Transcending Engagement Beyond Review Games

This past week, my partnering teacher assistant and I were observed leading a lesson for Math 8 students where we reviewed their review unit on integers by playing Integers Jeopardy, a Jeopardy game the two of us created. The lesson itself went really well, only having to work out a few kinks. What I noticed most about this lesson was that student engagement in this lesson was the highest I have seen thus far. Every single student seemed hooked into the game! Granted, it is not surprising that it would come during the first game we played. However, it did get me thinking as to how I can bring 100% engagement into the classroom daily. After all, wouldn't we all like to see each student raising their hands as eagerly as Hermione is?

Sara Van Der Werf's article on achieving 100% was definitely helpful in learning about ways to increase daily engagement. I'm going to summarize a few of her methods here that I found the most helpful and will look to implement here, but please feel free to check out the article or her video presentation for more methods.

Unfair to Assume
The first method she hits on is to model the engagement we are looking for. She makes an excellent point in stating that we cannot assume students know how to function in our classroom. We must teach and model how to engage in group work, partner work, and other social norms in our classrooms so that students can be successfull in our classrooms and we can see the engagment we want to see. For me, when I have my own classroom, I will take time at the beginning of the year to teach these norms in the first few days of the school year with a rich, accessible task (task TBD).

Changing the Language
Instead of asking "What questions do you have?," what if we started asking "What do you notice?" or "What are you wondering?" What kind of responses would we be getting? My bet is that we would see more than the same few students responding and it would lead to some rich mathemtical converstations that would lead to the breakdown of misconceptions and thus deeper conceptual understanding. Further, what if we changed "explain" to "convince me"? Again, I would bet that the responses would allow us to peer deeper into the minds of students and engagment in the mathematics would soar, since they are being required to display conceptual understanding.

Stand and Talks
I'm guessing that most of us are familiar with Think, Pair, Share and that a good chunk also use it in their classroom. Now, does it happen exclusively with students adjacent to each other? If so, what do you think about adding movement to it? Instead of the activity being essentially sit and talks, they would now be transformed into stand and talks. Adding this movement piece gets student up and moving, which can only benefit students. The movement engages the students not only with the mathematics, but also more students within the classroom.

Partner Work, Not Group Work
One of the chief complaints of group work is that one student does all the work and/or other students not doing any work at all. Van Der Wark argues that changing it up so that students work in pairs will work to resolve this issue. In supplying the partnership with one set of materials, the students must rely on each other and thus must both be engaged in the task and discussing the mathematics at hand. This method makes it difficult for students to hide.

With these in mind, I can see how the tasks already going on in my teacher assisting placement can be easily transformed to tasks that have a stronger impact on students. The unit I am planning will definitely includes some of these elements in the math workshop style lessons. I cannot wait to test these out and work toward bringing engagement levels to 100% on a daily basis!