Professional Development

Yesterday we had some pretty great professional development focused on student engagement.  Our essential question for the day was How can student engagement impact my evaluation? but I was more focused on how engagement can effect student behavior.  I am fully aware that my students need more challenging and open-ended work.  They need authentic/real-life projects to understand why our standards and skills are important, and they need more choice as far as how they show me what they know.

Some of the things we learned about were Schlecty's design qualities for plans and the classroom itself, ways to measure student engagement, and ways to add some of the design qualities to our lessons.
Here's a list of the design qualities:

• Content and Substance
• Product Focus
• Organization of Knowledge
• Clear and Compelling Product Standards
• Protection from Adverse Consequences for Initial Failures
• Affiliation
• Affirmation
• Choice
• Novelty and Variety
• Authenticity

I think my students need me to focus most on Product Focus, Choice, and Authenticity.  My plan is to include more real-life activities relating our standards and skills to how they will use this stuff as an adult.  I'll also be including more real choice.  Allowing them to choose the type of product they present will lead to a more memorable learning experience.  Focusing on creating a product instead of work just to do work will be better for my students because they are compliant.  They'll do what I ask because they've been raised to do so but they won't enjoy it or glean anything from it.  This is not what I want.  I want my students to have the same passion for learning that I do, and the only way I can think to do this is by working hard to make school better for them.