Student Engagement = Our successful practices Student 7 – 12 Success Our Collective Learnings from Students, Staff, and Research

Care Actively

Know the Student

Plan Forward

Communicate Effectively

Be Inclusive

Be Relevant

The information found in this eBook is a compilation of information gathered from a variety of sources. In 2011-2012, the central student success team conducted student voice forums in every secondary school and several alternative school locations throughout Simcoe County. These forums engaged upwards of 360 students in discussions focused on student engagement. In 2012-2013, we used THOUGHT s t r e a m to engage student success teams (upwards 120 staff members) to contribute, discover, and prioritize unique thoughts and strategies being used in SCDSB schools to support improved student engagement and achievement. We have also consulted a variety of relevant and recent research (see References). The themes, “Care Actively”, “Know the Student”, “Plan Forward”, “Communicate Effectively”, “Be Inclusive”, and “Be Relevant” were identified after a careful analysis of the compiled thoughts and research. Q Student Engagement Questions: Staff Engagement Questions: 1. Do you feel that you have a voice in your education and in what happens at your school? Why or why not? Are some students more “heard” than others?

1. What are some examples of strategies and activities that will support the notion that: "caring has to turn into action that helps students be and stay successful"?

2. Is your school a safe and inclusive space? Why or why not? Who might not feel safe, respected or included at your school? Why?

2. Profiles allow us to identify strategies that are "necessary for some, and good for all" (Learning for All). What are some ideas for ways to promote the use of the student success database as a proactive tool to create class profiles?

3. Do you feel that you are an important part of your school? Do you have opportunities to get involved in things that interest you? If not, what would you like to see changed? 4. Are you interested in what you’re learning? What makes a class interesting and engaging? What makes a class less engaging? 5. Do you feel motivated to go to class every day? What makes a student skip or show up late? What would/does make you show up on time, every day? 6. Do you think you’re reaching your full potential? If you are, what’s helping you to do that? If you’re not, what’s holding you back?

3. As a SS Team, what might you do in your school to support individualized education and career planning across the curriculum using a variety of resources (e.g., IPP, myBlueprint) for all students and especially those deemed at-risk? 4. What are some strategies that we must consider when creating a therapeutic timetable to ensure the student is poised for success from the start and is supported by teachers and the SS Team? 5. When students struggle with attention and/or engagement issues they are often referred to the SS Team. What are some examples of strategies that the SS Team can use to collaborate with the classroom teacher to identify in-class interventions for the student?

7. What are the 10 essential things that adults in the education system need to know about our students to make things better?

6. What are some examples of communication and follow-up strategies that can be implemented to keep the classroom teachers involved in timely and tiered interventions for at risk students?

The quote bubbles throughout this eBook are direct student quotes from the student forums.

7. What are some things we should consider about the strategies discussed that will contribute to a holistic plan to address the engagement and learning needs of students who present risk factors and/or who are at risk of not graduating?

Use Student Voice

Listen to us…we are smarter than you think!

We understand that: Motivation, engagement and student voice are critical elements of student-centered learning; without motivation, there is no push to learn; without engagement there is no way to learn; and without voice, there is no authenticity in the learning. For students to create new knowledge, succeed academically, and develop into healthy adults, they require each of these experiences. - Toshalis, E., & Nakkula, M.J. (2012)

What have our students told us? Through formal student voice forums (2011-12) and informal discussion with students, particularly students re-engaged through our Pathways to Student Success (PASS) program, students have told us, we need:

• teachers that believe in us, even when we screw up (because we will) - don’t give up – we all want to achieve even when it doesn’t look like it; • teachers that understand our strengths and needs and plan for each of us (not all of us together); • relevance – how does what we are learning connect to our world (current and future)? We want to be part of figuring out what we are learning – why and how; • to feel safe, cared for, and included (sarcasm isn’t funny); and, • staff that recognize the difference between normal teen conflict and bullying/harassment.

- Minister’s Student Advisory Council,(MSAC) 2012-13, Artists Liisa Sorsa and Disa Kauk

Helpful Resources In Their Own Words: Engagement, Student Voice Forums, 2011-2012 S Prezi Motivation, Engagement and Student Voice, Jobs for the Future (2012, April) SpeakUp in a Box SpeakUp Projects Students As Researchers In their Own Words, Student Voice Forums – Individual School Reports, 2011-2012 (contact us for a copy)

We know that: There ` is a need to actively create strong personal connections between school staff and students. In fact, students repeatedly say that having somebody at the school that actually personally cared about them is what kept them in school.

Care Actively

At the school level: • Model a culture of acceptance and collaboration When the teacher cares, you’ll start through actions, language, and environment caring more because you almost • Develop a school-wide policy that requires Students articulate a desire for don’t want to disappoint them… flexible due dates and empathetic practices but if a teacher doesn’t care, then more human connections with re: individual student circumstances there’s no one to disappoint except educators. • Staff key roles/classes purposefully (e.g., classes for yourself, and you won’t put in as - Tilleczek et. al., 2010. with high numbers of at-risk students) much effort. What bugs me the most is • Build and support a ‘coaching model’ from the top when a teacher says, I don’t down care what you do in class – Talk less AT us… • Create supportive and accessible extracurricular programs it’s your mark not mine.

…and more WITH us!

It really bugs me because At the student success team level: that’s like them saying, “I • Know every student who is struggling; establish personal don’t care about you. This is connections; and follow up regularly. just a job.” • Establish practices for early identification, prevention That teacher, she changed me. and intervention. She actually had time for ME. She would just ask me, “How is • Work with classroom teachers to provide ‘fresh starts’ Helpful Hints everything going?” for students • Access supports (board and community) for students • Student Success Database (SSDB) – review The TEACHER makes all the at-risk lists regularly; determine ‘who’s on difference! At the classroom level: first’ – include the classroom teacher • Make classes interesting and relevant • Make a point to connect personally with at least • Listen to and talk with the students five students every day • Be honest, fair, and trusting • Encourage reflection, ask classroom teachers to • Show concern for students as individuals by asking whether regularly consider how their students would they need help (both academic and social/emotional) respond to the following questions: “How do I • Make sure students understand what is being taught feel?”; “Am I Interested?”; “Is this important?” and, “Can I do this?” – Marzano & Pickering, 2011 • Ask students if something is wrong

We know that:

Know the Students

Mind, brain, and education research on individual differences, language learning, literacy, and mathematics suggests that students can follow different learning pathways to master the same core skills. Each individual learns most effectively through experiences tailored to his or her needs and interests. - Hinton, C., Fischer, K. and Glennon, C. (2013)

Teachers need to learn how to work better with each student individually, instead of looking at students like we’re one big centipede, and we’re each a leg, and that we all have to move together.

Helpful Hints

& Resources

We need to deal with home problems and life problems before we can deal with school problems. We need teachers that understand that!

School Resources • School Climate Survey Results (2013 new survey) • Compass for Success & School Improvement Planning Tool • EQAO student achievement and questionnaire data Student Success Team • Student Success Database & OSRs Classroom • My Classroom Data • Student Success Database – Student Success Profile, Grade 8 Transition Profile, and Compass Profile • Ontario Student Records • myBlueprint inventories - learning styles & occupational interests • Learning for All (p. 32-48 ) • DI - 2010 Educator’s Guide pp. 9 – 20 • DI Scrapbook pp. 9 - 16

At the school level: • Support all staff in the use of SSDB to create student and class profiles • Whole-school learning related to emotions and connections

At the student success team level: • Use data (see sidebar) to profile a group of students with common challenges. Develop specific intervention and prevention strategies • SST members and classroom teachers meet to discuss interventions and reflect on effectiveness • Members of SS team sit in on classes and assist with individualized strategies and practices to support increased engagement

At the classroom level: • Profile students first, then plan lessons and units to address the needs of specific students • Utilize student interests within delivery of curriculum • Include successes of the students in the student success database so that your colleagues benefit from your learning • Access the SSDB to benefit from successful strategies shared by colleagues • Spend time with other grade level teachers to discuss student profiles (co-plan strategies to improve success) • Form authentic relationships with students by asking questions about personal goals and interests The SCDSB Essential Practices K-12 document lists the development of class and learner profiles as an essential teaching process.

At the school level: • Provide opportunities for all teachers to gain familiarity with and access to myBlueprint If we don’t know what we want to • Ensure that every student is using myBlueprint to complete do, how can any their Individual Pathways Plan (IPP) course be • Engage with and actively develop community partners to relevant at all? support opportunities for students to explore career options (e.g., through career exploration activities, job shadowing, job twinning, or work experience) • Use the three compulsory credit substitutions (Ontario Schools, K-12, p. 61) to promote and enhance student learning or to respond to special needs and interests – do not wait until gr. 12 to enter substitutions in PowerSchool • Be creative when discussing new course offerings by considering particular groups of students who are at-risk (e.g., specialized technology, physical education, arts, interdisciplinary studies courses, course packages etc.) At the student success team level: • Schedule at-risk students in age appropriate courses of high interest, based on student interests—do not feel bound to all students earning compulsory courses first or as traditionally scheduled • Connect with at-risk students in a direct, explicit way to discuss interests, long-term goal planning, course selection—frequently and consistently and use myBlueprint with these students to document progress and planning (e.g. twice per semester) • Create individualized timetables that include early co-op, interest-based courses, and compulsory credit substitutions • When appropriate, for students older than 16, or for students with an IEP, consider a part-time or reduced timetable to support increased attendance and engagement (short-term) At the classroom level: • Use myBlueprint to address the curriculum requirements/expectations and to engage students in goal setting, decision-making and self-regulation • Plan experiential learning opportunities connected to course expectations • Teach using student inquiry as a model for teaching/learning

Plan Forward

We know that: Students need to be at the centre of their own learning, viewing themselves as the architects of their own lives. Students must be encouraged to discover who they are, explore opportunities, pursue their passions and design personal pathways to success. They must be encouraged to express their insights in individual ways and to keep track of what they discover about themselves and their interests, passions, and opportunities over time.

- Creating Pathways to Success, The Education and Career/Life Program Policy for Ontario Schools, K-12, (2013).

The more we expose our students to the world outside the classroom, and the more that we allow them to see the full spectrum of opportunities available to them, the greater the likelihood that they will have the capacity to plan for their future and make decisions in the present.

At the school level: • Conduct Student Success and SNC meetings regularly • Build time for collaborative discussions into staff meetings • Utilize technology to allow teachers to share and celebrate success stories; (i.e. encourage the use of the SSDB) • Communicate important, sensitive information about individual students to their teachers in a Ask us what we want in the timely fashion curriculum and what we • Communicate using a clear and consistent process want to learn so we can (i.e., every teacher has a list of steps – review the actually be interested in IEP and/or SSDB information, contact home, refer what we’re learning to SS Team, and collaborate with supports to develop, implement & monitor an intervention plan; this should happen quickly – early intervention is the key)

Communicate Effectively

Don’t assume we already know the basics.

We know that: Communication is about talking, but it is also about listening. It’s about conveying something to a particular audience. … It’s about talking, writing, texting, and drawing. And it’s about using social media – text and image together…Students need to communicate about things that are relevant to them: that have some personal significance.

-Gould Lundy & Swartz Creating Caring Classrooms (2011)

Resources

Student Graduation Planner (Grad Tracker) SSDB, e-mail, and old fashioned face-to-face communication

At the student success team level: • Start training and encouraging as early as staff meeting on 1st day • SS Team meets regularly (bi-weekly – at minimum) • Use emails! Close the communication circle (i.e. back to referring teacher) as a follow up and cc: all members of SS Team • Hold teacher forums to support collaboration re: particular at-risk students At the classroom level: • Offer regular reminders that supports are available • Conduct frequent assessment (as & for learning) including descriptive feedback (see Growing Success and the SCDSB Essential Practices) • Make rubrics student-friendly; use their language • Keep parents/guardians in the loop re: concerns and successes Effective communication must take place at all levels and among all stakeholders for a student’s success. School should be a place where we can hear the full sound of the conversation of humankind. - David Booth

We know that: [Some] students enter school with a markedly different outlook. Their social contexts create conditions that can marginalize and mark them as different or “other.” Whether it is the student’s race, linguistic heritage, immigration status, socioeconomic class, sexuality, or other cultural factors working alone or in combination, the messages received from society often tell the student that she is outside the mainstream. Setting foot on a school campus, the student may confront a context in which faculty and staff rarely look or speak like her, curricula seldom Teachers pick out students reflect her ways of knowing or her people’s like apples. Everyone history, behavioral expectations do not picks the bright shiny respect her ways of interacting, and the apples, but no one wants espoused or implicit values of the school the dirty, bruised apples may conflict with what she has learned at with the old, ripped home. clothes. -

Be Inclusive

[Become] educated on the treatment of LGBT and other sexual orientations …understand lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and all other types of students.

Toshalis, E. and Nakkula, M. (2012)

At the school level: • Establish an equity team (that includes a variety of stakeholders) to discuss strategies to identify and remove discriminatory barriers and biases that limit engagement so that diverse groups become more understood, have greater access, and as a result improved success • Support a review of classroom strategies and assessment and evaluation practices to promote school-wide equity and inclusive education policies and practices - (Equity and Inclusive Education in Ontario Schools, 2009) • Know and celebrate the diversity of your school population • Work toward representation of diverse groups on school committees At the student success team level: • Be holistic – consider all aspects of the student; involve them in planning, problem solving, and decision-making • When necessary, choose courses where the teaching style and the learning style match • Use the motto, “Nothing about them, without them” to encourage collaborative problem solving

[my courses] don’t help me learn about my Aboriginal beliefs; they just teach me to learn how to think like a white person.

At the classroom level: • Convey your belief that all students can learn and succeed • Plan ways to keep boys engaged – for ideas read, Me Read? And How! • Provide adequate wait time, perhaps 3 or 5 seconds. Girls wait until they have an answer to raise their hands; boys raise their hands immediately and then formulate an answer • Challenge any and all stereotypical/inappropriate comments and actions • Use a range of resources that include topics of cultural and social relevance

We know that: Relevance requires both connection and importance. The more relevance or connection, the greater the meaning. Personally relevant material more readily transfers from short- to long-term memory than do facts and skills learned in isolation. - Hume, 2002

At the school level: • Create a climate of conversation and collaboration that looks at common approaches or practices while still recognizing They should probably be teaching us more differences across subjects and departments (e.g., assessment, stuff that’s relevant to 21st century learning/essential skills, as well as literacy and real life. numeracy) • Engage in cross-curricular and cross-panel PLCs to examine and experiment with research-based instructional strategies • Include more elective courses for Grade 9 and 10 •

We could just

Google it!

Be Relevant

There’s things outside of high school… there’s aspects of life that need to be learned in the real world, instead of in here on paper. We can’t learn everything on paper.

• Develop linked courses (e.g., math/woodworking, English/art)—high interest based on student needs

At the student success team level: • Share the information regarding student interest and needs with regular classroom teachers and talk about (co-plan) strategies to incorporate interests and address needs in the classroom • Explicitly communicate with students regarding course selection (i.e., What is the course all about -really? What type of activities can be expected in that course?) – course descriptions may not capture the interest of the student!

Implicitly- and sometimes explicitly- students ask themselves four questions that determine how engaged they are in the classroom: (1) How do I feel? (emotions); (2) Am I interested?; (3) Is this important?; and, Can I do this? (efficacy). To move learning into working memory students must have a student’s attention and engagement. Attention is gained through emotions & interest; while, Engagement is gained through importance & efficacy.

- Marzano & Pickering, (2011)

At the classroom level: • Connect course material to real life and specific students interests – strive for both cultural and social relevance • Explicitly communicate Learning Goals and Success Criteria (cocreating these helps students to establish connections and to develop ownership of their achievement) • Gather information regarding student interests and hobbies through surveys, observation, and explicit dialogue. Incorporate these through purposeful planning into classroom instruction, assessment, and evaluation.

References 1. Gould Lundy, K., & Swartz, L. (2011). Creating Caring Classrooms. Markham, Canada: Pembroke Publishers. 2. Hinton, C., Fisher, K., & Glennon, C. (2012, March). Mind, brain, and education. Boston, MA: Jobs for the Future: The Students at the Centre Series. 3. Hume, K. (2011). Tuned Out – Engaging the 21st Century Learner. Toronto, Canada: Pearson Canada Inc. 4. Marzano, R., & Pickering, D. (2011). The Highly Engaged Classroom. Bloomington, IN: Marzano Research Laboratory. 5. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2008). Career Exploration and Experiential Learning Fact Sheet. Retrieved from: http://www.edu.gov. on.ca/eng/teachers/studentsuccess/exploration.pdf 6. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2012). Creating Pathways to Success. Retrieved from: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policyfunding /memos/april2013/CreatingPathways2013.pdf. 7. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2009). Equity and Inclusive Education in Ontario Schools – Realizing the Promise of Diversity. Retrieved from: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policyfunding/inclusiveguide.pdf. 8. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2010). Differentiated Instruction Educator’s Package. Retrieved from: http://www.edugains.ca/resourcesDI/EducatorsPackages/DIEducatorsP ackage2010 /2010EducatorsGuide.pdf. 9. Ontario Ministry of Education (2010). Differentiated Instruction Scrapbook. Retrieved from: http://www.edugains.ca/resourcesDI /EducatorsPackages/DIEducatorsPackage2010/2010DIScrapbook.pdf.

Care Actively

Know the Student

Plan Forward

10. Ontario Ministry of Education (2011). Getting Started with Student Inquiry. Capacity Building Series: Special Edition #24. Retrieved from: www.edu.gov. on.ca/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/CBS_StudentInquiry.pdf. 11. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2010). Growing Success – Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting in Ontario Schools. Retrieved from: www.edu.gov. on.ca/eng/policyfunding/growsuccess.pdf. 12. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2011). Learning for All – A Guide to Effective Assessment and Instruction for All Students, Kindergarten to Grade 12. Retrieved from: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/ general/elemsec /speced/LearningforAll2011.pdf. 13. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2009). Me Read ? And How! – Ontario teachers report on how to improve boys’ literacy skills. Retrieved from: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum /meread_andhow.pdf. 14. Ontario Ministry of Education. (2012). Ontario Schools – Kindergarten to Grade 12. Retrieved from: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document /policy/os/ONSchools.pdf. 15. Simcoe County D.S.B. (Working Document-June, 2012. Updated -June, 2013). Essential Classroom Practices. Retrieved from: SCDSB Staff Website 16. Toshalis, E., & Nakkula, M.J. (2012, April) Motivation, Engagement and Student Voice. Boston, MA: Jobs for the Future: The Students at the Centre Series. Retrieved from: http://www.studentsatthecenter.org /sites/scl.dl-dev.com/files/Motivation%20Engagement %20Student%20Voice_0.pdf.

Communicate Effectively

Be Inclusive

Be Relevant