Why it Matters

As teachers, we all want to create powerful learning for our students.  Even so, most of us must accept tests as part of our teaching and students’ learning reality.   The good news is that there is no trade-off between providing students with rich, powerful learning and making sure students are prepared for tests.  In a large-scale study conducted in Chicago public schools, researchers found that the best preparation for tests, even tests of knowledge, is the regular engagement in learning opportunities that focus on developing understanding, are connected to student’s life, have meaning for students, stress application, and involve communication of one’s thinking and expression of one’s ideas in the language of the disciplines (10).

What constitutes powerful learning?  Too be sure, there are lots of qualities and ingredients we might consider, but in examining principle #9, we will focus on the central element of opportunities.  The kinds of opportunities we create for our students are the prime vehicles for their learning.  Walter Doyle (2) has said, “Students will learn what a task leads them to do, that is, they will acquire information and operations that are necessary to accomplish the tasks they encounter.” Richard Elmore and Elizabeth City distill Doyle’s statement further into one of the core principles of Instructional Rounds by stating simply, “The task predicts performance” (1). Agreeing with these sentiments, Fred Newmann concludes that we need to focus on the “actual intellectual demands” placed on students (11).  Powerful learning opportunities have four key components (13):  novel application, meaningful inquiry, effective communication, and perceived worth (see Exhibit 1).  Furthermore, when the opportunities teachers create have these components, we find that they both engage and empower students as well as produce deep learning (14).

Of course, we always want our students to be engaged.  Engaged students learn more (5).  While many factors go into creating the conditions for engagement in the classroom (6), when it comes to the opportunities we are creating, it is useful to consider three specific types of engagement: engagement with others, engagement with ideas, and engagement in action (13). In engaging with others, we recognize that learning unfolds in the company of others and is a social endeavor. We learn in, from, and with groups. The group supports our learning as well as challenges it, allowing us to reach higher levels of performance. At the same time, learning demands a personal engagement with ideas. Whereas we might be able to receive new information passively, building understanding is an active process that involves digging in and making sense. We bring ourselves to the learning moment. Sometimes this is identified as cognitive engagement, to distinguish it from mere engagement in activity (3). It is cognitive engagement with ideas that leads to learning. Exploring meaningful and important concepts that are connected to the world often means students want to take action. Providing opportunities and structures for them to do so encourages students’ agency and power while making the learning relevant. 

It may be tempting to blame students for their lack of engagement. After all, it is their behavior (or lack thereof) that we are noticing. However, research by David Shernoff found that 75% of the variation in student engagement was attributable to differences in the classroom learning context while only 25% could be explained by students’ own background characteristics (14). Furthermore, Shernoff and colleagues found that involving high school students in thinking led to greater levels of student reported engagement in classes (15). These findings mirror those of other researchers assessing urban middle school students’ perceptions of their teachers. When teachers engaged students in independent thinking, students recognized this as useful to their development of understanding and autonomy as learners (16). The importance of deep engagement and thinking opportunities for all students was also a common theme among the teachers Mehta and Fine studied in their dive into deep learning (7). They found that teachers who promoted deep learning viewed thinking and engagement as a necessary part of learning and as something all students were capable of. This was in contrast to those teachers who failed to engage students in deep learning consistently. These teachers were more likely to view understanding, thinking, and engagement beyond the reach of their students.  

What does it mean to empower our students?  Once again, this is a broad concept that includes development of student agency, self-efficacy, self-regulation, voice, identity, independence, and initiative among other things. One way to bring in all these elements is to define empowerment as supporting our students to find their place in the world. As with engagement, many factors go into creating the conditions for empowerment, when it comes to the opportunities we are creating  authenticity, connected, identity, and originality.

It's hard to feel empowered when you're just learning for a test, when all you were asked to do is reproduce answers, content, knowledge, or procedures that you have been shown. Moving beyond merely reproductive tasks to those that require an original response allows students to find their voice, share their insights, and show their new understanding (2,7). Furthermore, empowering students requires us to move beyond merely teaching about a subject.  We need to engage students authentically in the disciplines, focusing on the processes, the ways of thinking, and the ways of uncovering new knowledge and understanding in various fields (4,11). When we do so, we encourage the development of identity (8,7). Students come to see themselves as mathematicians, as scientist, as historians, as artist, as writers. In short, they learn to view themselves as powerful thinkers in learners able to create new knowledge and build new understanding in the varied endeavors in which they engage. Finally, when the opportunities we create are connected to who student are as individuals, connected to the community in which they live, and allow them to stretch into the world beyond, the learning that is done no longer sits outside of them but resides within them (6).

What It Looks and Sounds Like

Of course, there is no one way that promoting powerful learning opportunities will look and sound. There is ample room for individuals to add their own creativity and stamp on things. The list below is a sampling of ideas that might be useful to advance your practice.

• Create tasks, projects, and units of instruction that will engage students in novel application, meaningful inquiry, effective communication, and which have perceived worth to the students (see Exhibit 1).

• Use the “Head + Heart = Hustle” lesson activity to find out what is personally meaningful for students (or teachers or parents). For younger children, drawing is a means by which they can express what they know as well as what they want to know. Pay attention to what they verbalize as well.

• Engage students in setting and evaluating their own learning goals.

• Identify an audience for students’ learning beyond just you as a teacher. How might your students’ learning find an audience within the classroom, beyond the classroom, and beyond the school?

• Ensure learning is authentic to the discipline, that is, students are engaged in the processes of thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and knowledge creation that people in the discipline actually engage in as opposed to merely learning about the subject as an outsider.

• Have students teach, explain, model, show, demonstrate their new learning to others.

• Use project-or problem based learning to provide a context for student learning and allow them to develop their skills in context. Skills developed in this way are easier to retain and apply.

• Involve students in the co-construction of the curriculum. This might mean bringing in students voices, interests, and questions to help shape a unit built more or inquiry than delivery of information. It might also take the form of attending to the clues found in students conversations and actions with regards to their interests and potential questions.

• Focus instruction around generative topics. These are topics that are central to the discipline or domain under study, relatable and interesting to students, and pique the interest and curiosity of the teacher as well.

• Use of discrepant events, “strange but true” facts, disequilibrium, or instances of perplexity to create novelty in the science or math classroom. This increases situational interest that increases student engagement and use of deep learning strategies to resolve.

• Find opportunities and occasions for students to set their own directions and learning path to investigate something they want to understand and explore.

• Use an investigative Case Based Learning (ICBL) approach to allow students to direct their own learning. Cases provide a meaningful context for learning, with a memorable anchoring experience on which to situate further learning. ICBL involves three phases – problem posing, problem solving and peer persuasion.

• Have students generate their own analogies, metaphors, and similes to explain the concepts and ideas they are seeking to understand. Metaphorical thinking make new information more concrete and easier to imagine. When students generate their own analogies or metaphors, they are able to link the new material to what is personally relevant to them. Have students identify limitations of the metaphors as well.

• Engage students in taking action by finding opportunities for students to take what they are learning beyond the classroom to make a difference in the world as advocates and/or change agents.

• Attend to the issue of transfer directly rather than assuming it will just happening by employing the strategies of bridging and hugging.

Reflecting on Your Teaching

The questions below are meant to push your thinking beyond where you are currently. Perhaps they might even make you a bit uncomfortable. Pick a question or questions below that will help you better understand the effects of your actions, critically reflect on them, provoke additional questions, and/or help you think about future actions and possibilities when it comes to creating powerful learning opportunities that will engage and empower your students. If you find yourself merely explaining what you currently are doing, chances are you might be reporting more than reflecting, Select another question prompt that might take you deeper.

• How might you help students to do a better job of productively engaging with others in your classroom? What skills or structures might you need to help them work on to do this more effectively?

• Looking ahead in your curriculum, where might there opportunities for your students to engage in action? What might these look like?

• What are the big ideas you want students to engage in this year? Why are these important to you? To the discipline? How will you help your students to see them as important?

• Where, when and how are you currently allowing for student voice in the shaping of their learning in your classroom or at your school? Do you think your students would view these as significant opportunities to shape and direct their learning? How might they be further enhanced?

• How can I tell if my students are developing the identity of a mathematician, scientist, artist, critic, writer (or whatever applicable identity) in my classroom? Where am I noticing it? Where might I look? What might I do to move it along?

• What is a past assignment I gave or lesson I taught in which students’ responses were largely reproductive? How might I bump that up so that it encouraged, allowed, and supported more of an original response from students?

• Where might I make a lesson or unit more connected to the students’ lives and our community?

• Where and how might I take my students learning beyond the classroom?

• How am I engaging my students in the authentic process of people in my discipline? What are these processes? Do my students see these processes a key part of what they are learning in my class?

Using Quick Data to Inform Your Efforts

Analyze a task or project from the perceptive of the students’ “doing.” Read through the task/project and make a list of the verbs that best describe what students will be required to do as they complete the task. Then, rank those verbs in order according to the amount of time students are likely to spend on each. Next, review and rate the tasks/projects in a unit based on the four elements of powerful learning opportunties: Novel Application, Meaningful Inquiry, Effective Communication, Perceived Worth. Click on the image below for further guidance.

Connection to the 8 Cultural Forces

(this section is still being developed)

Opportunities are the prime cultural force implicated by principle #9. In the lessons, activities, and units of instruction we design, we ensue that we embed them with opportunities to engage, to build understanding, to challenge misconceptions, to collaborate. We look for opportunities where we as teachers might step back so that students might step forward and assume greater responsibility for and direction over their learning.

Interactions. In any interaction we have we students, we can either encourage the student’s initiative and control over their learning or we can rescue them by essentially doing the learning and thinking for them, simplifying the task, or providing solutions to their problems. Rescue denies students the opportunity to feel empowered as learners and send the message that adults don’t have faith in them as learners. When we engage students with each other around ideas, we help them to develop rich understanding in a collaborative setting that allows then to explore ideas.

Language. One of the seven language moves is the language of initiative. Through our verbal interactions with students experiencing difficulty, we can convey to students that they are active, decision-making agents in the learning process:  “How are you planning on…” “What are you wondering about?”  “What did you decide about that?” or they can step in and rescue students by making these decisions for them:  “What you need to do next is…”

Time. It does take more time to engage students in rich, powerful learning. However, this is time well spent as it an investment in learning that will stick, learning that will be used, and learning that helps students develop as learners and thinkers.

Expectations. We can’t create effective create learning opportunities that empower our students unless we have an expectation for student empowerment as part of our teaching. When we expect our students to leave our classrooms as more empowered learners, we look for and capitalize on occasions for that happen.

Routines. We use routines that regularly engage students with others, with ideas, and in action. This might include Making Meaning, The 3 Y’s, and The 4 If’s

Modeling. We are models for our students of what engaged and empowered learning might look like. Our interest in and curiosity about the areas we study in our class lay the ground work for engaged learning. Our goal setting, decision making, and initiative provide models of empowerment as a learner.

Environment. If empowerment is helping students to find their place in the world, students learning shouldn’t be confined to the physical confines of the classroom or school. Be envisioning our learning taking place in the world, we help students see a larger context for learning. We also construct environments that are set up for engagement with others, ideas, in action.