Monday Musings - Student Engagement

I've mentioned before that our school district has done a ton of training in the principles of Quality Learning which are tools and philosophy developed by David Langford.  He uses brain research and the idea of total student engagement to challenge teachers to think about how they deliver instruction.  I first attended the training four years ago and it really got me thinking.

Over the years, I had gotten very casual about data collection.  Speech services tend to be heavy on direct reinforcement by the SLP.  After my training, I started changing things up.  I started using centers and began to challenge my students to self practice and to work with each other.  I started using run charts for data and my students started keeping track of their goals and their own data.  You know you assume that your kiddos know the whys and what fors of everything we do in education...unfortunately students can quickly become passive learners.

Last year I saw a first grade teacher use a tool called The Five Whys to have a discussion with her students about why they come to school.

I thought it would be something great start off the year in speech as well.

 I asked each of my groups to answer the question, "Why do you come to speech?" I then took their answer and turned it into another question.  For example, if they say "To say our words better,"  I ask, "Why do you need to say your words better?"  I did this five times.

This one was done by a group of third graders.  It is hard, but you can't comment or change their wording.  You just keep turning it back to them helping them dig deeper.

This one was done by a group of second graders.  Isn't it interesting that they brought up getting a job?

This one was done by a group of first graders.  It broke my heart when they talked of being made fun of.  It was so hard not to stop it and discuss bullying.  When it was all done we did discuss it

When we were done, we posted all the sheets around the room to refer to for the rest of the year.  All my groups (I did this with about 30 groups) either went the direction of getting a job or so people could understand you.  I only had one little hearing impaired student with autism who really didn't know why he came to speech.  What I loved about this was it started us all off with a common purpose.  We went from this activity right into looking at their goals and their data run charts.

It definitely is going into my bag of "must use" tools.