Week 1A

Assignment Choice: What do I think I know about engagement? Select one or more of the following brief activities and complete the activity and your sharing by the following date: October 2

1.  Discuss ideas about student engagement: What do we presently believe constitutes "engagement?"  How do we know if students are, in fact, engaged? Can we identify it?  Measure it?  Define it? What are the elements that make up the concept of engagement and do they all need to be present for something to be called "engagement?" Use the comments feature (button above-posts below) to post your thinking on the concept of engagement and reply to at least one other person on their ideas/ thinking. don’t forget to ask people questions about their ideas:)

2.  Watch this video.  Feel free to laugh, but also record what you notice the students do. Join our google doc and list all the ways to notice “disengagement” that you see in the video.  Also add other ways you have noticed in your school life. Try to list evidence of true student engagement in the second column. And ways students fake engagement in the first column.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4ZYlb8gkTk&feature=related

What signals do we see that the students are not "engaged?" Why do you think the teacher does not notice (or perhaps does not care) about these signals?

3.  Participate in a collaborative writing of the “definition” of engagement below (collaborative means people write stuff and other people edit and revise until we arrive somewhere that seems right).  Of course we could just cut and paste from Wikipedia but there would be no fun in that.