Student Engagement and catering for a Diverse Range of Learners

In this post, I will be reflecting on student engagement with reference to Phillip Schlechty’s 5 levels of student engagement as per the infographic posted above.

Considering how we might best encourage students to connect with the subject matter being taught, to capture their interest and make certain they can achieve the best possible  learning outcomes, means having to make certain we can find ways to make our lessons as engaging and meaningful as possible.

Schlechty (2002) defined 5 specific categories, or “levels” of engagement / disengagement: -

Authentic Engagement:

Students are actively immersed in the learning activities assigned and find their learning meaningful and valuable and of immediate intrinsic interest.

Ritual Compliance:

Students find little to no meaning in the work being undertaken but maintain engagements based purely on other extrinsic outcomes of their learning eg. Getting good grades, needing to pass a subject to complete a course etc.

Passive Compliance:

Students find little or no meaning in the work assigned and learning required but still try to make an effort, even if as minimal as possible, to avoid negative consequences such as failing a subject.

Retreatism:

Students are completely disengaged from their learning and have no interest in making an effort to complete the work assigned. However, they don’t attempt to disrupt the learning those around them.

Rebellion:

Students outright refuse to do the work assigned, are disruptive in class, and often substitute intended work with their own activities.

If we look at Schlechty’s 5 levels of engagement there is one thing that becomes abundantly clear, it is extremely important to make certain that we find ways to create authentic, meaningful learning experiences in an effort to best engage our students in their own learning.

So what can we do to help insure that this occurs:

Planning

Above all, the effort we, as teachers, put into creating effective, meaningful learning activities and experiences is of vital importance if we want to engage our students to the best of our ability. The importance of planning is stressed in the title of the AITSL standards Professional Practice standard 3 category, Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.

Differentiating learning

Consider how we can alter content and scaffold our lessons / content in such a way as to allow for it to be structured in such a way as to meet the needs of students of varying needs and abilities. We need to also make sure that we find strategies to make certain the content we are teaching is accessible to the level, ability and understanding of each of our students.

There are several AITSL standards that stress the importance of how we address differentiation in learning. For one, we might consider the entire category of Professional Knowledge standard 1, Know students and how they learn. More specifically, we might want to consider the following:

1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities: Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of strategies for differentiating teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities.

Create authentic learning experiences

By this, we mean looking at ways to helping students draw meaning from content by making it relevant through connecting it with current real-world issues, problems, and applications. By doing so, we can help students to find meaning in subject matter by helping them to connect it to issues in their own lives, their own life experiences, and experience of the world around them.