January 2025

Greetings! 

I hope you've had a wonderful winter break with time to relax and reflect with those you love. My heart is full when I think about the classrooms in which I’ve been fortunate enough to work in this fall. To work side by side with teachers, observing, learning from, and responding to students’ learning passions and needs is a source of tremendous intellectual stimulation and joy for me. My humble thanks go to the schools and districts in which I work.

In three blogs that I published this summer and fall* and in a podcast with Dr. Thomas Newkirk*, I hoped to jumpstart a conversation between you and your colleagues about how classroom teachers, principals, and instructional coaches can help kids become more deeply engaged in classroom work as a way to promote their overall well-being.

As I worked in classrooms this fall, I continued to think about how the Pillars of Engagement can be an anchor for educators when children are striving (I appreciate Stephanie Harvey, Annie Ward and their colleagues for changing the nomenclature from struggling to striving) with lack of engagement or behavioral concerns.

Simply stated, we see fewer behavioral issues when children are more engaged. I argued that, in this country, we have tried any number of social and emotional learning approaches, some of which are effective, but real engagement, students losing themselves in academic content and collaboration, is where we’re most likely to see substantive growth.

I want to reiterate that academic engagement is not a substitute for the social andemotional support some children need, but teachers are not therapists nor are we socialworkers; we must tackle the academic side of the equation. We can use the Pillars of
Engagement (Engaging Children, 2018) to launch conversations and help our studentsbecome more aware, and therefore more in control of their own engagement.

But for this blog, I want to turn our focus on engagement to a particularly troubling obstacle which is too rarely addressed.

The elephant in the room: Many of our colleagues, perhaps even those in your school, are being asked to comply with state and district curriculum mandates and to teach programs with “fidelity” particularly in early literacy. Many of the policies and programs
have not taken into consideration the overwhelming research that supports thoughtful, purposeful development of motivation and engagement, K – 12. See for example, Duke, et. al. 2011. Guthrie, et. al. 2012, Parsons & Erickson, 2024. Clearly, we know that student engagement is critical if we want students to retain and reapply what they learn. ** 

Other researchers (e.g. Kuhn, Stahl, 2022) emphasize that differentiation around students’ needs is another crucial piece of the puzzle (often missing in whole class approaches to literacy) when our goal is long term retention and reapplication of concepts. Another body of research looks at the importance of student choice (e.g.)Johnston & Ivey, 2013) in student engagement. We know that student  engagement is highly correlated to having choice and agency in their work. I’ve excerpted a few highlights of this research below. Unfortunately, much of this research is not incorporated into discussions about literacy including the “science of reading” conversation.

So, what to do? There  are a wide range of options for incorporating work on engagement, even if you are required to follow a rigid curriculum. The most important thing to remember is that a focus on improving student engagement doesn’t require a curriculum or program; it doesn’t rest on endless lesson plans.

Engagement work begins simply with an ongoing conversation between you and your students. In the last blog, I shared questions that will help you launch these conversations with your students. These discussions can be woven into any part of your academic day and don’t take longer than a few minutes. Here are some additional strategies, each of which should be very doable no matter what mandates you’re working with.

1. Take a few minutes to share your interests and how you are engaged (in and out
   of school). Once you have surfaced some examples of your engagement,
   students will want to share their own. When they do, talk about the
   characteristics of the engaged experiences; were they more intellectual, more
   emotional? Use the Pillars of Engagement to define and describe engaged
   experiences

2. Talk with students about how you reengage after you’ve become aware that you
   aren’t! Maybe you took a break, shared your experiences with someone else, did
   some research, etc. Kids need to have explicit instruction about how to reengage
   after they lose concentration. It’s a learned behavior!

3. Pause to point out engagement when you see it. For example, if you observe two
   students collaborating to solve a problem, ask everyone to look up from their
   work for a moment to hear about the pair who are engaged. You’ll see lots of
   engaged behaviors following these examples.

4. Confer with students, ideally as individuals, but also in small groups about what,
   in their current work, engages them the most and the least. Try to differentiate
   the learning tasks to favor more engaging tasks.

5. Start an anchor chart in the classroom with anecdotes about ways kids have
   been “caught” being engaged. Encourage the students to add their own. Pause
   for a moment to review these examples when you can.

6. Take any opportunity to offer choice in academic and social/emotional tasks.
   Even if your curriculum curtails choice, find small ways to offer students choice.
   For example, during independent work in literacy, I try to offer students a choice
   about whether to read OR write. If they read one day, they commit to writing the
   next and vice versa. It’s amazing to me how much this simple choice means to
   students. (More on integration in The Literacy Studio, 2022)
   https://www.heinemann.com/products/e12005.aspx

You’ll find dozens of additional ways to enhance engagement, even within a tightly prescribed curriculum. The suggestions above take very little time from your day and make a big difference. Again, kids are not going to learn to be engaged automatically; this like other life skills is a learned behavior and must be discussed explicitly in classrooms!

Finally, be prepared to share the research that supports your emphasis on student engagement. If you need some specific research, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at ellin@mosaicliteracy.com – as always, visit https://www.mosaicliteracy.com for many more resources and ways to be in touch.

May the rest of this academic year be filled with adventure and joy!!