From the first article we read in this class I was excited. I was excited because I had chosen the topic of engagement for my research and what I learned in the first term was that engagement was a very complex and broad topic that I was only beginning to understand. Learning about instructional design has provided a new way for me to think about engagement and my students. Instead of students, I now have users, people who need to choose to engage with my product, the lesson. This is engagement at its core. My students need to choose to learn and they need to choose to learn from me, so I need to sell the learning experience to them. This was my first epiphany this term, but it was immediately followed by an unsettling thought.
I am a person who hates to be told that I have to do something. My immediate response is, “No.” And we know that adult consumers are often in a position where they can choose to buy your product, or they can buy another one. My students do not have nearly as many options. They are legally mandated to go to school and they have no selection in terms of the teacher they have or the standards that they are required to learn. I understand why this turns some of them off from the learning process; but just as these things are out of the control of my students, they are out of my control as well. The options my students have are more on the level of effort and focus. It’s much like the leading a horse to water metaphor, they have to show up, but they don’t have to learn. As my research is considering the impact of student choice on student engagement I am left to figure out how much choice to give my students, in what way I want to provide that choice, and how to make the choices they do have meaningful. This is made even more difficult by the limited choices that I, and every other teacher have. I cannot choose what standards to teach, what curriculum to use, or at what times I teach each subject. How can I, with my limited freedom, create meaningful opportunities for my students to make choices? Kids can smell BS and they don’t appreciate the “you can do this worksheet or that worksheet,” version of student choice. Reading about the SITE model of instructional design lead to another epiphany. It is an epiphany that I am slightly embarrassed, but also excited about. In the sociocultural subcontext section of the article it discusses the fact that a learning experience must match what learners want in order for them to decide to put their time and energy into learning. After I read that I considered that I had asked my students how they felt about school in general during my first round of research. Many of them responded that they only came to school because they had to and that they found our curriculum to be boring. I found this rather discouraging as both of these aspects of learning are out of my control. My epiphany was that I should brainstorm with my students all of the choices we don’t have. Once we know all of the things we can’t decide, we can sit back and say, “Given that we need to do these things, what do we want? Are there ways that we can connect other areas of interest to 4th grade standards? What do we want the learning environment to be like? How do we want to learn?” It seems somewhat backwards but I think focusing on the decisions we don’t have first will lead us to a deeper, more effective, and hopefully more engaging discussion about the decisions we do have.
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The main audience I want to address in my research is my students. Because my research is focused on engagement, my focus is on them and their needs. WIth that being said, engagement is not only a struggle in my classroom, and I would like my research to be useful to other teachers who have similar struggles.
The biggest problem I have thought about thus far in creating a product that emphasizes student choice is that, thus far in my research this is a very broad idea. The decisions that students get to make need to be authentic, and this often means a simultaneous increase in the workload and relinquishing of control for the teacher. Neither of these are factors that many teachers will be overly enthused about, and I worry that many teachers will like the idea, but will not truly implement in their classroom. I have even struggled to continue providing students with student choice with testing coming up and feeling like there aren’t many authentic choices that even I can make. So I guess my aha from these past few weeks is I need to think of a simple method of implementing student choice into a daily routine that does not create too much work for the teacher or ignore the realities of time constraints and testing pressure that exist in classrooms all over this country. |
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May 2018
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Photo used under Creative Commons from Wajahat Mahmood