Northwest Education | Spring/Summer 2008
Student Engagement Takes Center Stage
Teacher Energy Promotes Student Energy
Teacher motivation is contagious in one Oregon district's literacy project.
MILTON-FREEWATER, Oregon—The computer lab at McLoughlin High School was quiet, save for the sound of pens crossing paper and the slip and tap of sticky notes being peeled apart and set aside. On the curling yellow squares, teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade captured the questions about teaching that most consume them, and then moved around the room, sticking their questions to the large sheets of paper hung on the walls. One cluster quickly dwarfed the others: motivation.
"We look out on a classroom full of kids with diverse backgrounds, emotional and social needs," fourth-grade teacher Sue Denman wrote in her final project, eight months after that first meeting. "How to reach all of those students, to motivate them to do their best is a daunting task. If we are really attuned to the uniqueness of our students, our techniques for motivation change from year to year, from class to class."
Denman is one of 10 teachers in the Milton-Freewater Unified School District's K-12 Literacy Cohort who are participating in a yearlong, teacher-directed literacy inquiry. The project is coordinated by teacher-leader Majalise Tolan, facilitated by the Oregon Writing Project at Eastern Oregon University, and funded by the Umatilla-Morrow Education Service District (UMESD).
As the school year comes to an end, one theme of the group's work together stands out in particular: Motivating students requires motivated teachers. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the things that engage these teachers in teaching are not all that different from the things that engage their students in learning.
Milton-Freewater Unified School District #7
Located in the rich agricultural Walla Walla River Valley north of the Blue Mountains in northeast Oregon, Milton-Freewater is a rural community of 6,585 residents. Home to the Muddy Frogwater Festival, the city is known for its annual frog jumping competition and the many frog statues that line its main streets.
Recently, Milton-Freewater has been recognized for more than just frogs, however. In 2008, McLoughlin High School ("Mac-Hi") was one of six schools in Oregon to be named a Celebrating Student Success Champion School for progress made in closing the achievement gap. Superintendent Marilyn McBride credits sustained effort at all the district's schools.
Milton-Freewater Unified School District is composed of Mac-Hi and five other schools: Grove, Ferndale, and Freewater Elementary Schools, Central Middle School, and Pleasant View Alternative School. In these six schools, 240 staff members serve the district's 2,050 students. The student population is split almost equally between white and Latino, and more than 75 percent of elementary students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch programs. For the first time this year, all schools in the district except the alternative school have met adequate yearly progress requirements, and graduation rates are on the rise, 98 percent in 2006, up from 69 percent in 2001.
"In this relay race to the finish, earning a diploma," McBride said, "the baton is handed off from educator to educator and school to school." Although the Champion School award went to McLoughlin, she noted, high school students' success is a testament to all.
Teacher-Directed Professional Development
After identifying motivation as their inquiry topic for the year, the teachers in Milton-Freewater's K-12 Literacy Cohort met three more times in person as well as sharing their ideas and projects online.
As they examined their pedagogy through the lens of motivation, the group read and discussed Douglas B. Reeves's 101 Questions & Answers About Standards, Assessment, and Accountability and the follow-up 101 More; worked with librarian Sharon Porter to develop effective strategies for partnering with librarians; and tried out new ideas for teaching material they had struggled to engage students with before.
Based on Leah Kinniburgh and Edward Shaw Jr.'s "Building Reading Fluency in Elementary Science Through Readers' Theatre," they also spent time practicing readers' theater, creating scripts of the kind their students might use to more fully engage in and demonstrate mastery over their reading.
The cohort's last meeting was reserved for presentation of lesson plans and projects. Upon completion of this year's work, teachers will plan methods of sharing their work with others. The teacher-centered focus has been critical to the Literacy Cohort's success. Based on the National Writing Project's "teachers teaching teachers" model and the UMESD's emphasis on teacher-driven professional development, the approach places high value on teacher expertise and problem-solving skills. Outcomes of the project are easy to observe.
"Trying To Get Kids To Care"
"The biggest struggle I seem to face is motivation," high school history teacher Jennifer Hammer posted to the cohort's Web journal early in the year. "I rarely assign homework because after seven years, I have noticed that it rarely gets done. So I don't set kids up for failure. I provide ample class time for work and for kids to ask questions. But trying to get kids to care about their academics, especially history, is difficult. They (and I'm generalizing here) seem complacent and accepting of mediocrity."
In her eyes, the homework problem is just one symptom of the larger underlying problem that many students don't seem to care about their academic performance.
This apathy may result from real deficiencies, teachers in the cohort are quick to point out. As kindergarten teacher Kathy Lonai notes, a "handful of parents ... either cannot or do not read aloud to their kindergartners." This failure to support kids' preliteracy needs has implications throughout a child's education. Students who fall behind in kindergarten fall further behind as reading becomes more difficult and as reading skills affect success in other subject areas. Middle school teacher Tori Van Broklin identifies struggling readers as her biggest challenge.
Of course, motivation may be affected by the way students perceive their abilities, as well. Researchers, such as Reed and colleagues in "Motivated Reader, Engaged Writer: The Role of Motivation in the Literate Acts of Adolescents," confirm that where students don't feel confident they may avoid work that will demonstrate to themselves and others that they can't succeed. Other research studies, such as Karlsson's Motivating At-Risk Students, show that this pattern becomes especially evident as students grow older, peers exert greater influence over each other's attitudes toward school, and students' willingness to take risks in the face of repeated failure steadily declines.
Second-grade teacher Dana Timm-Ballard attributes some of the disengagement that develops around fourth grade to peer pressure and also to assessment, both of which may affect self-confidence. "I do wonder if all the assessment doesn't add to their shutting down as students. After all, if you've already been shown to be lacking, perhaps over and over again, then maybe you will begin to give a lot less."
By the time these fourth-graders get to high school, they will have encountered many assessments. The more they disengage, the more they fail, and the more they assume their failure has to do with their abilities rather than their attitude.
"Cookie-cutter" curricula disconnected from students' day-to-day lives can also contribute to lack of engagement in literacy learning, especially in the teen years. When students lack a personal connection to the material and the instructor, they are more likely to spend their energy elsewhere.
"I've Raised My Own Expectations"
Teachers' willingness to examine their own teaching and the roles they can and do play in motivating students has also been key to the K-12 Literacy Cohort's success. Rather than placing blame on students, parents, or administrators for lack of motivation, teachers chose instead to take a constructive stance, considering how they could better use the time they had with students in class.
Social Connectedness
Like several of the teachers in the cohort, Van Brocklin returned to her classroom to try readers' theater with her own students, asking eighth-grade literature students to write scripts based on Jacqueline Woodson's poem "Describe Somebody." "Because they had to read their parts in front of the class," she reported, "I felt they were more willing to comprehend the poem than if they had to read it by themselves." The social aspect provided an extra incentive to try to understand and work with the text.
At the high school, Emily Powell gave students three minutes to respond in writing to statements about Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Students then passed their writing to the right, responded, and passed again. At the end of the period, students received a copy of one of these documents. In the essay Powell assigned next, students were asked to synthesize the arguments for and against a position and to include a quote from their peers. The social aspect of the writing and discussion, along with the honor accorded students in citing each other's ideas, made this academic work fun. In her kindergarten classroom, Lonai addressed student fear of spelling incorrectly by having students spell together. She gave each student a whiteboard and pen and then asked them to write the letter for each sound forming a word. "I told them to write the letter that makes the sound of /d/, then /o/ and finally /g/," she says. "When they put them together, they realized they'd written the word dog."
After mastering simple words, the class moved on to longer words and words not spelled phonetically, using the power of the eraser to reinforce the idea that attempts are more important than correctness.
Lonai reports that "since this activity, as well as the addition of a 'write down your own ideas' journal—as opposed to teacher-directed literature response with picture and one word captions—students have taken more initiative. Of my 23 students, 17 have improved on inventive spelling." These social strategies help students learn to trust the process so that they know they can do it, that they can try and fail and try again, and that others are also taking risks.
Relevance of Medium
Of course, the whiteboard technology itself may also be a draw. As Denman notes, her elementary students will "do just about anything if it involves writing on their whiteboards." She uses whiteboards to solve math problems, practice spelling, and write sentences related to both. "They beg to do it. They have contests to see who can spell the word correctly the fastest." Small investments in tools kids enjoy encourage a contagious pleasure in learning.
At the middle and high school levels, several teachers experimented with using computers to motivate students. "I asked, 'How can I use technology to get kids engaged?'" secondary English teacher Elizabeth Gwynn explained as she handed around mock MySpace pages her juniors and seniors had created for characters in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Character pages included a picture of the character, interests, friends, and latest blog entries demonstrating student mastery of content in a format relevant to their interests.
The technology allowed students to demonstrate literacy associated with popular culture and to harness that expertise to meaningful academic work. Research studies such as Xu and colleagues' Trading Cards to Comic Books: Popular Culture Texts and Literacy Learning in Grades K-8 point to other successful projects that have used popular culture to motivate students.
Opportunity to communicate learning to a real audience Lonai builds her kindergartners' excitement for learning by challenging them to go home and impress their families with what they know. "I love giving them big words, like 'antioxidants,'" she says.
"We repeat the word several times through the day so kids remember it and know how to use it. Then I give them a response and a look to use when their parents act surprised: 'I learned that in kindergarten.'"
Elementary school teacher Delores Larson also builds excitement by creating opportunities for students to share their knowledge. She used the Got Milk advertising campaign as a model for encouraging writing in her classroom. She invited her students to create a door display to "convince the whole school that writing is cool!" Under the title, "Got writing?" appears a photo of each student holding one of their own texts and sporting a Cool Whip mustache. Surrounding the display are students' original slogans about writing.
Differentiated Approaches
To encourage her second-graders to recognize coins and use math to reach monetary totals, Timm-Ballard established four centers in her classroom: a color-puzzle worksheet, a money pocket, a store, and a book shop, which each student has a chance to run. Students rotate twice through each activity during a two-day period. Timm-Ballard reports that the hands-on work, presented in a variety of formats, encouraged motivation: "They would have gone to these centers six more times at least."
When sixth-grade teacher Jacob Tolan employed readers' theater to respond to the story "The Stone," he found that students who struggled most with this different approach were his high achievers. When teachers differentiate instruction, he notes, they may find that variety opens doors for the students who appear to have weaker skills to demonstrate their actual abilities.
Meaningful Assessment
In their final meeting, several teachers reported on their efforts to make assessments, in particular, meaningful to students. "How can I fluff up getting a passing score on a state test?" joked high school English teacher Elizabeth Toms. "Come on, make a collage about getting above a 236?"
Powell and Tolan created a meaningful assessment by inviting their Advanced Placement and World Literature students to an English tea party where each student played a character from Jane Eyre and was required to meet and ask questions of five other characters. The questions and responses were scored. According to Powell, this creative assessment "forced students to think about their characters and how they would respond to different inquiries based on what they learned in the text."
Studies such as Goslin's Engaging Minds: Motivation and Learning in America's Schools show that the most meaningful assessments also provide immediate feedback. With this in mind, Timm-Ballard created Story Links to encourage students to read and summarize books. When students complete a book, they write on strips of paper the author, title, main character, setting, main problem, and whether they liked the story. Then, the links are joined "like a Christmas tree paper chain" and strung across the classroom ceiling so that students can immediately see their progress.
High Expectations
"I'm asking a lot," Jennifer Hammer admitted as she presented her final lesson plan to the group. One of the four projects from which her students can choose to demonstrate their understanding of the Middle East is to develop a plan for peace between Israel and Palestine, a challenge even their elders find overwhelming. Yet, "easier does not equal more interesting" as Fried noted in The Passionate Learner: How Teachers and Parents Can Help Children Reclaim the Joy of Discovery. Instead, Hammer hopes involving students in solving challenging, real-world problems will encourage them to perform above expectations—even their own.
"I've raised my own expectations," Lonai said after sharing a book of students' writing on the difference between living and nonliving things. All her students had written two complete sentences—far more than the single word she would have expected in the past. "Never have I had kindergartners who could do this."
As the project comes to a close, the power of inquiry-based, teacher-driven professional development is undeniable. Like their students, teachers want to be excited about and challenged by relevant tasks with lasting goals, and they want the opportunity to work together to pool their expertise on self-directed, hands-on projects that connect their personal and academic lives. They also need to feel confident in their own expertise, and to celebrate and receive immediate feedback on the quality of their work. The teachers in Milton-Freewater's K-12 Literacy Cohort operate in an environment that allows such things to happen. And as they gain energy from this dynamic environment, they translate that energy into classrooms where students learn.