Planning for Engagement

In twenty-five years as a school and district administrator, I saw an incredible variety in teaching quality. That being said, I cannot identify a single pedagogy that is superior to all others. Instead, I have settled on two powerful elements common to all the great teaching I saw. Both elements have everything to do with the lesson planning process. The first was an intentional match between the content and the instructional strategy chosen, and the second was intentional and planful work around student engagement.

High quality instruction is not about abandoning any single practice, or embracing another one. The best teacher I ever saw was quite traditional in his pedagogy. However, he was a fastidious planner and paid a great deal of attention to both pedagogical match and engagement.

Pedagogical match is simply the notion that certain pedagogies lend themselves as more effective for certain pieces of content than other pedagogies. We sometimes refer to these as content-specific pedagogy. The use of content-specific pedagogy means that a teacher has thought deeply about the content and the learning targets and have weighed pedagogical options, choosing the one they feel will be most successful.

I have found engagement to be a more difficult concept to measure. One of the problems is that there are so many different ways to define engagement. I have observed lessons where students were bored to the point of sleeping with their eyes open and the teacher suggesting that they were cognitively engaged. Likewise, I have seen students talking animatedly about nothing remotely related to the lesson and the teacher suggesting that the amount of activity in the classroom meant there was a high degree of engagement.

My compromise, as an administrator, was to look at the teacher’s intentions as evidenced by their planning. The lesson didn’t always pan out as hoped, but good planning worked far more often than poor planning.

I encouraged teachers to think about planning engagement for each student, not for the class, as a whole. Thinking about engaging each student means planning for “student engagement seconds.” Student engagement seconds are the total number of seconds that a teacher plans for students to be verbally and cognitively engaged in the lesson. This calculation intentionally leaves out silent engagement as there are other ways to measure that.

Student engagement seconds can be calculated by multiplying the number of students in the class (say, 30) by the number of minutes in the period (say, 40) and multiplying that by the 60 seconds in a minute. A class with 30 students and 40 minute periods has 72,000 potential student engagement seconds. A high performing teacher would map their lesson by indicating how many kids are planned to be engaged throughout the various parts of a lesson. For example, when a teacher is asking a “whole class” question and getting one answer at a time, one student is verbally engaged out of a possible 30. When the teacher asks their class to engage in a “turn and talk,” 30 students are engaged (as long as they’re talking about what the teacher intended).

In my experience, really good lessons made use of students listening to the teacher, students writing, and students engaged in dialogue. Most teachers dramatically overestimate how much they verbally engage students — they typically suggest they make use of 50,000–60,000 student engagement seconds (out of 72,000). My data showed that this was more along the lines of 2,000–4,000 engagement seconds.

Additionally, contrary to what many might think, the best lessons planned for 18,000–30,000 student engagement seconds. These lessons generally allowed for an element of direct instruction and provision of some content delivery that helps to ensure every student has some ability to participate. But, it also provided for a substantial opportunity for students to engage in some iterative, social learning. 20,000 engagement seconds represents more than 25% of the length of the class period.

The pre-observation conference is a great opportunity to foster some reflection on these issues. Asking a teacher to describe their rationale for choosing the pedagogical strategy they did helps them to clarify their learning targets and what needs to happen to achieve them. Likewise, asking them to calculate how much engagement they planned for and how well it matches their ideal for the lesson allows for the fact that there is no objective ideal, only the ideal for their intent, but holds them accountable to that ideal.

Don’t let anyone tell you that one particular pedagogy is the end-all-be-all. Every pedagogical strategy has its place. Help your teachers understand that the key to being successful with strategies is making a good match between learning targets and pedagogy. Being planful in your strategies and being explicit about engagement will help your staff have the kinds of lessons they hope to have.