Tagged: student engagement


Doing The Invisible Work: The Value of Relational Pedagogy

Take a moment and picture yourself teaching. What comes to mind? Is it a favorite instructional activity, a student’s inspiring essay, or a moment when a student shared something insightful about their lives? Whatever it is, I am sure it stirred up many emotions and memories that you may or may not want to remember. Now I invite you to do the same exercise, but this time, please visualize the invisible teaching you do each day. No one can directly see these actions, yet they are as valuable to student learning as any observable practice. Are you still not sure what I mean?

Invisible teaching practices include the feeling you have of sincere curiosity about your students or the deep sense of support you hold when you notice a student struggling. Even the empathetic mindset you use to plan a lesson or the facial expression you give to a student to show that they matter to you are examples of invisible teaching practices. In my perspective, most of our value as educators comes from these invisible actions, we perform each day with students. Although there is an endless list of invisible work that you can and should do with our students, I want to share a few invisible teaching practices that I found helpful in building community and helping my students succeed in my classroom.

Treat Students as Subjects, Not Objects
In their book, Everybody Matters, Bob Chapman and Raj Sisodia write, “the majority of employees in the United States go home every day feeling that they work for an organization that doesn’t listen to or care about them but instead sees them nearly as functions or objects as a means to the success of the organization” (Pg. 69). Our schools are no different. More often than not, educational institutions’ practices and policies recognize students as objects of a lesson or an outcome of a teacher’s effort rather than a subject responsible for their learning (Freire 1996). In my view, our current educational system operates from the perspective of “knowing is repeating something in authority figure told them” (Felton & Lambert 2020, Pg. 92).

From my perspective, students often view school as a series of transactions of mechanical sense of knowledge and rote skill development and less about learning how to ask more critical questions. When a school treats its students as mere objects, there can be detrimental effects. For one, schools reduce their practices to transactions and evaluation, leaving students to perceive that their teachers don’t value them as individuals but instead see themselves as valuable only when they mimic their teacher’s expertise. Sadly, we teach simple transactions where a student gives the teacher their work in exchange for points or technical feedback due to lack of resources or time. This reductive practice can make students see education as a sterile process of hoop-jumping devoid of meaning or purpose. In other words, they see school only as a game with specific rules to follow.

How Can You Treat Students as Subjects and Not Objects?
In their book Relationship Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, authors Felton and Lambert write that “taking time to ask students what their story is and using the resulting information as a departure point for teaching can create more student-centered classrooms and more reciprocal relationships based on mutual trust” (Pg. 3). When you ask students about their lived experiences, your teaching practice can lead to more authentic and sincere relationships with your students and potentially gain more context about who they are and their learning needs. Even a question such as, “Interesting, what makes you say that?” can make students feel like you value their thinking, experience, and individuality.

Relational teachers, teachers who value their students as learning subjects, see the time with their students as an opportunity to cultivate one of the most basic human needs: belonging. These teachers help students recognize that their thoughts matter and respect and care for each student regardless of their level of proficiency. In a 2014 Gallup Purdue poll of college graduate students, researchers found that if an employed graduate noted they had a teacher who cared about them as a person, they reported higher levels of workplace engagement and a sense of thriving in their well-being.

Further relational teachers see teaching first and foremost as a conversation with students. To teach our students effectively, we should know what they know, what they care about, who they are now, and who they are becoming (Schlosser 2014). Taking time to initiate interaction and listen to what the students are trying to say about themselves while you teach is essential in being more relational in your practice and understanding your students.

Measure the Strength of Relationships in Your Classroom
Whether intentional or not, many educators continue to reduce the perception of the effectiveness of a school to its measurable outputs such as grade distributions, graduation rates, and exam scores. Schools are rated and measured on these metrics. Yet, these same ranking systems exclude measures of connections, the strength of communal bonds, and levels of collective school efficacy since they are difficult to measure. The absence of these critical metrics leaves schools to ignore this valuable phenomenon when evaluating teacher performance and school culture.

Thinking back about my career as a student, my teachers and professors did not measure the strength of relationships, only technical knowledge. They never seemed to care what I felt about the class and their teaching, whether I felt like I belonged or that my feelings mattered. This perspective made me value earning points and grades over building supportive relationships, as well as value being an individual over being a part of a learning community. When schools don’t value and continually measure the strength of the relationships in their classrooms, they may deny students the chance to develop a complete sense of self.

How Can You Measure the Strength of Relationships in Your Classroom?
Once you begin to measure the impact of your relational practices, you are more likely to develop more meaningful relationships with your students that transform their educational trajectories (Espinoza, 2011); as we can measure, we can more easily change. Working within classrooms that prioritize student-to-student relationships may better help students believe in their inherent learning capacity. At my school, where I am assistant principal, we ask our teachers of introductory courses at my high school to emphasize and measure the impact of relationship building, track their instances of peer-to-peer mentoring, and develop active learning pedagogy. (Felton & Lambert, 2020).

We also ask our teachers to use assessment as a vehicle to measure the relationship quality with their classrooms. Our teachers use assessment not solely to evaluate students but also as an opportunity to get to know their students. We call this process: dialogic assessment, and it tends to stimulate student thinking better and drive more conversations which our teachers can use to guide their instruction. Our teachers achieve this by adding questions to their assessments such as “How is the exam going for you right now? Write a few words or details.” or “Did you guess or were you sure when you answered the previous question?” When our teachers began adding questions like these to their assessments, they increased the likelihood that their students saw them as mentors, an invaluable figure in their lives.

Pay Attention to Belonging Cues
Too often, educators unknowingly leave many of our students with uncertainty about if they belong or if they matter. This unintentional and invisible isolation can lead to students believing that school is a solo endeavor, leading to many school issues. Even the tiny implicit signals teachers send to students through comments or body language “can reinforce the internal narrative that they don’t know what they are doing and don’t belong in the classroom. (Felton & Lambert 2021).

A misinterpreted cue can lead to deterioration of performance or relations when there was no deliberate intent to isolate or marginalize. Although these signals are unintentional most of the time, they can still be debilitating for a student and may potentially impede future performance (Bandura 1997). Often, the perception that a student does not know something or is deficient in their ability could be due to the teacher sending cues about a lackluster performance (Bandura 1997). When teachers send deficiency-based cues to their students, they can be ashamed to admit what they do not know; they are confused, uncertain, or struggling.

How Can You Pay Better Attention to Your Belonging Cues?
As educators, we need to send a signal to our students that we genuinely care about their lives and sincerely care about their growth as human beings. You convey that you believe in your students’ abilities to succeed either directly or indirectly through the intentional transfer of content knowledge and skills, or indirectly, through cues such as eye contact, facial expressions, body language, and voice intonation (Felton & Lambert, 2021). The right cues can help students see that you are an ally and not an obstacle to their learning. (Felton & Lambert, 2021).

In his 2018 book The Culture Code, author Daniel Coyle writes that successful groups (businesses and schools alike) had three common attributes among their members:
1. Their members said they felt safe.
2. Their members said they felt connected.
3. Their members said there was a purpose to their work.
Some ideas I suggest to build these three attributes into your teaching practice could be:
1. To make your students feel safer, perhaps inactivate your formative assessment scores. In my experience, it signaled to them that it was acceptable to take risks and even temporarily fail in my class.
2. To make your students feel more connected, pause your entry into the lesson and let the students attempt to make learning independently, even for a few moments. In this way, students can build a personal state of learning that they can connect to my lesson to make sense of the content better.
3. To help your students see more purpose in classwork, consider designing your curriculum around transferable and enduring skills instead of situationally-focused content. When I re-designed my curriculum with a skills-first mindset, my students saw more purpose in the content because they understood they were learning the content to develop a more significant skill with potentially more utility in their lives.

These attributes make members of groups feel like they belong, and the same qualities should be true for your students.

Make Dialogue A Central Part of Your Practice
“When we learn and talk together, we break the notion that our experience of gaining knowledge is private, individualistic, and competitive by choosing in fostering dialogue we engage mutually in the learning partnership” (hooks, 2003). Suppose we are sincere in our devotion to getting to know our students. In that case, we should feel more empowered to ask students about their internal and external experiences throughout the learning process.

However, the societal view of a teacher tends to be as the imparters of wisdom or the possessors of proper knowledge, responsible for each student’s learning. This view leaves many teachers to consider the information in their lessons more valuable than their students’ minds and hearts. In my opinion, this is problematic as it put students in a passive role and places the burden of a student’s learning on the teacher’s shoulders, where it does not primarily belong.

How Can You Make Dialogue a More Prominent Part of Your Practice?
After many years in education, I realized that learning should be the student’s responsibility, and the responsibility of the conditions of learning should be the teachers. To make more sense of this point, I want you to think about a gardener. A gardener is someone who prunes, waters, and tends to the plant but does not tell the plant how to grow–the plant is responsible for growing itself. This gardening process should be the same in the classroom, where students learn how to develop themselves, and the teachers nurture this growth.

I found that students are more than willing to talk about their struggles and deficiencies when I asked a mixture of academic questions and personal questions. For example, I would insert reflective pauses on my assessments where I would ask students, “What new things have you realized after completing the last section of the exam? Or “do you have any questions at this point of the exam?” Asking these questions served several purposes: 1) they signaled to my students that I cared about them as people; that it was acceptable to talk about their experiences and emotions in my classroom, 2) I gathered more context about their answers and thought processes, and 3) I signaled that dialogue was a central part of my classroom.

A strategy that I used to help me use their dialogue as a central focus of my practice was to recite the phrase “Ask, don’t tell?”; meaning “Ask [students about their thinking first], [before] I tell [them advice].” (Sorensen, 2017). It was a mantra of sorts that I would say to myself as I interacted with students or provided feedback; sometimes they had such fantastic insight that they did not even need my advice! Repeating this phrase helped me build the mindset that I should be more of a reactor to student thinking and performances and not merely a deliverer of information or evaluator of their work. I was to act as a supportive presence for students who tried to make meaning, explored new experiences, emotionally worked through setbacks, and faced new challenges.

Closing Thought
As I close this article, I want you again to picture your classroom. However, as the image becomes clearer in your mind, I want you to ask yourself this question, “Am I teaching to my students, or am I teaching with students?” A teacher is likely to have more experience and expertise than their students, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have any. This erroneous assumption leads teachers to believe that their students are empty vessels and are waiting for the teacher to fill their minds with the teacher’s expertise (hooks, 2003). In my experience, it is teaching with students that matters most in education, where teachers create meaning and knowledge with their students. I invite you to think about meaning as an emergent concept resulting from interdependent collaboration, relational pedagogy, and productive discourse. When I did these central practices in my classroom, they transformed my classroom culture, my students’ engagement, and even me as a person.

Bandura, A., Freeman, W. H., & Lightsey, R. (1999). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control.

Chapman, B., & Sisodia, R. (2015). Everybody Matters: The extraordinary power of caring for your people like family. Penguin.

Coyle, D. (2018). The culture code: The secrets of highly successful groups. Bantam.

Espinoza, R. (2011). Pivotal Moments: How Educators Can Put All Students on the Path to College. Harvard Education Press. 8 Story Street First Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.

Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum.

“Great Jobs, Great Lives: The 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index Report,” Gallup and Purdue University, 2014, https://www.gallup.com/file/services/176768/GallupPurdueIndex_Report_2014.pdf.

Hooks, B. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope (Vol. 36). Psychology Press.

Schlosser, J. A. (2014). What would Socrates do?: self-examination, civic engagement, and the politics of philosophy. Cambridge University Press.

Sorensen, M. S. (2017). I HEAR YOU: The surprisingly simple skill behind extraordinary relationships (First Edition.). Utah: Autumn Creek Press.


Connect the Dots

I apologize for using a rather trite metaphor for the title of this blog, particularly since I never really cared for the dot-to-dot pages that would occasionally appear in my coloring books as a child.  I never saw the purpose. I could tell what the picture was going to be and I didn’t need to scour the page to find the next number to make it appear.

As an educator the idea of connecting things has become much more profound to me. Watching the students in my English classes make connections between what we were reading and what was happening in the world were some of my favorite teacher moments. The flip side of that was also enlightening to me. As a principal of a school with many different academic support programs for students I remember a conversation with a student who told me that she didn’t “do reading” when she went to a classroom to work with a teacher who was supporting English Learners, even though I had just been in that room and seen a lesson that was explicitly planned to connect to the general education classroom. The student didn’t see the connection and that was the problem. Read more


Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About! Using Academic Conversations to Assess Student Understanding

“Something to Talk About,” recorded by Bonnie Raitt in 1990, happens to be one of my favorite songs. While listening to it the other day, I began to think about the lyrics in a different context: meaningful assessment of student conversations. Tapping into student discourse is one of the most informative means of examining student thinking, particularly with students who might be culturally or language diverse. According to Zaretta Hammond, “One of the most important tools for a culturally responsive teacher is instructional conversation. The ability to form, express and exchange of ideas are best taught through dialogue, questioning, and the sharing of ideas.” (Hammond, 2015, p.149).

There is seemingly vast potential for educators to gather authentic evidence through the observation of academic conversations. Teachers can gain valuable insights into their students’ conceptual understanding and the language skills they demonstrate in real-time, authentic conversations. But as I reflect on the various assessment practices that I typically observe, I wonder if we are capitalizing on this powerful source of information? Are educators assessing the quality of rigorous academic conversations and providing support when needed to enhance that quality? Read more


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Making a Comeback: Reclaiming Assessment as a Motivator in your Classroom

I appreciate how patient my daughter is with me when I ask her questions about school. Fortunately, she does not yet have an awareness that, when her friends get home from school, they likely do not have to respond to the same questions of, “How did you get to show your teacher what you know today?” or “Where did you have choice in your work today?” Admittedly, typing this makes me smile, as I realize I should probably simmer down with my questioning a bit. Yet I learn so much about the experiences she is having in school as they relate to her ability to communicate what she can do with the content and skills she is being taught. And that knowledge is very important to me. Read more


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How Learning Targets Empower Students (and Help Me, Too)

This guest post is written by Shannon Finnegan, a social studies teacher at Hopkins High School in Minnesota.

Throughout my teaching career, I have taught in three vastly different schools: a suburban high school, an inner city 6–12 school, and an alternative high school. In these different settings, I have found that there are certain educational buzzwords and catchphrases that will provoke groans and eye rolls on teacher professional development days regardless of where you work. Words such as differentiation, backwards planning, and standards-based grading are just a few of the phrases that will make teachers cringe on inservice days. When I began teaching at a small school in Brooklyn, New York, I came to loathe one phrase in particular: learning targets. Read more


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The Power of Common Formative Assessments

Many researchers have identified formative assessment as one of the more powerful practices to raise student achievement (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Hattie, 2009). When speaking of its power, we often compare formative assessment to summative assessment using metaphorical expressions. For example, formative assessment is like “tasting the soup before serving one’s guests,” or the “practice before the big game.” Others have described formative assessment as the rehearsal before the performance, or the “check-up before the autopsy.” Read more


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Simply Deep: Designing Authentic Assessments that are Meaningful and Relevant

“Being able to recall scientific concepts, identify historical events, or memorize mathematics facts and algorithms, while acutely impressive, is no longer sufficient to prepare students for the challenging world they will face. Identifying characters, theme, and symbolism used to be the focus of education, and it was enough. In the past, learners would occasionally have opportunities to collaborate, communicate, critically think, and creatively problem solve, but that was the means, not the end. Read more


Calling the Audible: Be the Playmaker for Instructional Agility

Here we are again. Back-to-school season! For some students, this a highly anticipated time of year. Who are my new teachers? Will I know anyone in my class? When is recess? Where will I sit in the cafeteria? How will I remember my locker combination?

I absolutely love the rejuvenation and anticipation of a new school year. But I’ll admit. My geeky “director of research, assessment, and accountability” self also has a bit of sporty spice side. Fall brings out that sporty spice with the anticipation of another favorite season: football. Yup, pigskin. Love it. Plan my Sundays around it. And because I also have the common ailment known as “everything-always-connects-back-to-education,” I started making some connections with my current conversations at work as I was watching a preseason game this year. This connection hit me with a force as strong as a 300-pound tackle sacking a quarterback.

Teachers are playmakers. Read more


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A Beautiful Noise: Productive Student Talk Time

It’s a beautiful noise
And it’s a sound that I love
And it makes me feel good
—Neil Diamond

I’ve been working a lot lately with educators in developing curricular units of study and the corresponding assessments while talking about the learning skills necessary for students to experience success. As an aside, I’ve deliberately not used the label “21st Century” in front of “learning skills” as I think we all understand in 2017 that we are in the 21st century. It’s lost its cache or novelty. Read more


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Start Your Year by Building a Learning Partnership with Your Students

It’s here. The start of the school year—that crucial time when educators excitedly “set the stage” with their students and jumpstart their vision for a successful learning experience in their class. It’s an official opportunity to initiate a strong learning partnership with students that empowers them to grow in their independence and empowerment as learners (Popham, 2011). Sounds good, right? Yet, if we think about the typical approach to setting the stage at the beginning of the year, it often falls short of establishing a strong foundation for that partnership. Read more