Heather Wolpert-Gawron - Just Ask Us: Kids Speak Out on Student Engagement

Kids Speak Out on Student Engagement

Foreword by

• Carol Radford

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ISBN: 978-1-5063-6328-8

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My first experience with asking students what they thought of my teachinghappened quite by accident. I was in my beginning years of teaching fifth gradeand was frustrated that the students were not engaged. In fact, they were sodistracted that I couldnt hear myself teach! So I loudly asked, Well, what doyou think I should be doing? Silence. They couldnt believe I asked them. Thenthey authentically shared what I could do to engage them and how I could be abetter teacher. I never looked back. I continually sought out ways to find outwhat my students thought. I used informal surveys, tickets to leave, and evenhad students draw pictures of me teaching so I could see what I looked like inthe classroom.

Later in my career as a teacher educator I discovered that novice teachers werestill facing the same challenges. In one of our class discussions a teachershared that he had a student who changed her math grade from an F to an A! Wewanted to know how this teacher had helped the student succeed in school. Wedecided to ask Jennifer, the high school student, and record her responses. Myfirst video, Teachers Make a Difference, was produced and shared in allof our teacher education courses. I was hooked!

We continued our research, asking students, What is an effective teacher? andWhat advice would you give beginning teachers? We created online surveys,designed protocols for novice teachers and mentors to talk about the data, andproduced a series of student perspectives videos. We learned that students had opinions about how theirteachers could teach them more effectively. We also learned that novice teacherswanted to change their practices so their students could succeed.

What was missing in my journey into student perspectives was specific ways thenovices could actually engage their students. That is why I am so excitedabout this book, Just Ask Us: Kids Speak Out On StudentEngagement . Heather Wolpert-Gawron is an experienced practicing teacher.She has done her research, collected student voices from across the nation, andtested the practices in her own classroom. She includes a Student EngagementSurvey in the introduction to help you get started with these ideas in your ownclassrooms right now.

If the goal is to help our students learn and be successful in school, then weneed to listen to them. We need to pay attention to what they need, not what wethink they need.

Heather has brilliantly captured the essence of students perspectives in eachchapter. She has learned that students want to

• work together,
• have their teachers be more visual and to use technology,
• know why they are learning,
• move around in the classroom,
• have choices,
• experience their teachers as human,
• create using what they know,
• participate with new ways of learning, and
• learn using a variety of methods.

These specific topics come from the students voices and Heather organizes theminto separate chapters that include samples and many choices for engaging ourstudents. What I love most about this book is that all these creative ideas arein one place, and the format is easy to read, making it useful for busyteachers.