How to Increase Student Engagement School-Wide | E236

Key Moves to Increase Student Engagement:

•  Appreciate Teachers' "Why" and Connect to Your Vision:

    ◦ Leaders should share their vision often and loudly, connecting it with teachers' personal "why". Your teachers look to you for vision.

•  Celebrate Small Wins Loudly and Often:

    ◦ Publicly acknowledge positive things you see happening in classrooms.

    ◦ Leave positive Post-it notes for teachers; these can serve as powerful reminders that they are on the right track and encourage more of those actions.

    ◦ Share wins in faculty meetings (at the beginning and throughout) and in weekly newsletters.

    ◦ Celebrating wins tells everyone what is "awesome," aligns with the vision, and helps kids be engaged, implicitly encouraging others to follow suit. "What you focus on grows".

•  Protect Planning and Collaborative Time:

    ◦ Faculty meetings should not be boring updates that could be emails. Teachers often cite meetings as the one thing they would change in education.

    ◦ Use this rare collaborative time to model engagement strategies you want to see in the classroom, such as Project-Based Learning (PBL) moves, collaboration, voice, and choice.

    ◦ When you model "sit and get" in meetings, you are communicating that this is how teaching and learning are done. Instead, model empowered and engaged learning.

•  What NOT to Do: Don't Just Launch PBL Ineffectively:

    ◦ Avoid sending only one person to a PBL training and expecting them to train the entire staff or for others to instantly become innovators. This often leads to frustration and the abandonment of PBL.

    ◦ Effective PBL implementation requires a comprehensive approach, as seen in the Babcock Ranch model school in Florida, where everyone is PBL certified, they use structured processes (like the "PBL Simplified" book), and have PBL-certified coaches.

    ◦ PBL is a significant shift, especially for teachers accustomed to traditional teaching. Success comes when PBL becomes ingrained in the school's culture and daily operations.

Practical Steps for Implementation:

•  Start small but be consistent.
•  Audit current engagement by observing classrooms and identifying teachers who are already doing great things.
•  Find and "fuel" these teachers by lifting up their PBL-like actions (e.g., great entry events, community partners, voice and choice).
•  Build time into your schedule for discussing PBL and fostering staff collaboration.
•  Create engagement for your teachers so they can experience it firsthand and then model it for their students.
• Once student engagement is achieved, "shout that from the rooftops".

Leadership Advice and Resources:

•  Don't lead alone. Leading is challenging, so build a team.
• Consider starting a leadership team if you don't have one to help build a common vision.
• For a full year or three-year plan for PBL implementation, including information on teacher retention and grant funding, visit pblwebinar.