Who should pose the questions?

In their new book, Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins re-make the case that questions drive learning. The book provides a framework for understanding what makes a question "essential" (Chapter 1) and, thus, supportive of profound learning and how to use essential questions to design learning environments that engage students (Chapters 3-6). 

While I made several dozen Post-It flag marks throughout the book, two references the authors cited from the education literature especially resonated with me. One referred to work that shows the importance of helping students frame their own questions (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) and the other to recent work that revealed the many instructional techniques - including high-level questioning - that have a greater effect on student learning than socioeconomic status (Hattie, 2009).

McTigue and Wiggins make the point that teacher questions ought to facilitate student questions rather than merely elicit answers. To be essential, teacher questions must be open-ended, thought-provoking, cannot be answered by recall alone, and raise additional questions. However, open-ended doesn't mean without purpose, and this is where deliberate design is critical. The authors make the point that good teacher questions help students inquire into the important ideas related to learning content. When students learn to frame their own questions, they more actively process and make meaning from information and are better able to check their own comprehension. It's the instructional designer's job to use questions to both facilitate student engagement and guide that engagement toward subject matter understanding. McTigue and Wiggins note that "if teachers merely elicit and run with student questions without framing overarching curricular goals and essential questions to support them, then there can be no guaranteed and viable curriculum"

The idea that instructional design can have a greater impact on student achievement than SES, the second important reference, is perhaps evident in a recent study in North Carolina that showed problem-based learning (PBL) environments can uncover previously unrecognized advanced academic potential in low-income students (Gallagher & Gallagher, 2013). PBL models require students to address a problem without sufficient knowledge at the outset to solve the problem.  These models generally include a driving question, focus on real-world issues, require student inquiry and collaboration, allow for student choice, and result in the completion of a product.  A consistent finding in the research is that PBL learning environments facilitate greater student motivation and engagement and improve students’ disposition toward learning. In the North Carolina study, not only did a PBL environment allow low-income students to use higher-order thinking skills previously undetected by fact-based, content knowledge assessments, students for whom PBL revealed advanced academic potential closely resembled traditionally-identified advanced academic students based on measures of student engagement and student product.

Why did it take a PBL environment to discover this potential?

The authors assert that part of the answer is that ill-structured problems or questions (essential, if you will) create situational interest. An inquiry-based environment, they argue, creates a context that supports the inquiring disposition of gifted students and reveals previously hidden advanced academic potential in low-income students who are often not engaged by traditional, fact-oriented instructional environments. Furthermore, the authors contend that engaging students with essential questions "opens the door to full participation, regardless of students' background knowledge."

Finally, McTighe and Wiggins, per their argument in Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, would approve of the fact that the inquiry in the student work this study analyzed was driven by student questions framed within a larger ill-structured problem (or essential question) designed by the teacher around specific standards.

"Thus the question 'Who should pose the questions?' is a false dichotomy," McTighe and Wiggins write. "It is not an issue of teacher questions versus student questions, but of how to blend both in a purposeful manner."

• Gallagher, S. & Gallagher, J. (2013). Using problem-based learning to explore unseen academic potential. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 7(1), 111-131. 
• McTighe, J. & Wiggins, G. (2013). Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, Alexandrai, VA: ASCD.
• Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge. 
• Palinscar, A. & Brown, A. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), 117-175.

Putting the pieces together

Understanding student engagement is about understanding the dimensions and depth of the relationship between students and the school community, according to the authors of an analysis of measuring student engagement published last year in the Handbook of Research on Student Engagement. The authors frame engagement as a three-dimensional construct that includes a cognitive component (engagement of the mind), a behavioral component (engagement in the life of the school), and an emotional component (engagement of the heart). And they assert that measuring the depth of each of these elements of engagement requires understanding students' perspectives.

"As in any social system, an understanding of the complexities of the system does not necessarily reside in those at the top of the system, who only have a narrow understanding and perspective on the ways in which the system operates; those at the bottom of the social hierarchy within a system often have the greatest insights into the whole system." 

The authors assert that educators must learn to conceptualize engagement as a cultural issue rather than a structural one. They describe cultures as interrelated, overlapping, nonlinear sets of relationships that, when viewed from a distance, appear as webs or sets of webs. In other words, a single student's engagement in the school begins from a perspective that is unique to that student but not independent from the perspectives of others nor from the structures upon which the school environment is based. This is why, the authors assert, attempting to understand engagement only as a structural issue and implementing top-down policies as a means to address it "does not have a direct and uniform impact on student outcomes." Cultures are way too complicated for that.

So is engagement.

For example, emotional engagement has been found to be fluid on any given day across learning environments for individual students, suggesting that engagement is context dependent (Park, Holloway, Arendtsz, Bempechat, & Li, 2012). While this may seem to complicate things from an educator's perspective, it is actually great news for schools because many elements of the learning context are within the control of educators: how we interact with students, the work that is designed for students, and how organizational systems are designed to support that work.

It also means we need students' perspectives. But how do we get them?

Again, complicated... and the best way is the most personal and hardest to measure; getting to know individual students and what motivates them. But an aggregate understanding of the students' perspective is important as well for schools, something that is communicable and practicable. There are student self-report surveys that have proven to be statistically reliable and valid measures of engagement as it relates to student achievement. Experience sampling has proven to help researchers understand engagement as it relates to context. Teacher ratings and student interviews also provide insight into students' interaction with learning environments. And observation is potentially useful for both research and practical purposes. The problem is that currently the most common, and too often the only, means of understanding the student experience is performance on standardized assessments. While performance data is important for understanding the full scope of a student's educational experience, it is not enough and does little to inform understanding about the educational processes that are linked to the outcomes the assessments measure.

The authors of the current analysis review the findings of the latest High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE), a student survey designed to assess the extent to which high school students engage in educational practices associated with high levels of learning and development. A statistically valid and reliable construct for data collection and analysis, the HSSSE is designed to collect information regarding all three aspects of engagement (cognitive, behavioral, and emotional). The latest administration of the HSSSE revealed three major themes: students feel they have little voice in the school community, teachers are powerful figures in the lives of students, and students crave activity and interaction in the learning environment.

These three understandings represent actionable data for schools in designing their learning environments. When combined with other data, including personal knowledge about what motivates students, interview and observation data, and a variety of student performance data, we can begin to put together the engagement puzzle. Warning, however, it's a really big puzzle. And it will take attention, commitment, persistence and a sense of purpose to complete it.

But if engagement is the key to learning... puzzle anyone?

• Yazzie-Mintz, E. & McCormick, K. (2012). Finding the humanity in the data: Understanding, measuring, and strengthening student engagement. In S.J. Christensen, A.L. Reschly, & C. Wylie (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, 743-761.
• Park, S., Holloway, S. D., Arendtsz, A., Bempechat, J., & Li, J. (2012). What makes students engaged in learning? A time-use study of within- and between-individual predictors of emotional engagement in low-performing high schools. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 41(3), 390–401. doi:10.1007/s10964-011-9738-3

Am I going to read or do something else?

That is the question.

Students whose reading instruction at school relates to their daily lives and appeals to their personal interests are making the choice to read and are performing better than less engaged students, according to the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). PIRLS is an international assessment of fourth grade reading comprehension that is conducted every four years. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) published the results for the most recent administration in December. The latest PIRLS collected information regarding the construct of student engagement for the first time. The report's authors indicate that student engagement focuses on the importance of the learning activity that brings the student and the content together (Mullis, Martin, Foy, & Drucker, 2012).

While reading is required for many school related activities, it is also something students can choose to do or not, according to the authors of a research review on students' engagement in reading and how classroom instructional practices influence reading engagement. In building a model that describes how instruction, motivation, engagement, and achievement are related, the authors assert that the effects of instructional practices on student reading outcomes are mediated by engagement. (Guthrie, Wigfield, You, 2012). 

That is, classroom contexts only affect student reading outcomes to the extent that they produce high levels of student engagement for reading.

The authors make the distinction between engagement and motivation. They assert that engagement is a multidimensional construct that includes behavioral, cognitive, and emotional attributes associated with being deeply involved in an activity. Motivation, which they assert relates to and informs engagement but is more specific, is what energizes and directs behavior and is often defined with respect to the beliefs, values, and goals individuals have for different activities. Motivation, the authors assert, is important for the "maintenance of behavior" with respect to cognitively demanding activities like reading in which a variety of skills are involved from processing individual words to generating meaning from complex texts.

Basically, it boils down to student choice and, once students arrive at school, how their instructional environments influence their choices.

The authors outline some instructional practices and their connections to student reading outcomes, both directly and indirectly through their influence on engagement and motivation. The authors' goal was to describe how instruction, motivation, behavioral engagement, and achievement are related. They attempted to identify and document the engagement processes that serve as links between the practices of teachers and the reading outcomes of students.

Some of what the authors' literature review found includes:

• Engagement positively influences reading competence for elementary and secondary students when potentially confounding cognitive and motivational variables were statistically controlled, including past achievement, socioeconomic status, and self-efficacy.
• Motivations such as self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and valuing are related to an increase in student engagement and reading behaviors including effort, attention, time spent reading, concentration, and long-term persistence in reading. Motivation not only influences the amount of engagement but the quality as well by activating "cognitive strategies that are productive for full comprehension of complex texts."
• Intrinsic motivation, measured as enjoying reading, was associated with reading engagement for elementary and secondary students over and above students' prior knowledge, past achievement, and self-efficacy.
• Classroom practices are "a sword that cuts in two directions." Practices most associated with high levels of student motivation and engagement for reading include: 
• providing autonomy support (choice and self-direction in reading context and reading related activities) 
• relating reading activities to students' personal interests and goals, and providing students opportunities for collaboration and interaction with the teacher and other students regarding what they are reading
• avoiding practices that are not student-centered. Negative feedback, a lack of protection from adverse consequences, or requiring students to use materials outside of their zone of proximal development can have deleterious effects on students' motivation for reading.  

• Guthrie, J., Wigfield A., & You W. (2012). Instructional Contexts for Engagement and Achievement in Reading. In S.J. Christensen, A.L. Reschly, & C. Wylie (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, 601-634.
• Mullis, I., Martin, M., Foy, P., & Drucker, K. (2012). Chestnut Hill, MA: TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, Boston College.

Transformation through engagement

"In class, bored."

This was a Tweet one morning from one of our students that several colleagues and I noticed while participating in a regional school district meeting, ironically, about embracing technology's potential to capture the hearts and minds of the first digital generation. As an advocate for putting social media to work for learning, this was not exactly how I had envisioned its use by students. However, our student was not expressing something that is unique to our school district nor do I believe it was a reflection of how hard his teachers are working. It's the system. I heard it the day of this writing, and it deserves consideration:

A great teacher in a bad system will lose to the system every time.

Gallup research shows that engagement in school declines as students get older, a trend that Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education, calls a "monumental, collective national failure" resulting from too much standardization and not enough experiential and project-based learning in schools. Perhaps an interesting frame through which to see this is the nation's primary standardized assessment of student learning, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The most recently reported NAEP trend data shows that today's students perform better than students 40 years ago, but it also shows that improvement for high school students over that time is minimal compared to the improvement of younger students, taking on a similar pattern to Gallup's measure of student engagement.

When the full construct of what Gallup measures in its student poll is included (hope, engagement, and well-being), the research shows that student engagement considered this way positively correlates with grades, attendance, retention, graduation, employment, college and vocational readiness, and, by the way, performance on standardized tests.

In other words, engagement distinguishes between high and low performing schools.

Gallup's research helps to frame the argument that determinants of student academic and professional success transcend intelligence and aptitude and underscores the need to have a larger framework for thinking about how instruction, and its supporting systems, should be designed to help students pursue and reach educational and vocational goals; about how to increase student engagement. Busteed's assertion that there is too much standardization and too little experiential and project-based learning in schools deserves some consideration. Both experiential and project-based learning share fundamental characteristics with other contemporary instructional models that form a transformational teaching framework that defines a broader approach to "understanding the overall instructional environment and how key players in that environment can interact to maximize students' intellectual and personal growth" (Slavich & Zimbardo, 2012). Transformational teaching, rooted in the principles that learning is active and should be student-centered, gives educators a way to reconsider traditional notions of instructional design. Common to transformational teaching models are strategies to facilitate student mastery of knowledge and skills, increased opportunities for collaboration and discovery, and the promotion of positive attitudes about learning.

One of the interesting connections between Gallup's student poll results and transformational teaching is the concept of student hope. Hope is one of the most potent predictors of student success and is measured in Gallup's research in part by students' self-efficacy to solve problems, do quality work, reach goals, and graduate from high school. Gallup's criteria for measuring hope aligns with one of the theoretical underpins of transformational teaching, social cognitive theory, which asserts that people exert intentional influence over events in their lives in accord with their self-efficacy beliefs. Efficacy beliefs influence optimism, resiliency, coping, and persistence. The goal of enhancing student self-efficacy is among aspects of transformational teaching that are associated with promoting positive student attitudes about learning.

Using a transformational teaching framework to think about how schools can help students pursue and reach educational and vocational goals helps to simplify the complexities of how curriculum, instruction, teachers, and students can interact in schools to redefine traditional notions of teaching and learning. It also gives us a way to think about how to design the organizational systems that govern how schools operate and in which teachers do their work. For whatever reason, our student was not engaged at the moment he sent that Tweet, and while no one can be engaged all the time, Gallup's data shows that too many students are engaged too little of the time. As Phil Schlechty writes in Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, how public schools address the problem of student engagement will determine how relevant they remain in the future.

• Donaldson, S., Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Nakamura, J.(Eds) (2011). Applied Positive Psychology: Improving Everyday Life, Schools, Work, Health, and Society. Taylor & Francis, Inc.  
• Gallup (2012). Gallup student poll, Retrieved from http://www.gallupstudentpoll.com/home.aspx
• Rampey, B., Dion, G., & Donahue, P. (2009). NAEP 2008 trends in academic progress (NCES 2009–479). National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.
• Schlechty, P. (2011). Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Wiley, John & Sons, Inc.
• Slavich, G., & Zimbardo, P. (2012). Transformational teaching: Theoretical underpinnings, basic principles, and core methods, Educational Psychology Review, 24(4), 569–608. 

Tomorrow's college students

Empathy in college age students has declined over the last 30 years, according to a University of Michigan study published in Personality and Social Psychology Review. The researchers measured two components of interpersonal sensitivity: empathic concern (a person's feelings of sympathy for the misfortunes of others) and perspective taking (a person's tendency to imagine other people's points of view).

While the Partnership for 21st Century Skills includes critical thinking, problem solving, and information literacy in its framework for college and career readiness, it also includes communication and collaboration, personal and social responsibility, and empathy. Ironically, the UM study found the sharpest declines in empathy have occurred since the 21st century began.

So how do we help students cultivate social skills while also helping them develop the more demonstrable skills they will need to participate economically and politically in today's world?

Several colleagues and I recently visited a Southeast Texas elementary school that has adopted a discovery learning model. Based on a protocol similar to what is commonly called project-based learning (PBL), this school's instructional model is designed to facilitate active student inquiry and collaboration. We saw students questioning, researching, writing, reporting, teaching, creating, and doing much of this by working together.

There is considerable research that suggests that the inquiry protocols that characterize discovery or project-based learning models can help facilitate greater long-term comprehension and application, more opportunities for creativity, greater achievement motivation, enhanced bonding to school, and even better scores on standardized tests. Furthermore, the social benefits of participating in collaborative learning environments are beginning to turn up in the research regarding PBL. A study published in Education 3-13 found that primary students in PBL learning environments not only exhibited improved content knowledge and an enhanced view of experiential learning compared to traditional models, they also developed more positive attitudes about working in collaborative environments and toward peers from different ethnic backgrounds.

I don't know if the UM researchers will replicate their study of empathy in college students in the years to come, but perhaps we should keep in mind that many of today's primary and secondary students will be tomorrow's college students.

• Kaldi, S., Filippatou, D., & Govaris, C. (2011). Project-based learning in primary schools: Effects on pupils’ learning and attitudes. Education 3-13, 39(1), 35–47. doi:10.1080/03004270903179538
• Konrath, S., O'Brien, E., & Hsing, C. (2011). Changes in dispositional empathy in American college students over time: A meta-analysis, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15(2), 180-198

But what about the test?

Would it be right to take the position that creating inquiry-based, authentic learning environments for students is not mutually exclusive to preparing them for standardized tests?

I recently asked this question of Phil Schlechty, author of Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work and founder of the Schlechty Center, a nonprofit organization focused on school transformation. Schlechty's answer was a resounding yes. He said he knows of no place where students are participating in engaging work and not performing better on standardized tests. While Schlechty asserts that standardization in general is an inhibiting factor in education and should be reconsidered, the risk for schools, he said, is not in designing authentic learning environments for students... it's in NOT doing so! He explained that the type of instructional environment that is adequate to ensure students perform on standardized tests is not the same type of environment that will inspire the development of the skills, attitudes, and habits of mind that are required for the 21st century workforce. Furthermore, learning environments dominated by direct instructional approaches and rote memorization are only partially successful in preparing students for standardized tests since these models don't engage many students in school work at all. While traditional instructional methods can be valuable within a larger, student-centered instructional design, they simply aren't enough.

In Engaging Students, Schlechty cites project-based learning (PBL) as an example of an instructional model in which there is potential to design work for students that is more intrinsically motivating and honors the abilities of students not accounted for in designs that rely solely on traditional instructional approaches. Furthermore, research indicates there is great potential for PBL in helping students realize greater long-term retention, comprehension, application, and skill development than traditional approaches.

But what about the test?

In one diverse, rural Texas school district in which the scores on the state's standardized social studies assessment of students in a PBL learning environment were compared to those of students in a traditional environment, students working in a PBL setting performed significantly better than students working in a traditional setting. A higher percentage of PBL students scored at the pass and commended levels for all three years studied than their counterparts in traditional settings. Furthermore, the PBL setting had more positive achievement growth on the state assessment for all sub-populations of students as categorized by the state, including those coded as socioeconomically disadvantaged. Finally, the authors found that students working in PBL settings had higher rates of grade promotion and that PBL better facilitated the realization of College and Career Readiness Standards as measured by the state's accountability system (Summers & Dickinson, 2012).

While the best reasons for creating authentic learning environments for students have nothing to do with standardized testing, standardized testing should not be used as a reason to avoid it.

• Schlechty, P. (2011). Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work, Wiley, John & Sons, Inc.
• Summers, E., & Dickinson, G. (2012). A longitudinal investigation of project-based instruction and student achievement in high school social studies, Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 6(1), 82-103.

What about teacher engagement?

In Todd Whitaker's parable, The Ball, teacher Annie Erickson realizes she has forgotten what is most important to her in her work. She realizes she is not connecting with her students, and she recognizes the students are not invested in the work she creates for them.

"When I first started teaching," she began, "I loved coming to school every day. Every aspect of my work was fun. I especially loved teaching students about life, and I tried to bring that into the  classroom whenever I could. We had some wonderful lessons. 

"But the best part of the day for me didn't take place in the classroom at all. It was recess! It wasn't that I wanted a break from teaching. I just loved going outside with the children to play...I loved interacting with my students."

While participating in a discussion about this book with colleagues recently, I recognized that what Annie was describing in the parable relates to the psychological needs we all have to feel autonomous, competent, and emotionally connected to others in our work. Ms. Erickson was talking about the elements of self-determination that predict engagement, especially the need for relatedness. Ms. Erickson seemed to no longer be engaged. 

While Annie Erickson's description of her problem reflected issues related to all the needs addressed by self-determination theory (the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness), her greatest regret seemed to be what she perceived as a diminishing personal relationship between herself and her students.

A study published this year in the Journal of Educational Psychology sought to understand the influence of relatedness with colleagues and relatedness with students on teacher engagement. The authors, believing that teaching is unique among professions due to its reliance on the establishment of "long-term, meaningful connections with the 'clients' of the work environment" because of the amount time they spend with students each day, conducted three related experiments analyzing teachers' relatedness with their colleagues and teachers' relatedness with their students.

The authors found that autonomy support (climates in which principals encourage teacher empowerment) was positively related to teacher's relatedness with colleagues and students. Furthermore, all three experiments, using three different measures, found relatedness with students was a significant predictor of workplace engagement among teachers and facilitated higher levels of enjoyment and lower levels of anxiety, anger, and emotional exhaustion among teachers. Also, it was the connection with students rather than with colleagues that was more strongly associated with teacher engagement. These results were true among both elementary and secondary teachers.

The idea that teacher engagement can be enhanced by their connections with students is not surprising and is found throughout the research. However, in addition to losing focus on connecting with her students, Annie Erickson expressed frustration with greater demands on her time due to school, district, and state mandates. She had lost a sense of autonomy in her work. The idea that autonomy support is strongly correlated with relatedness between teachers and students is new in the research and, if true, has implications for those designing the various systems of educational workplace environments, since the research also shows that the relationship between teachers and students is the most significant factor in student learning once students enter the school building.

• Klassen, R., Frenzle, A., & Perry, N. (2012). Teachers' relatedness with students: An underemphasized component of teacher' basic psychological needs. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(1), 150-165.
• Whitaker, T. (2010). The Ball. Bloomington, IN: Triple Nickle Press.