TLI Keynote Series: Speaker puts a spotlight on student engagement

Weston Kieschnick believes there’s an engagement crisis in America’s schools. 

For one thing, remote learning got kids used to the freedom of being outside the classroom. For another, kids no longer buy into the notion that education is a vehicle for upper mobility.

“They watched the graduating classes before them do exactly what we asked them to do,” the Technology Leadership Institute Keynote Speaker told an audience of educators recently. “Then they watched those kids come home with massive debts, struggle to find jobs and move back home with their parents.“

The answer to these twin dilemmas, he believes, is student engagement.

“If we’re going to be serious about engaging kids in a world where technology is everywhere,” Mr. Kieschnick said, “we have to be serious about engagement.”

‘How to eat a banana’

A former HS teacher, Mr. Kieschnick has written books about teaching, hosts a podcast on the subject, and even married a teacher. Now he travels the country, observing teachers do what they do. An anecdote makes his point about what he believes engagement looks like.

He recalled walking in at the start of a sixth-grade class and seeing the teacher at the front of the room, holding a banana. Students asked her why, but she didn’t answer, which only spurred more questions. He admits he was intrigued.

  When the bell rang to start the class, she finally spoke: “How fast do you think you can eat this banana?” A name-that-tune-style competition was on as students bid the time down from 60 seconds to one who boasted he could do it in seven seconds. So she set up the timer on her phone as he began to peel the banana and get ready.

“That’s not what I asked,” she told him. “I asked how fast can you eat that entire banana.” He protested that he had to peel it first, but the whole class backed her up regarding her directions. Finally, she relented but stressed the order in which he must peel and eat the banana. 

“So we can all agree, order matters,” Kieschnick recalled her saying. “And that’s how she starts her lesson on order of operations that day. That’s a heck of a lesson.”

Instead of the traditional introduction where the teacher tells the class what they’re going to learn that day, she drew her students in by engaging them.

‘The fun teacher’

Engagement and fun are not synonyms, Mr. Kieschnick warned, and he’s not interested in helping anyone be “the fun teacher.” Engagement, rather, is curiosity, participation and the desire to persevere. 

The perceived difficulty of a task is in an inverse relationship with a child’s desire to participate, he said. Kids aren’t afraid of failure. They’re afraid of humiliation. Curiosity is a prerequisite to overcoming that. Without engagement, we squash that curiosity, he said.

Surveys show that most teachers believe they are engaging. Students disagree, though, especially as they get older. There are plenty of possible reasons: outside interests, increasing difficulty, student focus. He adds relationships and smartphones to the list.

Student engagement is a function of students’ disposition and teachers’ methodology, he said. 

‘More engaging than a window’

As an illustration of how old this equation is, he showed his audience a photo of a school building with no external windows and a classroom with desks in rows. The advent of Air Conditioning made schools expensive both to heat and to cool. At the same time researchers noted disengaged kids often stared out classroom windows. 

Put the two together, and that led to windowless schools, of which many today remain. But windows weren’t the problem, Mr. Kieschnick said.

“If you can't be more engaging than a window, we have to have a different conversation,” he said.

Rather than investing in people, we throw external solutions at problems, he maintained. A similar phenomenon is happening today with technology, but technology will not solve the engagement problem, he said, adding, “You all know this.”

Engagement, he posited, is formulaic. Just as there is a formula to writing a pop song or a hit movie or a funny joke, there is a formula to engaging students. 

Clear answers aren’t always provided when teachers are told to “be more engaging,” he said, so he came up with a formula: The ATLAS Model. The acronym stands for Attention, Transition, Lesson, Activity, Summation.

Educators have to be serious about engagement, Mr. Kieschnick said.

“The feeling kids feel when they walk through our doors can’t be boredom,” he said, “and the feeling kids feel when they leave cannot be failure. If those are the two prevailing emotions, they’ll forget everything that happens in between.”

Weston Kieschnick is an award-winning educator, best-selling author, TEDx speaker, coach, husband, and father. He is the author of The Educator’s ATLAS, Bold School, Breaking Bold, co-author of The Learning Transformation: A Guide to Blended Learning for Administrators and the creator and host of Teaching Keating; one of the most downloaded podcasts for educators and parents on iTunes. Weston has worked in collaboration with innovative tech and publishing companies (Google, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Apple) to redefine teaching and learning in the digital age. As such, he’s advised educators from every state in the U.S. and more than 30 countries around the world.