Engaging Students
Practical Strategies For Raising Achievement
The Seven Engagement Factors
In his book, Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind, Eric Jenson talks about the seven engagement factors. These factors correlate with student engagement and they are strongly ties to SES.
- Health and Nutrition - Physical, mental, and emotional health support engagement and learning.
- Vocabulary - A child's vocabulary is part of his or her brain's toolkit for learning, memory, and cognition. Words help children represent, manipulate, and reframe information.
- Effort and Energy - Effort matters a great deal in learning. The difference is in the teaching.
- Mind-Set - When students have positive attitudes about their own learning capacity, and when teachers focus on growth and change rather than on having students reach arbitrary milestones, student engagement increases.
- Cognitive Capacity - This is highly complex. A brain that is susceptible to adverse environmental effects is equally susceptible to positive and enriching effects. Students with low cognitive capacity are ripe for an engaging teacher who is willing to teach the core cognitive skills that lead to academic success.
- Relationships - All children need reliable, positive adults in their lives.
- Stress Level - Stress can be defined as the body's response to the perception of loss of control from an adverse situation or person. Small amounts of stress are healthy. Acute stress is severe or intense stress resulting from exposure to trauma as abuse or violence. Chronic stress is high stress sustained over time.
I will be sharing with you powerful engagement strategies that will help you nurture a positive climate, build cognitive capacity, encourage greater effort, build understanding and activate energy.
This will not be easy!!! This process requires your to upgrade your repertoire, roll up your sleeves, get a fiercely positive attitude, and charge ahead into your job of teaching. You can make a difference in the live of the students in your care at Liberty Elementary School.