Topic: Student Engagement

By understanding and valuing each writing process stage, you can guide students from initial ideas to completed works. Because as writing mentors, our goal isn’t just to teach writing—but to inspire a love for it.

As educators, we all want our students to have the skills and insights needed to navigate the world outside of their classroom. In this mission, the significance of relevance in reading cannot be understated.

Pre-reading scaffolds are powerful tools that can equip struggling readers with the skills and confidence they need to navigate and comprehend text.

If educators don't have a language to define and describe engagement—a point on the horizon toward which we're working—and if we don't incorporate talk of engagement into our discourse with students, how can we help children become truly engaged?

Engagement, in part, depends on what you feel and sense when you enter a classroom. It's the culture—unseen and unheard, but omnipresent, and it's a little tougher to pin down.

Our ideas about engagement were for formed in early childhood by our parents, and have been solidified by what our teachers did to 'motivate' us. In classrooms now, many of these old notions are concretized by what our colleagues believe about motivation and engagement.

Ellin Oliver Keene helps us answer the question, what is the difference between motivation and engagement?

In a recent series of short video interviews, Lucy Calkins and her TCRWP coauthors discussed the guiding principles they had in mind while creating the forthcoming Units of Study in Phonics. Watch the videos below to discover the why the authors paid particular attention to transfer and engagement.

Fostering Belongingness to Support Student Participation

Why is Inquiry Work Good For Kids?

Heinemann Fellow Kate Flowers on Working Toward "Do No Harm" Feedback

Small Changes, Big Differences: Plan Backwards for Student Engagement