Student Engagement

In his book Why Don't Students Like School, cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham describes true thinking and learning (not just relying on memory or how you've always done something) as "slow, effortful, and uncertain." Remember the last time you were learning something yourself. You were probably feeling all three. According to Willingham, "We tend to avoid this kind of thinking unless our fragile curiosity is nurtured in an environment that includes

• challenge yet with built-in opportunities to succeed
• adequate background knowledge in our long-term memory
• adequate environmental clues (that's a reason to partner students and post charts to the walls)
• room in our working memory (It doesn't take much to load their working memory)
  

Willingham, makes several suggestions for enticing students through their brains:

• Plan lessons around essential questions and solvable problems
• Respect students' cognitive limits, build in breaks so students can think about or do something with new ideas, and make sure students have the necessary background knowledge to approach their work.
• Differentiate and tier assignments, keeping the standard as the baseline
• Play with pacing, see how the class responds, and adjust. The brain automatically responds to change; do your students need more or less of these to sustain interest?
• Instead of thinking in terms of relevance, which can be hard to pull off for diverse groups, consider the question that will engage students and make them want to know the answer.

Odds are that your lessons already include some or all of these strategies. Has brain-friendly engagement paid off in you classroom? What has worked?