Return of the Jedi! 
The Last Crusade!
The Bourne Ultimatum!

These are all famous Part 3's!  

Tune in next week for another in the series--Year 3 of the Littogether Teacher Leader Project!  Yes, coming to a school near you...after school workshops on good teaching, for FREE!

This year's theme is relevance in our teaching. It's brought to you by teachers, coaches, and principals in schools all over New Jersey (and possibly beyond!)  There will be workshops for Kindergarten through Grade 12 (yes, Grade 12!) with some of the most dedicated teachers around.  There will be sites in Northern, Central, and Southern New Jersey about best practices in literacy, technology, and other areas.

Stay tuned to this blog for more information after Halloween...no tricks, all treats!

A large part of engagement for students (and for us as well!) is curiosity. How can someone be really into learning if they don't wonder about things?  This year, many of our teachers have taken on the study of curiosity to learn more about how to pique it.

During one of our study groups, some of our teachers decided to do an experiment. They went into a 4th Grade classroom, and showed the students two pictures.  One was an ordinary, conventional picture of an apple that has a bite taken out of it.  The other was unusual...a house on top of a rock on top of a lake.

We projected the picture of the apple, and asked students to write down what they were thinking.  The answers tended to be one of four types: observational (Someone took a bite out of an apple.), personal connection (There is an apple. I love apples.), curious (I wonder who bit that apple.), or creative (There was an old lady who took a bite out of an apple...)
Next, we did the same with the unconventional picture of the house on the lake, and the answers neatly landed in the same four categories.

These four categories seemed to be on a continuum from most concrete to abstract, so we wanted to see if kids' answers were the same in both instances.  We plotted these answers.  

The students in the gray boxes going up the diagonal had the same type of answer both times (observational/observational, curious/curious, etc.), showing that kids might be apt to have one mode of thinking that's comfortable for the same assignment, and that their minds may have been sort of set on one mode.

The students whose answers were above the diagonal and more creative answers with the unconventional picture.  This was a very small sample size, so we'd have to do more and more trials of this to see if it holds true consistently, but it seems to show that since there were more there than on the opposite side, the more unconventional setting yielded more curious, creative, abstract thinking.

So what's the moral of the story? One is that some kids feel more ready to think abstractly, while others are more concrete.  This might be developmental or because of experiences.  However, (we suppose) it's teachable.  The other is that the more out-of-the-box, creative our teaching is, the more likely we might be to make our kids do the same. 

Are you curious about curiosity? There are great books out right now about this topic. Try out the same experiment with students you know. We're going to try it with younger students, and we're also trying figure out if there was a pattern to kids' answers and what we know about them. Stay tuned, and comment if you have more ideas about this curious topic!

During the last year, we've been studying the tricky work of moving kids (and ourselves) to become more and more engaged with our work.  As Csikszentmihalyi tells us, flow is the feeling of absolute joy that overtakes us when we are engaged in an act that matters to us.  How do we get there?

About 100 teachers, coaches, and principals decided to study this up close.  We each chose an activity that kids need to do (homework, working together, reading a book, etc.) and thought of students who landed in each of the four categories found on the chart above: Non-compliance (refusing to do it), Compliance (doing the minimal necessary requirement), Congagement (a made-up word that's a little bit more than compliance), and Engagement (loving doing the activity).

We then looked at patterns in how we knew the student fit into that category and found certain trends.  Here's what we found.

1. CHOICE MATTERS.  Having autonomy over the task mattered.  When kids have a say in some of the parameters of what they'll do (which book they'll read, deciding on content or structure of writing, anything really!), they tend to be further to the right on this continuum. Please note there is a fine line of difference between choice and choices.  Choice is much more open-ended, and students get to make important decisions about the big picture.  Choices are set by the teacher, and while it's nice to give kids the final say in which they'll choose, ownership can only be partly theirs if the teacher is saying, "You'll have to choose from my list."

2. SKILL MATTERS.  When you're able to do something with ease, it's easier to feel engaged with it.  So in order to move kids further toward engagement, we need to bump up their skills within that area.  Skill remediation and early successes will help engage kids in whatever the work is.

3. GROWTH MINDSET MATTERS.  Of course, when students see struggle as a positive part of a larger journey, they're able to become engaged.  They're not concerned with their first failure, because they see it as a chance to improve. We can support this by using words like, "We're not quite there yet," "What part of this works for you and what part you still working on?" or "Which is the greatest challenge and how will we work on that?"

4. SMALL STEPS.  Usually, people go up this scale one step at a time.  If someone is non-compliant with something like doing homework, we have to work toward compliance, and then congagement, and then engagement.  This will take time, and usually people go up one step at a time.

5. THIS IS ABOUT US, TOO.  Teachers and principals are this, too.  Admittedly, I'm non-compliant about cleaning my desk (I don't see it's immediate value, sorry!), compliant with paperwork (I'll do what I have to do to not be in trouble), congaged with school security (This is very, very important, but not my true love), and engaged with all things learning (Nothing matters more!)  We should identify ourselves in all of these categories to continue to grow and grow.

6. IMPOSING NUMBERS WILL LEAD TO COMPLIANCE.  The good news: imposing numbers will lead to compliance.  Students who are non-compliant about anything (reading for long enough, writing about their reading, etc.) will become compliant when you place a number on it (read for 30 minutes, use 2 post-it's, practice math facts for 10 minutes).  The bad news: imposing numbers will lead to compliance. Yes, sometimes students who are already engaged will slip back to compliance, because they might only read for 20 minutes, write only 2 post-it's, practice math for only 10 minutes.  Impose numbers and rules as a matter of differentiation to keep everyone growing.
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When we want kids (and colleagues) to grow in their engagement, let's think about what we know about it.  It will help us bring back that loving feeling to learning!