools featured saw the importance of extending the learning relationships at play: involving parents and employers much more. City Academy Norwich have realised that seeing schools as merely the basecamp for learning, not the destination, engages both the student and the school, in their local community. OFSTED have highlighted the importance of creating a welcoming, open, inclusive learning environment (what Learning Futures called ‘school as learning commons’).
There was, however, no mention of the pedagogical shift that we found to have the biggest effect upon school and student engagement: introducing project-based learning. When done well (and that’s a whole other post) PBL not only triggers relevance and practical application of knowledge in young people’s learning, it also allows schools to be creating vital services and products for their local communities.
It would have been good to have seen the TES get away from the behaviour/compliance issue we that dominates the engagement debate. But they did at least quash the red herring of ‘edutainment’, the teacher-as-entertaineras the solution to disengaged students. The Learning Futures schools discovered that it was less about the (teacher) performing, and more about the pedagogy; less about control/compliance and more about committing to making the business of learning more engaging for everyone involved in it.
What are your experiences of tackling disengagement? Does your school see it as a behaviour issue? Are there strategies adopted which have consistenly worked? I would love to hear your views.
So just to get this straight, if you get students engaged by making them engage then it’s not “true” engagement?I think you are revealing that “engagement” doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just an excuse for discredited 1960s ideas like Project Based Learning.You know it doesn’t really help children learn, so you can’t force it on teachers, so the next best tactic is to sell it as more fun. But you can’t say “fun” because, as you acknowledge, you don’t want to be seen as suggesting that schools should just be entertaining children, so instead you use the weasel word “engaging”.Trouble is, that the very ambiguity that made you use the word in the first place, is the very same reason people who don’t accept your teaching ideology can also use it. So now we have “good” engagement and “bad” engagement. What a joke.
Here in South Australia, many educators have been using Ferre Laever’s work about involvement to gather data for reflection and practitioner inquiry. My experience has been that the involvement scales have helped educators to better recognise when children are deeply involved (AKA engaged), superficially involved or perhaps even “pretending to be involved” (AKA compliance). In my work, I see too many children of all ages not reaching their potential because they have learnt that at school it’s better to pretend you’re involved because then the teacher won’t ask any more of you. Engagement is far more than just enjoying what you do. You actually need some cognitive load – some intellectual challenge – to be deeply engaged.
Lisa: fascinating stuff. Couldn’t agree more re the intellectual challenge, and it’s in this area where poor PBL gets (rightly) criticised. But rigorous PBL should have relevance, purpose and intellectual challenge.The work going on in SA (particularly Margot Foster’s work for the DECS) has been ground-breaking and should be far better known!
Now this is getting somewhere. Excellent. The provocation about “cognitive load” from our Australian colleague is really well-timed as this important piece of the current work on engagement differentiates current developments of Project-Based Learning from some of the less-successful examples from the past. Proper, learner-driven PBL is not only enjoyable but so much harder and more stretching and therefore productive than simply doing the required.I remember Chris Watkins from the IOE saying that when you push learners on what they mean by “fun”, it is in fact “complexity” that they appreciate and his research was clear that mental stretch was very much valued by learners. Moreover, our delighted surprise at this finding is a bit odd on reflection: adults absolutely hate being bored, so why wouldn’t younger people?! And these engagement deliberations aren’t peripheral, but central to how productive we make the years of compulsory education to which our children are subject.
Great contribution, Mark, and it brings us back to Andrew’s original point about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ engagement. What Chris Watkins is describing is, to me, close to what Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘Flow’ – deeply immersed. It’s hard to imagine how one could get deeply immersed in a superficial task.And you’re right to point out that current versions of PBL, when practiced well, have the cognitive load, and complexity, that the stereotypical view of the 60s version lacked.Traditionalists often like to point out that students can’t have ‘fun’ all the time. But, in my experience, they enjoy dealing with complexity/fun, and I never knew a learner – adult or child – who actually learned anything (or could recall it later) when they were bored.So, whilst I disagree that there’s such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ engagement, there is ‘superficial’ (where the teacher is entertainer, or where the task is enjoyable but simple) and there’s ‘deep’ (where the task is complex, relevant, purposeful , and it’s being driven by the teacher, rather than the learner). I’ve seen this as the norm in a number of great schools, so I refuse to accept that it’s unrealistic, ambiguous, or unachievable