Pillar One
Promoting positive feelings
Students learn from people they like. Teachers practice bringing more of themselves into the room, asking for student feedback, and making lessons feel personal.
Program two
One day on student engagement and motivation
Practical strategies, grounded in research, for classrooms competing with phones, games, and social media.
+22%
Higher math achievement for engaged students
Gallup, 2019
2.5×
More likely to earn excellent grades
Gallup, 2018
74% → 33%
Engagement decline, 5th grade to high school
Gallup, 2018
+20%
Achievement gain from this category of strategies
Marzano, 2003
Why this training
Why engagement, why now
A student who does not connect with the lesson stops trying. Teachers also compete with every app and game on every device. Randomization, storytelling, and attention-grabbers help them win that competition and make participation the norm.
Two more problems follow. Lessons that feel irrelevant are forgotten, so teachers learn to tie content to students' lives. Test pressure makes students anxious, so dynamic tension strategies teach them to perform under real conditions.
Research
"Focusing on students' social-emotional development had the largest contribution to the effectiveness of classroom management strategies."
Korpershoek et al. (2016). Review of Educational Research, Vol. 86, No. 3.
The five pillars
How the engagement system works
The training moves through five pillars, modeling each one and giving teachers time to practice.
1. Positive Feelings
2. Attention & Interest
3. Connectedness
4. Self-Efficacy
5. Sharing Best Practices
Pillar Two
Promoting attention and interest
Randomization techniques keep every student ready to answer. Teachers also practice questioning and storytelling as tools for capturing attention.
Pillar Three
Promoting connectedness and relevance
Brainstorming, synectics, and fresh visual approaches help students attach new ideas to what they already care about. That attachment is what makes learning last.
Pillar Four
Promoting self-efficacy
The goal of education is for students to learn how they learn best. Dynamic tension strategies and practice under pressure help them perform in real conditions and become resilient learners.
Pillar Five
Sharing best practices
Every good lesson should be a shared lesson. Teachers learn the matrix method for recording and trading their most engaging lessons.
Agenda
A typical engagement training day
On your campus, full-day or half-day, set around your calendar.
Teachers start at 8:30 AM by connecting engagement strategies to motivation and learning, then move through the pillars, positive feelings, movement, randomization, and storytelling before 12:00 PM.
Lunch is from 12:00 to 1:00 PM. Between 1:00 and 3:30 PM, teachers learn to make lessons meaningful and relevant, guide personal connections, use visual images in new ways, build self-efficacy, and prepare students to respond under pressure.
One day for every teacher
Ask Jessica Coles-Black for a quote and choose a date.