Engagement

Working in schools can be demanding. More is expected of us than ever before and we are often expected to do MORE, with LESS. Increases in accountability, the accelerating pace of change, high expectations from busy working parents and the challenges of working with people all add to life in a busy school. It is therefore not surprising that staff morale can suffer. This leads to a lower sense of job satisfaction. However, according to Herzberg, “the factors that lead to producing job satisfaction (and motivation) are separate and distinct from the factors that lead to job dissatisfaction.” Harvard Business Review, Sept 2007 According to Herzberg the opposite of job satisfaction is NOT job dissatisfaction but, rather, NO job satisfaction.…

Feeling inundated and overwhelmed by the feeling of constant change? You aren’t alone! Staff in many schools feel that their world is in a constant state of flux and to an extent they are right! Much HAS changed, IS changing and WILL continue to change in schools. Increased accountability, tightening budgets, increasing expectations, changing curriculum, new systems and the demands of fast paced technology developments all contribute to the unsettled feeling of change. It is no wonder that many people who work in schools are experiencing what I call change fatigue. Leadership guru Ken Blanchard’s Predictable Stages of Concern are helpful in reflecting on and understanding our mindset when faced with yet another change initiative. Just like Kubler-Ross argues that…

The well documented research by Stamford University on the ability of four year olds to delay their gratification is commonly referred to as the Marshmallow Test. The children were given the choice of immediately eating a marshmallow or if they could wait and resist the temptation to eat the marshmallow, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Of the 600 children tested, only 200 children were able to delay their gratification and therefore receive the reward. Stamford reported a high correlation between this ability and future success. This importance of persistence, focusing on a task and “doing the work” is not likely to be a surprise to most educators. This is consistent with the key messages in Dr Carol…

– This article is adapted from an article written by Sal Khan (Khan Academy) Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones. What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or…

Student misbehaviour can certainly sabotage our teaching and increase our stress level. Students are far more likely to misbehave when they don’t see the relevance of the school work they are being asked to do. Some of the most common questions older students ask are, “Why are we doing this?”, “Why are we learning this?”, “How am I going to use this in my life?” and “What’s the point of doing this?” It’s tempting for a busy teacher to brush off these types of questions. But they are questions that are worth taking the time to answer. Explaining why you have planned a particular activity and making it relevant to the students helps to engage them. These explanations help make…

Educators have long been aware of self-fulfilling prophecies. Recent research on brain activity from Dr Tali Sharot’s book ‘The Optimism Bias’, clearly illustrates why our expectations of our students are so important. The problem with pessimistic expectations, such as those of the clinically depressed, is that they have the power to alter the future; negative expectations shape outcomes in a negative way. How do expectations change reality? To answer this question my colleague, cognitive neuroscientist Sara Bengtsson, devised an experiment in which she manipulated positive and negative expectations of students while their brains were scanned and tested their performance on cognitive tasks. To induce expectations of success, she primed college students with words such as smart, intelligent and clever just…

It’s not surprising that one of the most consistent findings in educational research demonstrates that the more times students spend engaged, the more they learn (Gettinger & Ball, 2007). It also won’t surprise that the more engaged students are, the less stressful it is. Instead of trying to ‘manage’ students to comply, engaged students are on-task and ‘in the zone’. As they are interested and actively involved in the learning experience they don’t require ‘management’. This lowers the demands on the teacher and reduces our stress level. Reflecting on the level of student engagement that exists in your classrooms is worthwhile. Schlechty (2002) defines five levels of student engagement: Authentic Engagement—students are immersed in work that has clear meaning and…