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Educators can improve engagement and encourage students to lean into their voice by providing opportunities for them to lead a classroom exercise, education professors say. This could include drawing up a word problem in math, for example, or creating a writing prompt.
Doing this can spur a stronger understanding of concepts for the leading student and more relatable classwork for their peers, but teachers must also be intentional in how they tee up such an assignment, according to experts at Stanford, Harvard and Northwestern.
Denise Clark Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, has done research showing that more than half of students are typically not fully engaged in class.
“They’re going through the motions,” said Pope, who is also co-founder and strategic adviser for Challenge Success, a student well-being, belonging and engagement nonprofit affiliated with the university.
“Voice and choice are definitely ways to ‘up’ the engagement,” she said. “Students creating questions or problems for other students, yes, it’s definitely one of the ways you can build voice and choice.”
Pope said voice and choice could boost engagement, because students might focus on trends in popular culture or use language common to their peers. “Help them think about … what goes into creating a good prompt, or what goes into creating a good problem,” she said. “That becomes a lesson in and of itself.”
Research supports the idea that cultural or contextual relevance to students’ everyday lives and experiences will positively impact engagement and, thus, learning, said Gretchen Brion-Meisels, senior lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
“Instead of the topic being, ‘We’re going to learn how to divide fractions,’ the topic is something that is actually a real-world question they have that requires them to understand fractions,” she says. “There’s reason to believe that having them participate in the high-quality production of questions for their peers could be beneficial.”
How to help students lead an assignment
To lead such an exercise, rather than pouring knowledge into students, teachers should help them develop their own ideas, says Paula Hooper, assistant professor of instruction and learning sciences at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy. Hooper witnessed this in action during postdoctoral research in a Boston classroom.
The teacher “would model for the kids, ‘So-and-so went collecting shells with his grandma in Puerto Rico,’” and then introduce a math problem based on that, she said. “She would say to the class, ‘Do you understand Jose’s solution? If you don’t, ask a question.’ ”
In doing so, teachers should not feel pressed to end the discussion as soon as the right answer is reached, if there is one, Hooper said.
“It’s about everybody engaging together to support each other’s ideas, rather than testing to see if somebody has the right idea and then stopping,” she said. “It gives the class agency that we can figure things out together.”
Pope said she’s not convinced student-created assignments are the best way to boost engagement. She expressed the concern that a student might create an assignment that half the class finds unengaging — so a teacher might guide them to a more open-ended prompt.
If the prompt involves “statistics in the Super Bowl, and not everybody is excited about that, you could give them the option to pick your favorite Winter Olympics sport,” Pope said. “The teacher should have some editorial oversight. What if the problem or assignment is not actually getting at the depth or challenge or content that the teacher is trying to get across?”
Brion-Meisels cautions that students writing the problems or prompts need to understand the underlying pedagogy at some level to ensure their peers can understand and answer the question. And teachers’ editorial oversight should include a scan to make sure questions are not unintentionally offensive.
“There’s a place for humor, but make sure the humor doesn’t cross a line,” she said.
