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Student Engagement in OnlineLearning During COVID-19 SchoolClosures Predicts Lower LearningLoss in Fall 2021

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Student Engagement in OnlineLearning During COVID-19 SchoolClosures Predicts Lower LearningLoss in Fall 2021

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The Key to Better Student Engagement Is Letting Them Show You How They Learn

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The Key to Better Student Engagement Is Letting Them Show You How They Learn

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A couple of weeks ago during a coaching session, a middle school teacher I work with described a fun math activity. She asked her students who were learning remotely to build blanket forts. As you might expect, the students calculated the area, perimeter and volumes of their forts. What was surprising was that for days after this lesson these students logged into class from inside their blanket sanctuaries.

Almost inadvertently, during a particularly trying time in their lives, the students built learning environments over which they had agency. More to the point, they were engaged.

A year into the pandemic, the instructional sands keep shifting from in-person, to remote, to concurrent (or hybrid) and back again. And almost every conversation I have with educators regardless of whether they are classroom teachers, instructional specialists or administrators is around student engagement. Sometimes these conversations are with administrators concerned about the increasing numbers of students on the school's D-F list or with teachers disconsolate about students who won't turn on their cameras, turn in work or participate in discussions and whose attendance (virtual or in-person) is sporadic at best.

All of them are asking, with some urgency, about how we can boost student engagement under these difficult and fluctuating circumstances. From my vantage point, the causes and symptoms are multi-faceted. We need to partner with students-individually and collectively-to discover the root causes and empower them to be their own antidotes.

Performance Success

Well before the pandemic, researcher Amy Berry was examining student engagement, and in the past few months TeachThought founder Terry Heick has joined this conversation. Berry and Heick both offer continua of student investment in learning from outright rebellion to the compliant student "doing school" to the fully invested student with agency over their learning and intrinsic motivation to pursue growth. That our students are distributed across this continuum is not new; that so many students now appear to have slipped into retreatism is what is so concerning.

When considering students as individuals and trying to identify the root causes of their perceived disengagement I find it useful to consider the variables of performance success-knowledge, skills, an environment conducive to learning and the motivation to learn. Missing just one of these variables can have a profound impact on engagement.

In particular, when teachers are teaching and students are learning in such varied and fluctuating settings, I am inclined to focus on the impact of the learning environment on a student's ability to engage. That's part of what made the blanket fort lesson such a success. Inside the fort, students could tune out distractions and focus. They could choose what to bring into their forts and what to share with everyone who could see their video feed. Middle school students are navigating the most vulnerable and self-conscious developmental phase. And by forcing these students to keep their video cameras on we are compelling them to let into their private spaces lots of people who would never be granted access to those spaces otherwise. Seen through this lens, it isn't that surprising that they ordinarily are not active participants in their learning these days.

Whether they are socially distanced, sitting behind transparent screens in the classroom or home and tethered to a screen, the emotional wellness of our students is rightfully our paramount concern. Curriculum can be compacted. Learning gaps can be filled. But emotional injury is harder to overcome. Investment in social-emotional learning has taken on a new urgency, and through this work we can empower students to understand their own unique impediments to engagement and make that thinking visible to us.

Toward Visible Thinking

Unless we approach the development of social-emotional learning competencies through an equity framework we not only are limited in how much growth we can help our students realize, we risk compounding the damage our students have already endured. CASEL is a recognized SEL thought leader so let's explore the competencies they have already outlined: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making.

Source: CASEL

When we nurture students' self-awareness and ability to self-manage we need to include examination of implicit biases and privilege in that work. Students who are aware of the unconscious beliefs they have developed and the opportunities from which they benefit-or do not benefit-are able to develop racial and cultural literacy. Their understanding of the historical legacies and institutional systems that come to bear on their social awareness and relationships equip them to amplify marginalized voices. The result of developing this self- and social awareness means that students make responsible decisions in ways that promote equity and opportunity.

Let's return to the blanket forts and consider how the lesson can be expanded to include opportunities for students to practice SEL skills. Students could design their ideal, personalized learning space taking into account their audio-visual, kinesthetic and other needs. They could prototype their designs and present them live to the class or as a submitted project for others to review, and then give each other feedback on their concepts. Expand this exercise by challenging students to research a community issue they could address. Perhaps they design shelters for homeless youth or temporary shelters for families in storm ravaged areas.

Beyond math-and non-fiction reading and social studies-students will examine their own needs and biases and build empathy with people whose lives and experiences are different from their own. In the process of constructing, presenting and providing feedback on their designs the students will practice understanding an audience and communicating effectively and productively. Ultimately, students are making decisions in the interest of equity, opportunity and informed action.

The more that our students become aware of their learning processes and can make their thinking visible to us, the better we can nurture their development. To that end, capturing their reflection is essential, especially when students are remote and distributed. Here is a guide students can use to collect evidence of their SEL growth (or mastery of curricular learning targets) and explain the insight they are deriving from that learning.

I can give and receive constructive feedback.

I said...
I heard...

So going forward...

I can recognize when aspects of my identity make it difficult for me to understand other people or situations.

I experienced...

Because of that...

I can use technology to connect, collaborate and learn with other people.

I created...

Now I realize...

When students have agency over the path, pace, time and place of their learning, they will invest in it. The more we all make our thinking visible to each other, the better equipped we are to build strong, equitable learning communities that can thrive in these fluid educational circumstances.

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The Key to Better Student Engagement Is Letting Them Show You How They Learn - EdSurge News

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A couple of weeks ago during a coaching session, a middle school teacher I work with described a fun math activity. She asked her students who were ...

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Goal-setting practices that support a learning culture

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Goal-setting practices that support a learning culture

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Goal-setting practices that support a learning culture - kappanonline.org

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Having students set their own goals and monitor their progress is most effective when teachers are able to create a culture, rather than following prescriptive steps.

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Summer school may seem like a common sense way to help children make up for the months of lost school time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg urged President Joe Biden to push every school in the country to stay open this summer in a March 2021 Washington Post opinion piece. Governors around the country from Virginia to California are endorsing summer school, as has the powerful teachers union leader Randi Weingarten. More than $1.2 billion of the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package signed into law on March 11 is specifically earmarked for summer school and many policymakers are urging that billions more in federal and state funds be spent to open schools this summer.

There's just one problem. Research studies done before the pandemic show that summer school usually doesn't accomplish its purpose of raising reading or math achievement.

"Generally, summer programs are not effective because they don't really engage young people and they're not run well," said Jean B. Grossman, an economist at MDRC, a nonprofit research organization, and Princeton University, who has evaluated summer school programs. "It looks like summer school should help but the research is a mixed bag."

In a 2020 synthesis of summer school studies, researchers calculated that the benefit to students tends to be close to zero in math or reading. This meta-analysis is a draft paper, meaning it has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but is the most recent review of the evidence.

Summer school is "boring" and it's not productive to force kids to learn when they don't want to, said Robert Slavin, an education researcher at Johns Hopkins University and one of the meta-analysis authors. "Nobody wants to be sitting in school while their friends are out playing," Slavin said.

When there were initial achievement gains from the extra summer instruction, they were often fleeting and disappeared by the next spring, Slavin added.

One of the biggest summer school studies was conducted in five cities: Boston; Dallas; Jacksonville, Florida; Pittsburgh, and Rochester, New York. Researchers at RAND observed how students did over four years, beginning with third grade in 2013, and found no lasting academic benefits to summer school because of poor attendance. Twenty percent of the kids never showed up and the kids who did come skipped an average of one out of every four days. Many kids skipped more. Academic benefits from summer school were only seen in the fraction of kids who attended faithfully for two summers in a row.*

Summer school programs that resembled camp, including sports and arts, didn't have any better attendance than those that resembled ordinary school. Attendance prizes for families helped, RAND reported. One district spent almost $70,000 in supermarket gift cards for parents and small treats for kids, such as pizza and ice cream.

One of the most rigorous summer school studies looked at an unnamed Northeastern city that made summer school mandatory to elementary school children who failed year-end tests. Economist Jordan Matsudaira of Teachers College, Columbia University compared what happened to students who scored just below and just above the cut off for being sent to summer school. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.) Third graders who went to summer school did slightly worse than those who didn't. Meanwhile, fifth graders benefited from summer school, in both reading and math. Attendance remained a problem. Many of the students who were supposed to go to summer school refused to or didn't attend regularly.

One can find individual studies that show strong results for summer school. But scholars told me that these positive studies often involved small numbers of children and compared the performance of students who attended summer school with different types of students, which is not an apples-to-apples comparison. In other words, there's a lot of shoddy research on summer schools out there.

One review of almost 100 older studies of uneven quality, published in 2000, generally found positive results from summer school. In the underlying studies, middle-class children benefited more than disadvantaged children - a disappointment for policymakers who are keen to focus on the neediest cases. And just to point to an example of how muddy the research is, this older meta-analysis found that the gains were strongest for early elementary and high school students. In the mandatory summer school study, which I described above, it was the opposite, with fifth graders benefiting much more than third graders.

Unfortunately, there are few randomized control trials, the gold standard in research, for summer school. Grossman conducted one in 2011-14 in which middle school students were randomly assigned to a five-week summer program with trained instructors using good curricula for reading and math lessons in the mornings and fun afternoon activities such as sports, music, theater and art. Again, persuading kids to enroll was a problem.

Even though attendance for those who did enroll was rather good in this study, the academic results were still disappointing. The program was billed as a way to "accelerate" learning but students learned at the same pace as they did at school. The gains for the five-week summer program were small and not statistically significant compared to kids who didn't attend.

"My takeaway," said Grossman, "is, if you're lucky, for every week of summer school, you get what you get in a week of regular school. And if the summer school is not done as well, you get less than that."

Often summer programs don't train the instructors well or adhere to a proven curriculum. In a separate review of summer reading programs, positive results were seen only when instruction was "research based," according to an analysis of studies that took place between 1998 and 2011 for children in grades kindergarten through eighth grade.

What do the researchers suggest for schools that want to proceed with summer school? Grossman's advice is to focus on social-emotional skills and relationships to help re-engage students in learning. She thinks the best summer programs don't make kids sit in a math class for an hour every day in the summer, replicating the structure of traditional school, but engage kids in topics that they're interested in, such as social justice. "Maybe they have to calculate disproportionality in school discipline and they sort of inadvertently do math while they're learning about this cool subject," she said.

Slavin advocates fusing summer camp with intensive, daily tutoring. He noted that two studies in his summer school research review proved to be exceptions to the pattern of ineffectiveness. One is a Los Angeles study, published in 2005, and the other is a study in a small city in the Pacific Northwest, published in 2013. Both summer school programs focused on teaching young children to read in kindergarten and first grade. In both cases, children received group phonics instruction followed by reading practice in very small groups that resembled tutoring. To Slavin, tutoring is the secret sauce that made both summer school programs work, echoing the strong, more definitive evidence seen in the research literature on tutoring.

Unfortunately, even Slavin points out the gains for students in the Los Angeles summer school experiment faded out by spring; the students who had attended the summer program were no better off than similar students who hadn't. No one followed up with the students in the Pacific Northwest study to see how long those gains lasted. And no one has studied whether Slavin's summer idea of alternating soccer practice, say, with math and reading tutoring would actually be effective.

What all this shows is that helping kids catch up after the pandemic won't be easy. And pushing students into summer school isn't the answer - as appealing as it might sound.

*For more details on this randomized-control trial of summer school, see Hechinger coverage in 2020.
This story about summer school studies was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger's newsletters.

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PROOF POINTS: Slim research evidence for summer school

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Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox Summer school may seem like a common sense way to help children make up for the months of lost school time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Students Are Struggling. They’re Asking Us to Slow Down and Focus on Relationships. - EdSurge News

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A little more than a year ago, I remember sitting in meetings trying to figure out how we might do remote learning for a week or so to contain the ...

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The purpose of this survey is to gather information regarding the quality of the professional development in which you have engaged. This information will be used to guide future professional development. Your individual responses will be treated as confidential information.

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How the Science ofLearning and DevelopmentCan Transform Education

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How the Science ofLearning and DevelopmentCan Transform Education