E3-Investment Leads to Engagement

 E3 - Investment Leads to Engagement

Over the past year or so, my second focus in life--along with retiring as a Superintendent, and moving on to NewTech, and selling a home--has been the incredible workload of building a new home. Last fall, my wife and I had our cabin torn down (with help). This past 12 months has been filled with non-regular tasks associated with getting this done. We did sell our old home in Belgrade without a lot of pomp and circumstance, so that was a great outcome. However, in the meantime, moving to a new home has been incredibly engaging, yet anything but smooth. 

We had a non-conforming lot, meaning it was smallish compared to others that may want to build on an existing property. We sought variances and appeared before the county committee, and interacted with leadership to get the process started. We took on the general contracting aspect, primarily to save money, but that role was certainly expanded beyond expectation. 

Needless to say, we are all in, both financially and with our effort. We have great investment in each of these areas (financial and effort) thus we deeply care about each aspect and work diligently to ensure the best outcome. We are clearly invested with both MONEY and TIME. Even the most disengaged person will suddenly become interested when those two elements are scarcely threatened. 

I'm not sure where I heard this analogy nearly forty years ago, but it has a lot of weight. Likely in a church. When you have a House of Cards, you aren't invested in the outcome of this house. When you have a home that costs you a big chunk of your life's work financially, the outcome is EXTREMELY important to you. The details of your closet organization suddenly take high priority in your life. You will never need to know it again, but learning it now is integral to your investment. As your investment increases, your engagement follows. 

Many of our students are sitting in high schools with this dilemma. They are spending a great deal of time in a place that they have little to no investment in. They are not invested in a great deal of the content. They see no future for its relevance--society essentially tells them the same thing once the graduate;  Their relationships with adults are transactional--much of their school work is centered around getting a grade or just staying eligible for sports. 

This sounds bleak, but the main motivating factors tha high school students are motivated have would embarrass us. The root causes of low rigor, low relevance and poor relationships lead to a lack of engagement from our students. 

You can watch an MSHSL tournament on TV and the advertisements will tout the advantages of playing sports--kids in sports have higher GPA's, or kids in Band or Choir have higher GPA's.  Of course, your GPA will be higher if you are in Band & Choir, simply because you are in those classes. In Fine Arts courses, 90% of the students will get an A, so basically everyone has a higher GPA simply because they are enrolled in those classes. The relationship between Fine Arts and GPA is not causal, it is circumstantial. The average student in Band or Choir have higher GPA's than those who don't. 

Our schools maintain these status quo conditions because of these philosophical errors.This doesn't mean that sports, PE or the fine arts are bad, but we have to be real about what our messaging suggests and what it does not. Many students are disengaged in the educational process in a typical US High school. This has nothing to do with sports, band, or PE. It likely has everything to do with the components of regular "schoolwork" in the American HS such as common requirements, the adult hierarchy of the system or the credit-seeking perspective of both teachers and students, etc. 

The essence of learning is derived from the learner. Going back to the house analogy, when you have low investment in a product worth little to you, you will likely not have high engagement. If you have some investment, it may be due to artificial aspects that mask your true motivation to do it. For instance, our athletes that get high GPA's may not care about their high GPA's as much because of the authenticity of the learning, but perhaps to less impressive factors such as compliance, eligibility and the advantages gained from achievement in athletics or fine arts. 

To succeed in life, you will need to have both interest and effort. It's harder to control effort, but we can control interest more as educators. To some extent, we can provide our students with things that hold their interest. When we look at our instructional experiences closely, we would find that there are many things we require that simply don't have the rigor, relevance or relationships we need, yet we make EVERY student take them, and pass them. If not, you don't graduate. 

The summary of this is that our students are attending schools largely in institutions that are Houses of Cards for them. The system participates in a largely transactional environment where you do tit for tat. If you do your homework, you will do better on the tests. If you do better on the tests, you can star on the wrestling team. Once we remove the artificial motivations, all bets are off. In the inner city or in larger districts, where these motivations are less achievable, these transactions are increasingly difficult. Special Ed students, low SES, disenchanted suffer by the weight of their conditions. And high schools are often late to intervene, not because they don't want to, or they don't have the ability to, it is because they don't know how to. 

We have been "schooled" to do things a certain way and other alternatives become almost dogmatic. Others have written about "unschooling" our system, and I have affection for that term. You have to be keenly aware of what we do and why we do it. This doesn't imply that all is bad. The ability to read and problem solve and compute is clearly evident in our society. 

However, it can lead to a false positive. If running is good, should I run all day? If eating vegetables is a good idea, is that all I should eat? Clearly, we know these answers. We need doses of a lot of good things, and no one thing is better than others. But, to each of us, there is some distribution for ME that is different than YOU. Ironically, there is a new field called nutrigenomics that suggests that even our diets need to be personalized based on our own DNA needs.  It seems like our education needs that same personalization, including our curriculum, expectations, standards and experiences. This is the fundamental aspect of personalized learning -- every learner (and teacher perhaps) is equal and different and their education should reflect that. 

When we get students to INVEST in their learning, we will likely see them be more ENGAGED in their learning. We should exhibit the utmost in flexibility to achieve that, because we all know that if we erased requirements, many experiences in HS education would be dead. We can find many experiences that are required that don't pass the engagement or relevancy smell tests. 

Lest we profess an anarchy, my personal direction for dealing with this is quite simple. When you see the lack of INVESTMENT in students, or LOW ENGAGEMENT, try to change it. Not in big, macro ways, that may be politically impossible, but in solid ways that are WIN-WIN-WIN for our system, teacher and student. When we do so, we make our high schools better by small lots on a consistent basis. Our House of Cards has a more concrete foundation that allows for consistent growth where all proprietors are tending to its future. In summary, a great education becomes something that you build from, nourishing and tending to it the rest of our life. This requires more than knowledge, for sure. It requires us to have the skills, relationships, relevancy and feedback that provides durability for the rest of your life!