Charting a New Course: Supporting Student Engagement within the ELA DLEs
Charting a New Course: Supporting Student Engagement within the ELA DLEs
Educators have spent the last school year painstakingly navigating through the storm of pandemic learning. Just as a storm at sea is brought on by the dynamic relationship of the ocean surface, wind, and atmospheric pressure, the 2020-2021 school year created conditions which upset the balance between school safety and educating our students. Teachers and administrators have been in survival mode doing their best to build virtual relationships with students, find access to high-quality texts, and create opportunities for collaboration. As ISD/RESA professionals who support educators, we have been riding this wave of uncertainty and doing our best to be a life-boat during these stormy seas. We fished through our resources to provide professional learning opportunities teachers would find timely, and help teachers chart their course to an ever-shifting definition of classroom success.
In our efforts to understand the challenges educators faced in this new learning environment, it became clear that we needed to gather some feedback from teachers to understand their current reality. We surveyed over 100 Secondary English Language Arts teachers to read their observations of student engagement, student discourse, and student choice.
One topic that continued to emerge from the survey was engagement. Nearly half of the respondents stated it was difficult to keep students engaged. A deeper read into the responses revealed many teachers were considering engagement in terms of behaviors such as students’ work completion and turning cameras on or off. Just like in a face-to-face classroom, behavior is one aspect of engagement, but does it tell the whole story of how much a student is learning?
The Distance Learning Playbook by Fisher, Frey, and Hattie (2021) defines engagement in three domains: behavioral, cognitive, and emotional. Student participation in class demonstrates their behavioral engagement. Evidence of cognitive engagement could be gathered by looking at what students produce to demonstrate their understanding and make their thinking visible. Emotional engagement occurs when students feel a sense of belonging and motivation (p. 102). Using behavior alone to determine student engagement is insufficient. Students can look as though they’re completely engaged when, in reality, they are not cognitively or emotionally involved in the learning.
Emotional engagement, as it turns out, is at the core; it is a life raft in the storm. Considering emotional engagement in instructional planning is key. Students need to feel valued in the learning environment, whether virtual or face-to-face.
Students need that emotional engagement in order to take the risks necessary for cognitive engagement--planning, problem solving, monitoring their own progress. If they are to ask questions, participate in discussions, and become critical thinkers, they must be part of a community that has explicitly communicated and practiced structures and expectations of behavioral engagement: how they participate in the work. This community is one in which all students' voices are lifted and valued.
We want students who are curious, questioning, and responsive. We want students engaged within the cognitive and emotional domains. When this happens, meaningful participation follows. As educators, what can we do, or how can we create an environment that will foster student engagement on all levels? We realized the Essential Instructional Practices in Disciplinary Literacy: Grades 6-12 (DLEs) can be useful tools to help teachers set their course through the rough waters of pandemic education.
The DLEs support the three dimensions of engagement. They anchor our literacy content in research-based practices. The three levels of engagement live within the Disciplinary Literacy Essentials. As educators we need to navigate the DLEs through an inquiry lens: how can we address each dimension instructionally and in our curricular design? How might we use the DL Essentials to help us reflect on our current instructional practices to find ways to increase each type of engagement?
Some questions to consider for each dimension of engagement might be:
What could this look like in our schools? To get a classroom view we went back to the survey results. One respondent shared, “... there seems to be a disconnect between student and teacher.” Students are disconnecting or demonstrating a lack of participation through turned off cameras and muted mics. Out of the 10 DLEs, let’s explore Essential #8: Ongoing observation and assessment of students’ language and literacy development that informs their education.
Consider the following bulleted point:
The teacher engages in observation and assessment guided by:
students’ strengths, areas for improvement, and socioemotional needs (Bullet 1).
Observing and collecting data around students’ cognitive performance and social emotional behaviors can lead to emotional engagement through conferring, whether with individual students or small groups.
Conferring sessions provide a window into the unique abilities and learning progressions of each individual student. The information obtained through these sessions allows the teacher to provide timely and specific formative feedback to guide students’ learning and literacy development (Bullet 5), which bolsters emotional engagement by valuing student strengths and helping learners identify the next steps in their cognitive work. Conferring also involves students in developing success criteria and learning goals, as well as in supported, productive self and peer assessment (Bullet 6). By doing so, teachers create opportunities to enhance behavioral and cognitive engagement by allowing students the choice in setting clear goals and understanding the purpose of the work as well as emotional engagement by connecting with students (see table below).
The engagement opportunities in DLE 8 help deeply connect students to their own learning. As the educational community continues our critical conversations around assessment practices, we need to focus on ways to generate assessments valued by learners, not just teachers. Conferring is one example of an assessment practice that bolsters student strengths, motivating them to engage in the cognitive and behavioral dimensions of their work.
The storms from this past year have permanently changed the routes we have used for years to guide our students through our courses. As we return to face-to-face learning, we must reflect upon the challenges we have overcome this past year, and as we navigate the next steps in our educational journey, we can look to the DLEs to help us make our way through these as-yet uncharted waters. Finding ways to attend to student engagement will help us reach our destination, and arrive at new, safe harbors for teachers and learners alike.
References
Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Hattie, J. (2021). The distance learning playbook grades K-12: Teaching for engagement & impact in any setting. Corwin Press.
Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators General Education Leadership Network Disciplinary Literacy Task Force. (2019). Essential instructional practices in disciplinary literacy: 6 to 12. Lansing, MI: Authors
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