Student Engagement

Student engagement is the meat and potatoes of teaching. If students are not engaged, they are not going to learn. The days of passive listening are over. We are a multitasking society. Students must learn while doing. An added benefit of an engaged class is that everyone is having a good time. A positive atmosphere goes a long way. Of course, there are many ways to engage students. Some strategies will not be everyone's favorite. Writing, for example, is hard for many first graders, especially the struggling readers. They still need to practice the skill, but we make sure to do many other engagement activities as well. One of my favorites is whole body movement. Spelling time is a great time for whole body movement. I like to break up our reading block with spelling in the middle. Not only do the movements help students learn to spell better, but they also get the students out of their seats and get their blood flowing. We like to clap our spelling words based on the type of letter we are spelling. This also doubles as handwriting practice. Letters which go to the top line are clapped over the head. Letters hitting the middle only are clapped in front. Letters going under the line are clapped down. For example, the word, "bag" would be clapped up, middle, and down as we say the letters and spell the word. All teachers struggle with classroom management. It was definitely something I struggled with when starting out. One veteran teacher warned me, "If you don't have classroom management, you have nothing." Then she proceeded to run her classroom like a bootcamp full of robots. I tried this approach, but we were all miserable. There had to be a better way. What I've found is that a positive, structured classroom full of engagement opportunities will eliminate most behavior problems. Engagement is the key. For my most recent peer observation, I had a math lesson all planned out. We were using work mats to relate addition to subtraction. We chanted, "part-part-whole," and used our arms to show adding to the whole and subtracting from the whole. The students really got the lesson, which was a big improvement from my attempts to teach the concept last year. I felt good about the lesson going in because I was prepared. I was still worried about that unknown factor: how would the kids behave? Would I get 85% engagement? It turns out, I didn't need to worry. Both my peer observer and observing administrators had nothing but positive feedback. They said my greatest strength was classroom management. That felt really good!