Engagement Strategies

Engagement strategies capitalize on and build upon students' academic background, life experiences, culture and language to support rigorous and culturally relevant learning. 

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Optimize Relevance, Value, and Authenticity

Individuals are engaged by information and activities that are relevant and valuable to their interests and goals. This does not necessarily mean that the situation has to be equivalent to real life, as fiction can be just as engaging to learners as non-fiction, but it does have to be relevant and authentic to learners' individual goals and the instructional goals. Individuals are rarely interested in information and activities that have no relevance or value. In an educational setting, one of the most important ways that teachers recruit interest is to highlight the utility and relevance, of learning and to demonstrate that relevance through authentic, meaningful activities. It is a mistake, of course, to assume that all learners will find the same activities or information equally relevant or valuable to their goals .To recruit all learners equally, it is critical to provide options that optimize what is relevant, valuable, and meaningful to the learner. 

Vary activities and sources of information so that they can be: 

• Personalized and contextualized to learners' lives
• Culturally relevant and responsive
• Socially relevant
• Age and ability appropriate
• Appropriate for different racial, cultural, ethnic, and gender groups
• Design activities so that learning outcomes are authentic, communicate to real audiences, and reflect a purpose that is clear to the participants
• Provide tasks that allow for active participation, exploration and experimentation
• Invite personal response, evaluation and self-reflection to content and activities

Include activities that foster the use of imagination to solve novel and relevant problems, or make sense of complex ideas in creative ways.

Optimize Individual Choice & Autonomy

In an instructional setting, it is often inappropriate to provide choice of the learning objective itself, but it is often appropriate to offer choices in how that objective can be reached, in the context for achieving the objective, in the tools or supports available, and so forth. Offering learners choices can develop self-determination, pride in accomplishment, and increase the degree to which they feel connected to their learning. However, it is important to note that individuals differ in how much and what kind of choices they prefer to have. It is therefore not enough to simply provide choice. The right kind of choice and level of independence must be optimized to ensure engagement. 

Provide learners with as much discretion and autonomy as possible by providing choices in such things as:

• The level of perceived challenge
• The type of rewards or recognition available
• The context or content used for practicing and assessing skills
• The tools used for information gathering or production
• the color, design, or graphics of layouts, etc.
• The sequence or timing for completion of subcomponents of tasks
• Allow learners to participate in the design of classroom activities and academic tasks
• Involve learners, where and whenever possible, in setting their own personal academic and behavioral goals.

Promote Understanding Across Languages

The language of curricular materials is usually monolingual, but often the learners in the classroom are not, so the promotion of cross-linguistic understanding is especially important. For new learners of the dominant language (e.g., English in American schools) or for learners of academic language (the dominant discourse in school), the accessibility of information is greatly reduced when no linguistic alternatives are available. Providing alternatives, especially for key information or vocabulary is an important aspect of accessibility. 

• Make all key information in the dominant language (e.g., English) also available in first languages (e.g., Spanish) for learners with limited English proficiency and in ASL for learners who are deaf. 
• Link key vocabulary words to definitions and pronunciations in both dominant and heritage languages
• Define domain-specific vocabulary (e.g., "Map key" in social studies) using both domain-specific and common terms
• Provide electronic translation tools or links to multilingual glossaries on the web
• Embed visual, non-linguistic supports for vocabulary clarification (pictures, videos, etc).

Activate or Supply Background Knowledge

Information is more accessible and likely to be assimilated by learners when it is presented in a way that primes, activates, or provides any pre-requisite knowledge. Barriers and inequities exist when some learners lack the background knowledge that is critical to assimilating or using new information. However, there are also barriers for learners who have the necessary background knowledge, but might not know it is relevant. Those barriers can be reduced when options are available that supply or activate relevant prior knowledge, or link to the pre-requisite information elsewhere. 

• Anchor instruction by linking to and activating relevant prior knowledge (e.g., using visual imagery, concept anchoring, or concept mastery routines)
• Use advanced organizers (e.g., KWL methods, concept maps)
• Pre-teach critical prerequisite concepts through demonstration or models
• Bridge concepts with relevant analogies and metaphors
• Make explicit cross-curricular connections (e.g., teaching literacy strategies in the social studies classroom)

High Yield Pedagogical Practices (HYPPS)

HIGH YIELD PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES (HYPPS) are high-level pedagogical practices that integrate deep content learning with language and literacy development. They address the four language domains: reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Collaborative Summarizing - Students collaborate to read and discuss complex text by finding the main ideas and details to summarize the text. The purpose of this HYPP is to foster academic conversations about text-dependent questions and serves as a scaffold from academic conversations to writing. 

Expert Group Jigsaw - Students become experts on a topic through focused reading and collaborative discussions with peers. Students read and take notes on text, meet with peers in expert groups, teach important findings about the text in jigsaw groups. The purpose of this HYPP is to foster student engagement and individual accountability for learning, scaffolds student understanding, maximizes peer interaction, establishes cooperation and respect through teamwork. 

Collaborative Text Reconstruction - Students recreate/reconstruct a text that they have listened to several times, taken notes on and discussed with partners without ever looking at the text. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students’ understanding of the topic, deepen content knowledge, draw attention to the meanings and language features in the text, and apprentice students into writing the text type. 

Sentence Unpacking - Students deconstruct text to find the meanings of long, complex sentences. Teachers guide students through sentences to find the meaning of sentence “chunks”. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students to understand the complex sentences and text they encounter by raising the awareness of language and connecting the language awareness to meeting. 

Cohesion Analysis - Supports student’s reading comprehension and scaffolds writing abilities by focusing on cohesion created through the whole text, paragraph, and sentence level structure/organization. Helps students understand the predictability of text types using analysis of text types. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students’ reading comprehension and scaffolds their writing ability by focusing on how cohesion is created through the whole text, paragraph, and sentence level organization and structure. More information coming soon.

Joint Construction of Texts - Teachers act as a facilitation scribe, prompting students to offer ideas for what to write in a collective piece. Teachers model how writers think about writing and encouraging students to create more academic and genre-appropriate text. The purpose of this HYPP is to scaffold students’ abilities to write a particular genre. Supports students to compose independent texts through a teacher-facilitated process that allows rehearsal of writing. 

Collaborative Problem Solving - Students engage in answering a prompt by first finding the story and understanding what is being asked. They solve independently, and with a partner and a group of four. Students agree on an answer and create a collaborative poster using visuals, words, and numbers (If applicable) representing all members’ thinking and work. The purpose of this HYPP is through discussion and problem-based tasks, students learn to think for themselves, provide feedback to their peers, and are encouraged to take risks and make “mistakes.” 

Stronger and Clearer - Students think and individually write how they would solve a problem. Students then share their thinking with another partner and have the opportunity to clarify and ask questions. Have students switch several more times before returning to their seat to individually write their response. The purpose of this HYPP is to provide a structured and interactive opportunity for students to revise and refine both their ideas and their verbal and written output.

Text Analysis - Teachers explicitly teach students the purpose, text structure & organization, and linguistic features through the use of the Genre Cheat Sheets. The purpose of this HYPP is fundamentally written genres are distinguished by their social purposes — that is, what the text is intended to accomplish within a particular context and content area and the desired effect on the people who will be reading it. These social purposes shape the genre, guide how it is structured and organized, and determine which language resources are most powerful to use in the text. More information coming soon.