Middle School Reaching and Engaging All Learners
Reaching and Engaging All Learners
Every middle and high school faces the challenges of reducing failure and drop out rates and closing the achievement gap among different groups of students. A long line of research explores disengagement as a precursor to dropping out (Appleton, Christenson, and Furlong 2008; Finn 1989). The dissonance created by the pressures of standards-based instruction and the desire to make learning personally relevant is all too real for today’s secondary teachers. Thus, the need to deepen teachers’ understanding that engagement is fundamental to learning and student achievement has become a critical focus in our middle and high schools.
Deeper engagement in learning fosters student attitudes and feelings that increase motivation, effort, persistence, and product quality. Reaching and Engaging All Learners has a singular aim of supporting middle and high school teachers to use research-based instructional strategies and classroom practices, protocols and practices that emphasize three critical components of student engagement in learning:
• Cognitive, Intellectual, Academic Engagement;
• Social, Behavioral, and Participatory Engagement; and
• Emotional Engagement.
How can Reaching and Engaging All Learners help my school?
These services can support an entire faculty, grade level teams, a cadre of new or untenured teachers, or specific departments to institutionalize a set of strategies and practices that that will reach and engage all learners -from the high achiever who is disengaged and compliant to the low performing student who feels disconnected and unmotivated. Participants will explore teacher behaviors, classroom structures, and learning strategies that ramp up engagement for all learners. As a result of our services, middle and high school teachers will:
• Learn characteristics of five kinds of adolescent learners and the factors that influence their capacity to learn
• Explore six conditions of engagement and their relationship to greater academic achievement
• Build a high performing community of learners who can engage effectively and efficiently in whole group, small group, and independent student work
• Align standards-based content and instruction with personalized, student-centered learning
• Utilize the “workshop” model, more effective pacing, and a “bookended” approach to weekly planning that increases students’ attention, effort, and ownership of learning
• Incorporate formative assessment and personal conferencing into daily instruction, two strategies proven to produce the greatest gains in academic achievement
• Embed targeted academic learning supports and intervention into daily practice
• Build relational trust through personalizing relationships and effective teacher talk
• Increase personal interest and engagement through student voice, choice, and differentiated assignments and products
• Increase situational interest and engagement through strategies that “game up” and problematize the curriculum
How will students benefit from Reaching and Engaging All Learners?
When teachers consistently use engaging instructional strategies and classroom practices, students are able to:
• Take more responsibility for their own learning and record and assess their progress
• Develop better habits of learning that increase personal and social efficacy, self-discipline, and group participation skills
• Sustain effort to accurately process information and complete challenging work
• Assess how course work links to personal learning goals and their future aspirations
• Make connections between effort and achievement
• Feel a sense of pride, competence, satisfaction and enjoyment related to academic achievement
What services come with Reaching and Engaging All Learners?
Full implementation includes five days of training plus classroom coaching, collaboration and consultation with the principal, instructional coaches and key academic leaders. ESR can also customize Reaching and Engaging All Learners to meet the needs, interests, and constraints of individual schools, districts, and new teacher partners. ESR also provides assessment tools to evaluate student, faculty, and programmatic outcomes.
To download a five-day Reaching and Engaging All Learners agenda (PDF), click here.
To download Reaching and Engaging All Learners goals (PDF), click here.
What materials do teachers receive?
All participants will receive Making Learning REAL: Reaching and Engaging All Learners. The book is organized around seven core practices that increase engagement in learning, including a set of readings that link theory and research to each of the core practices.
Why work with ESR?
ESR has been a part of the change process in public schools nationwide since the early 1980s. ESR has been a voice for change in America’s education system—a voice that says we must create the safe, respectful, and productive learning environments that all young people deserve. ESR has a proven track record of working with middle and high schools and those districts supporting them, offering practical consultation, training, coaching, and resources through a wide variety of programming. ESR program consultants are former teachers or administrators who have extensive experience supporting educators in their efforts to improve school climate and culture and to transform teacher practice.
To download a flier (PDF) to share with your colleagues, click here.
To schedule Reaching and Engaging All Learners Professional Development please, call us today toll free at 800.370.2515 ext 19, or fill out the form below to have us contact you about a customized quotation for our services.
