Student engagement - been there, done that
“Student engagement? We’re already doing that. We’re all set.”
I hear this often when talking with school leaders from more affluent, high-opportunity schools where they have the resources to innovate. The department head or the curriculum coordinator of the school is driven, hiring a group of teachers who are collaborative, and creates digital spaces using Google docs and folder sharing services to collaborate on lesson plan documents. They are able to schedule teacher planning time appropriately to have built-in collaboration time. They’re already using student choice in the classroom through project-based learning approaches and assessment choice, and they talk about how their classes are a “hive of different activities” compared with traditional classrooms. They haven’t committed to a textbook, all their curriculum is created in-house with input from subject-matter experts to which they have access.
It really is wonderful that students are benefiting from their great work, and getting exceptional educational experiences. These schools provide the perfect environment for even more opportunity. What I’ve noticed is that the collaboration and shared educating practices are specific to one department of the entire school, and that can limit true student-centered educational innovation for the school.
For example, the high school’s Science, English, or Social Studies department may be a maverick in their own school or district, and are able to rehaul curriculum significantly, and quickly. These departments are bringing in teachers who have the time, experience, and education to create engaging lesson plans and reform the syllabus, bring in modern teaching practices that use student choice to complete a determined curriculum. That department is collaborative with the other same-subject teachers, mostly within the same grade, and possibly with some different grade subject teachers.
To improve on these great efforts, the next step is twofold:
Expand teacher collaboration. Let’s have teachers collaborating across districts, even state-wide, or within schools. Teachers should be collaborating across different departments and different grades, aligning complementary learning objectives across subjects and possibly even across grades.
Make student engagement programmatic. We applaud student choice in the classroom and the efforts every school is already making! But, to take student engagement to the next level it must be consistent, adopted by students, and have a feedback mechanism for continuous improvement.
The expected achievement:
What we want to hear about is how school administrators can quantify their engaging curriculum with actionable insight for planning subsequent curriculum investments. Administrators should also be able to see how their student-centered approach applies to activities in the classroom as well as to the planning and progression of the syllabus. They will also no longer see collaboration as a subject-based, siloed knowledge unit, and instead, gain from the numerous benefits of being an interdisciplinary organization. By addressing the above points, administrators would also be applying good practices of meaningful student engagement, including ways to provide students a voice, with concrete implications of their vote.
The Solution
That’s why we created Student Soapbox, a desktop and mobile app built on the Salesforce Education Cloud. It is a tool that drives both collaboration across the teaching community and student engagement. Student Soapbox is an important tool to break away from this siloed approach in the K12 or even Higher Ed space, and drive interdisciplinary collaboration and learning. How? Ask us to show you!