Below is an excellent video from Wes Fryer, who discusses the difference between “enthralling” and “engaging” students. He also provides useful strategies about how teachers can do this. The major ones are choice and differentiation: a) choices about the ways students learn material. “Rather than asking them to learn facts, ask them to apply those facts by tackling complex questions that are worth answering”; b) differentiate learning choices and assessment options.

He says: “For over a hundred years our education system has been putting students in small desks in straight rows and trying to force them to remain enthralled for hours on end.”

“If you are one of the teachers who has been trying to enthrall your students constantly and have been frustrated by this experience, today is the day to stop pursuing that goal all the time. Stop trying to enthrall your students and instead strive to engage them. ”

Providing students with choices about what they learn and the ways they express their learning means that they are more likely to become personally invested in what they are learning. This opens up opportunities to make learning empowering and relevant. I can only remember one subject, Society and Culture (often criticised for its lack of academic rigour), where I had the opportunity to do this in school. I researched the “Fall of Communism” and can still remember spending hours researching and thinking about complex issues and making historical and contemporaneous connections. It seems a shame that students often have to wait until postgraduate level until they are given genuine options for self-directed learning. There are a couple of progressive courses in NSW (Australia) that offer this, Year 12 (Senior Year) English and History extension. These courses provide students with the chance to research subjects of their choice but the product they are allowed to create, in history anyway, is still confined to a traditional essay format – strictly no mashups or collaboration allowed.

Fryer discusses the way we can engage students rather than insisting that they memorise content whilst we either bore them to death by writing endless notes on the board or attempt to ‘enthrall” them with tricks a ringmaster would envy. The key is helping students to become experts, rather than demanding that they sit still, stay “on task” and listen for hours on end. Teachers, he says, can encourage “students to collaborate with each other to create authentic knowledge products that reflect their true understanding, perception and mastery of the subject being studied and devise assessment and have students help devise assessments that cannot be faked: A worksheet or study guide will not suffice.”

We can measure our success by:

• the number of questions students ask and strive to answer in their products
• the amount of higher level thinking reflected in the products they make together
• the choices have to learn, express, create and share their ideas

Thanks Wes, I’m going to hang up my leotard for a while…

Photo: Matt Miegel