After spending the last month reading blogs and responses to blogs about the Marzano quote about engagement, I feel compelled to write my own blog in response.
For those who missed it, here is the tweet from Marzano, or people paid by Marzano to manage his twitter account.
Engagement is obviously a central aspect of effective teaching. If students are not engaged, there is little, if any, chance that they will learn what is being addressed in class. #studentengagement
From the reading and conversations I have had about this tweet, it appears that there are teachers who believe this tweet is an attack on them as teachers. That they are being blamed for the lack of engagement students exhibit and a student’s failure is a reflection on their ability as a teacher. These comments have expanded to include frustration that Marzano is not a teacher and is telling teachers how to teach, the prescriptive nature of implementation of Marzano’s evaluation system, Marzano’s greedy nature, how most administrators were bad teachers, and, in one long-winded comment chain, arguing about whether or not Elizabeth Warren is part Native American.
This all has me a bit befuddled, which is not a new situation for me, unfortunately.
Are there teachers out there who seriously believe that engagement of students is not directly tied to effective teaching? I have been a teacher and administrator for 28 years and I am here to tell you that teachers most definitely have a direct impact on whether or not students are engaged in the learning in their classrooms. And, ultimately, whether or not those students are able to implement that learning.
Let me tell you what I have seen in my career. I began my career in special education teaching alternative high school students with significant behaviors and then taught middle school behavior disorder in an urban school district and then became the Behavior Interventionist in that building. As a Behavior Interventionist in a building of 800 middle schoolers, I learned a very important lesson about teaching and engagement and behavior. To say one impacts the other is an understatement.
I went from classroom to classroom in this position and saw varying levels of student engagement. A teacher delivering a boring lecture equals behavior issues and a teacher using instructional practices that were highly engaging had very few behavior issues. I’m not saying they never had behavior issues, but I am saying that the number of times I was called to their classrooms was significantly less than the teachers who engaged in ineffective practices. I continued to see this phenomenon when I became a building administrator. Some teachers had very few, if any, behavior problems in their classroom while some sent out multiple students a day, week after week.
Why is this? Because teaching is a PROFESSION! Teaching requires knowledge, and skill, and experience, and reflection, and strategies in order to be effective. There are highly effective teachers all over the place and they are effective because they are excellent at their craft. I am dismayed at the belief that what a teacher does has no impact on the engagement of students. If that is the case, why license teachers? Why not put kids in front of computers to learn with low trained paras as proctors?
How do we expect the teaching profession to be respected and valued if we want to distance teachers from the results of their work? Engaging students is hard work and the many teachers I know who are Rock Stars at engaging students are successful because of the work they put into their learning as an educator. Why would we not provide teachers professional learning and accountability around engagement when we know these are strategies that can be learned?
Effective teachers are amazing and the work they do engaging students is not only critical to the results for students, it is one of many reasons why we need to celebrate and reward teachers at very high levels.
When I think of the many engaging teachers I have had the privilege of working with, I think about the personal efficacy they carry with them at all times. These are the teachers that want the difficult student in their classroom, that don’t want the student to leave their class because they know the learning they are providing is critical, that believe students will be engaged in their classroom because that is the expectation they have for all students. They are effective, they know they are effective, and they want students in their classroom because they know what they do with students matters.
Teachers don’t walk out of college with the ability to engage students at high levels. This takes additional learning, and coaching, and practice, and collaborating with other teachers, and mentoring, and risk-taking, and observing others, and data monitoring, and reflection, and time. Successful teachers are Student Engagement Super Heroes and I refuse to pretend that this is disrespectful to say out loud.
One More Thought: As a person who will need a new liver in the future, I have done some shopping around for the best place to have someone replace my crappy liver with a bright, shiny, healthy liver. One of the selling points for Mayo is that they have many skilled surgeons who have experience with difficult cases. These challenging patients also suffer from such things as kidney failure, diabetes, obesity, etc. Although it would be easy to blame the patient for his/her complicating factors (as many of these are lifestyle induced) they actually put their very best people on these demanding cases. So, knowing that engaging students who are challenging to engage is an advanced skill for a teacher, one would think that we put our most difficult to engage students with our most experienced and skillful teachers, right? I mean, that is how it is most of the time, right? RIGHT? I think we all know the answer to this one:(