Transcript Slide 1

Student Engagement and
School Community Links
Peter Sullivan
Monash University
Overview
Challenges facing educators
A theoretical perspective
Some implications generally
Implications for community partnerships
A disclaimer
I had originally intended to be more explicit
about what I say means for School
Community links, but there is not much. I
am leaving to you the interpretation for
your own context.
The challenges educators are
facing
Especially in the middle years:
A decline in school engagement of young
adolescents as compared with their engagement
in primary school.
Increased truancy.
Greater incidence of disruptive behaviour,
alienation and isolation.
The alienation appears to be most acute in the
case of disadvantaged students.
Note the Prime Minister’s concerns about
bullying
PISA has some things to say
In 2003, Australia was one of 41 countries that
participated in the Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA).
Over 12 500 15 year old students, from all schools
systems, and from each state and territory, completed a
two-hour pen and paper tests in their schools, and
answered a 30 minute questionnaire.
The focus of the assessment was on how well young
people had been prepared to meet challenges, how well
they could adapt their learning to the needs of their lives,
and to address aspects of school organisation, including
factors contributing to disadvantage.
In the Australian results:
Australia is characterised as high in quality but
low in equity
There was a strong relationship between
achievement and socioeconomic background
Some schools were more effective than others in
moderating this effect.
Students in metropolitan areas performed better
than regional students, who, in turn
outperformed rural students.
Indigenous students were over-represented in
the lower categories of proficiency.
Two complementary challenges
We need to educate the next generation of
inventors, creators, thinkers, advocates, and
explorers who will find ways to build a peaceful
caring society, tackle major problems (e.g.,
energy), innovate, entertain, and find ways to
build sustainable societies.
Given demographic imbalances, the most
effective way to ensure that there are working
people with the right skills, is to improve the
effectiveness of the education of all students,
especially those who are currently
underperforming
In both cases we need to challenge
students (appropriately)
A different take on ZPD
Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development
(ZPD) … “distance between the actual
developmental level as determined by
independent problem solving and the level of
potential development as determined by
problem solving under adult guidance or in
collaboration with more capable peers” (p. 86).
ZPD defines learning as going beyond tasks or
problems that students can solve independently,
so that the students are working on challenges
for which they need support.
The complexity of challenge
Unless the students are challenged they
are not learning and growing
But what if students resist challenge by
giving up, thereby prompting the teacher
to reduce the challenge by feeding in
information
This resistance has been widely
noted
Pupils misbehave during tasks involving higher
order processes
Pupils work effectively on tasks requiring only
recall of information (Doyle, 1986)
Pupils are not interested in each other’s
opinions
The more unfamiliar the task, the more difficult
it is to teach (Desforges & Cockburn, 1987)
A particular theory - Dweck
Perspectives on intelligence
entity
– people who believe that their intelligence is
genetically predetermined and remains fixed through
life.
– Dweck suggested that students who believe in the
entity view require easy successes to maintain
motivation, and see challenges as threats.
incremental
– can change their intelligence and/or achievement by
manipulating factors over which they have some
control.
– Students with such incremental beliefs often choose
to sacrifice opportunities to look smart in favour of
learning something new.
The theory – Dweck
Seekers of affirmation (performers), when
experiencing difficulties
– lose confidence in themselves,
– tend to denigrate their own intelligence,
– exhibit plunging expectations,
– develop negative approaches,
– have lower persistence.
– seek positive judgements from others and
avoid negative ones.
Achievers for its own sake (mastery)
– do not blame others for threats
– do not see failure as an indictment on
themselves
– hold learning goals which are to increase their
competence when confronted with difficulty
– do not see success as essential
Aspirations and Expectations
Potentially positive influences include the
extent to which students’ connect current
schooling with future opportunities or their
possible selves, which is “the futureoriented component of self-concept”
(Oyserman, Terry, & Bybee, 2002, p. 313)
A research study
With year 8 students, in a regional city
Asked students, in one on one interviews, to do a
series of graduated questions until they could not
continue, then we asked them about the
experience
Data Collection
Included:
Student surveys
Individual interviews
with students
Observation of
students’
performance on a
range of tasks
Recording of
students’ responses
to protocol questions
Matching students’
performance and
response against
background data
including teacher
achievement and
effort rating and
gender
The key findings were
The students were surprisingly confident in their
own ability, they perceived themselves as trying
hard, and they saw these as linked.
The students seemed aware of the importance of
effort.
Even though we anticipated that students would
give up when posed difficult tasks and this would
provide the prompt for our discussions, in both the
English and mathematics tasks all students
persevered for the whole time.
More results
A key finding was that, to an open response item, nearly
half of the responses related to the negative influence of
classmates. The responses explain a lack of observable
effort as being, on one hand, a result of a desire to be
popular, and on the other hand, from fear of retribution
from peers.
Interestingly, many students indicated that they feel that
the lack of effort by some students is an issue that
should be addressed. These suggestions about how this
could be done were extraordinarily insightful, mature,
and empathetic.
Recommendations for action
There are five specific implications for
educataors. In particular it is recommended that
we:
– work on building an understanding of the nature of
community, the world of work, the nature of study
pathways and options, and strategies to optimise
options so that students can be aware of the
relationship between their opportunities at school and
the future life choices;
address the relevance of the curriculum
and the type of tasks used. If the students
do not connect schooling to their future
then tasks that are only relevant for
students whose goals include higher study
may not be attractive to the others. Note
that this does not mean basing curriculum
on limited student goals, but engaging
students in learning activities that are
intrinsically engaging;
make students more aware of their actual
achievement and effort. This includes usual
assessment modes, and also the processes for
affirming effort. It is possible that primary and
junior secondary teachers give students
unrealistically positive evaluations of their
achievement and effort. This has dual negative
effects of endorsing inadequate effort and
achievement, and fostering inappropriate goals
of seeking teacher endorsement;
teach self-regulatory behaviours such as
cognitive, meta-cognitive, social, and
affective awareness. As with other aspects
of schooling, these behaviours are able to
be learned, and it is lower achieving
students that most need specific support in
developing such behaviours;
identify interventions that address
mismatches between teacher and student
expectations for classroom and schoolbased activities. Schooling processes are
compatible with conventional middle class
aspirations, but are less obvious for
students from families who do not have
such familiarity with the ways schools
operate.
The tension with learning the
disciplines
Should we talk about intellectual development?
Is it possible that some approaches develop
people intellectually and others don’t
What are the skills that will allow students to
grow to their potential?
What do the “disciplines” have to offer?
Learning music, especially where reading and interpreting notes is
involved, seems connected with ID
Poetry gives insights into language that are not possible through report
writing and reading newspapers (also the experience of remembering)
Learning the skills of drawing seems to have transfer across domains
and are associated with high level performance in many fields
Learning to speak a second language (even if this is English) is
liberating, builds tolerance and connections, postpones senility,
broadens communication genres, …
Intense physical activity seems to enhance performance in all fields,
and physical skill development augments this
There are abstract principles in understanding food preparation that go
beyond learning to cook
Ditto IT
It is not possible to appreciate the environment unless you have words
to describe what you see, hear, feel, smell,
Štech (2006) argued that school mathematics
has a role in prompting reflection, abstraction
and generalisation that is not possible in
responding to everyday tasks. Štech was critical
of approaches that:
– localise the dynamic of learning almost exclusively
into the world of everyday experience and neglect the
importance of activities … directed at reflection and
abstraction. Thus they hinder investigations into the
differences and tensions between an item of
knowledge in its everyday form and one which is
formalised – and therefore bypass the decisive
moment of cognitive and personal development of the
individual. (p. I-39)
Basically the argument is:
Activities in which students engage are the
medium through teachers (broadly
defined) and students communicate
The type of activity determines the type of
learning
It is better for the student to be engaged
by, in, or through the activity rather than
through the personality of the teachers,
the fear of parent, …
Some of the characteristics of
appropriate activities are
a need for variety and diversity,
for activities to include meaningful reasons
for students to engage in the tasks,
ideally for the activities to be personally
relevant
for there to be challenge, interest and
control (see Middleton, 1995)
to include a social component (probably
not with friends)
In the case of numeracy
There were over 600 specific projects in
Australia (in 2004) involving parents in
numeracy education of their children in
some way
The workplace demands for numeracy
including accuracy, transfer, and adaptable
knowledge (data, networks)
Implications for Community School
Partnerships
SPP up to you
parents
Some comments offered starting points
for some subsequent intervention
“It’s good to be smart because then you
know stuff, and if you’re dumb just so your
friends like you then it’s really bad.
Obviously they’re not your friends if they
make you be dumb to be their friend.”
Next steps?
Arrange these cards in order to make a
story
Write a story about when you have
underperformed to be liked by your friends
Role play
video
What would you say to a friend you said
that they didn’t try their best because they
wanted to be your friend
…
Another one
“…if you’re playing (sport) and you mess
up or something and you have a kick and
it falls short or it goes out of bounds on the
full where it shouldn’t, if you have
someone on your team that says, ‘You’ll
get the next one,’ you’re more confident to
keep playing, but if someone is like, ‘What
are you doing?’ …”