Copy of November 5th PL: ATLAS Engagement

With your subject-alike, grade-alike team, be thinking of a standard or element you’ll be teaching before the end of the semester that is not your favorite thing to teach.

November 5, 2024

Welcome to Engagement By Design

“Engagement is the product of active learning and motivation. It is the product rather than the sum because it will not occur if either element is missing.”

—Dr. Elizabeth Barkley

• The goal is not to be “Driving” every day. There will be times when you need students to simply participate.
• It is a reasonable goal to strive to be on the right side of the continuum every day.
• What strategies might you use to plan a lesson that is cognitively engaging (per the continuum) without necessarily being fun?
• What un-fun standards could benefit from intentional engagement?

A few notes about this continuum:

Today we will be using standard 1.4 from the Career Competencies for the career clusters/pathway: Model work readiness traits required for success in the workplace including integrity, honesty, accountability, punctuality, time management, and respect for diversity.

Use this link to open the planning document: tinyurl.com/yeymxxhy

Engagement does not equal fun. Engagement requires curiosity, participation, and a desire to persevere. Curiosity is a prerequisite to engagement.

—Weston Kieschnick

The ATLAS Protocol

There is a formula for engagement that we can all use!

• Attention
• Transition
• Lesson
• Activity
• Summation

Get ready for a Design Sprint!

You won’t plan every detail today, but you will have a great outline for an engaging lesson!

Step 1: Attention

Using a specific strategy to grab students’ attention is essential.

• Enrolling Questions: Questions that are personal and relevant to the student, and that allow them to connect the learning to themselves or their world.
• Stories: Tell stories that will link to the content and can easily transition into the day’s lesson.
• Games/Challenges: Keep them short; the goal is to capture (or recapture) students’ attention, not to replace a lesson. The game should connect to the content.
• Videos/GIFs/Pictures: Need to connect (however loosely) to the content and resonate with students. .
• Mnemonics: Help to make the key learning memorable. Examples include classics such “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally”, as well as physical movements connected to words and phrases, or songs or rhymes to connect key learning.

The bottom line: It needs to connect to your kids and to the learning!

Enrolling Questions work for every subject!

Your Turn!

Everyone can plan engaging lessons, and there is a formula to make it simpler.

Step 2: Transition

This is not a behavioral transition. This transitions between prior knowledge and new learning. Think of the transition as a distilled version of the day’s lesson, or a mantra for the key concept from that day. Like a mantra, it should be repeated throughout the lesson, and students should say it out loud. Examples might include:

• Math: “Order Matters” (when teaching Order of Operations)
• Science: “Genotype is in the DNA, phenotype is what you can see” or “All living things are made up of cells.” (Life science)
• Social Studies: “In democracies, people choose their leaders” or “The Civil War was fought for many reasons, but they all lead back to slavery.”
• ELA: “Pronouns replace nouns in order to avoid repetition.”

Everyone can plan engaging lessons, and there is a formula to make it simpler.

Teacher Practice

Step 3: Lesson

• Forgetting is an important part of being human. It allows us to prioritize information and make decisions based on what we deem important. Our role as teachers is to make sure that we convey to students what is worth remembering.
• This means that we must prioritize essential standards and pieces of information by:
• Reiterating important information in several ways (audio, visual, lecture, reading, writing, etc.)
• Repeating key words and phrases and having students say them out loud
• Asking questions that refer back to key information and concepts
• Giving students time to think and process important information
• Lecture can be useful, but it should be kept under 15 minutes. At the very least, students need to do something every 10-15 minutes before you begin lecturing again.

Your Turn

Everyone can plan engaging lessons, and there is a formula to make it simpler.

Identify the following: What is most essential in your lesson Where you can break to have students do something with their new knowledge

• Some examples of low-prep activities include:
• Concept mapping
• Think-pair-share or turn & talk (students must be taught the structures, or else they’re just chatting)
• Quick writes
• Close reads
• Jigsaw
• Guided practice

Step 4: Activity

• As long as you only want students to be able to hit the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy (“Remember” and “Understand”) then listening may be enough. If you want them to be able to do the rest (“Apply”, “Analyze”, “Evaluate”, and “Create”) then they must do something.

Your Turn

Everyone can plan engaging lessons, and there is a formula to make it simpler.

Which of these would apply? Do you have another, better idea?

• Concept mapping
• Think-pair-share or turn & talk (must be taught the structures or they’re just chatting)
• Quick writes
• Close reads
• Jigsaw
• Guided practice

Step 5: Summation

In the summation phase of a lesson, there are three goals:

1. Reiterate the relevance of what students just learned to their lives outside the classroom. This makes the learning relevant.
2. Tie the learning they have just done to a positive emotion. This is best done demonstrating to them what they knew at the beginning of class and what they know now.
3. Reveal what comes next. Simply put, preview the next learning.

Your Turn

Everyone can plan engaging lessons, and there is a formula to make it simpler.

The process is:

• Reiterate the most relevant (essential) information
• Help them reflect on what they learned. This could be done with an informal formative, such as:
• Exit ticket
• “Write the three most important things you learned”
• Class discussion
• Self-assessment/confidence rating on essential information
• Preview what comes next

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