How I engaged learners without gimmicks – EDUWELLS

This year, I’ve run an experiment with mastery learning rather than running a programme of unit/topic learning. It has been life changing for both myself and my students. This year, I was asked to teach middle school art for the first time. 25 years ago, I was a Fine Art graduate but have never taught it. This allows me to visually show you the results of my experiment, while I emphasise that I believe this applies to all school subject disciplines.

My experience has shown that students seeing and feeling their continuous development is all that is needed to engage them. No tech, gimmicks, or games are required. The student examples I will use are purposefully the ‘worst’ students who ‘hated’ the subject and started with a strong ‘can’t do‘ attitude. They saw no purpose in Art and tried on two occasions in the first week to start a water fight rather than attempt anything productive.

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose

My experiment was based on the research highlighted by Dan Pink (Motivation) and Dylan Wiliam (Learning). I noticed many overlaps in the advice about intrinsic motivation and best learning practice. Intrinsic motivation or what teachers might call genuine engagement requires an individual to see and feel Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Could these three features make the Art haters into Art lovers?

Please watch Dan Pink explaining for 90 seconds.

My experiment started with me considering what do I want most in my students. It boiled down to simply that I wanted them to take the subject seriously and know that they could be better and better at it. Once serious about the subject and their capability to get amazing at it, teaching and applying knowledge and skills would be easy but needed to be taught carefully as part of each individual’s development.

In this scenario, autonomy in the classroom means a learner knows they are working on what they need to work on. Where possible it also means they are applying the required learning to their own context (their own interests, theme, or stories) Knowing that what they are doing is specific to their needs is engaging in itself.

Mastery means an environment where all comments are focused on practical next -steps moving forward and how the next piece of work would be so much better than the current piece. It means that progress is what is celebrated and recorded to then showcase in teaching resources (see left). I used live student examples and compared to last week’s examples to showcase and celebrate progress more than product. By showing the progress on a slide and not naming them, weaker students got a buzz from being the example to the class of progress that we were aiming for, regardless of the current quality of their product. Titiro whakamuri, Kōkiri whakamua is a New Zealand Māori proverb that means “Look back to move forward”

Purpose is offered automatically by the focus on and celebration of progress. When students can see they are improving, it gives school a purpose. Sadly, this sense of development is not felt by learners who are being shunted from one sub-topic to another without the learnings being visibly transported from one assignment into the next. I recommend you watch Wiliam explain this in the 4 minute video below.

More purpose can be added with live publication (I used an online digital gallery from week 1) of best current work. Knowing we were on an improvement process, it became normal for students to request each week that I update their piece in the gallery with their latest improved version. Another way to achieve a sense of accountability is to invite outsiders in to only witness progress. Have a colleague visit the class and then tell the class they will return in two weeks to see the improvements.

Teacher language

I want to highlight the careful use of language I used when continuously moving around the room offering feed-forward for next-steps. I would always start with something I liked about the work and was specific about why it was good and that I wanted more like it. I would then follow this with wanting to see more of something, less of something else, and a new feature that would ‘make the work from now on amazing!” Some people refer to this as the “rose, thorn, bud” feedback. Mixing specific praise with practical what-next steps proved to encourage increases in self-esteem, seriousness, and development. Above is an example of the ‘worst’ student growing over 10 weeks into a super keen, empowered student who celebrated finding out we continue Art after the spring break. The guns were his context in which to learn the knowledge and skills and his interest in these meant more engagement and purpose for him. Also note that this became one of my teaching slides to maintain the focus on development over product and the student was proud, despite his initial output on the left being so poor.

Traditional school kills learning

In the Dylan Wiliam video above he mentions how school is so often circular in its habits rather the spiraling upward. A topic is studied, work is produced, deficiencies are highlighted and teachers hope that they do better when they do it next term or next year. Schools rarely plan a mastery programme across units of study and so much less development happens and expectations remain low. It is extremely hard to plan units of study with an eye on knowledge and skills being shifted from one unit into the next so as to see and feel the development. Mostly, units of study are delivered separately and the student output marked in isolation. You start and finish one circle before separately starting a new circle. This makes actual learning and understanding more difficult.

In a programme of isolated topics and little visible development, gimmicks and games become important to maintain interest. You can hear teachers around the world discussing and sharing engagement strategies but this seems to me because we are choosing or being told to deliver and repeat content rather than focus on learning. Actual learning is engaging in itself.

Comparing learning and education

The slide below compares the 10 week development of the ‘worst‘ (‘I can’t draw‘) Year 7 students in my learning experiment on the left with the output of average Y10 students after 90 weeks of Art Units on the right. What you can see here is the development or lack of development in 2 key aspects of engagement. Firstly the never interrupted incremental development of skills and knowledge but equally important is the development or not of seriousness towards the activity. The Year 10s probably can draw better than the 4 examples shown but a lack of seeing and feeling development over 4 years of Art study (about 90 weeks – Art is not always a whole-year programme) has led them to not apply themselves to the activity. This leads to a double negative hit when it comes to output.

Grades also kill engagement

Another 15 min Wiliam video below points out that the issuing of grades can kill engagement / motivation. He highlights a very controlled research project where the same classes with the same teachers offered feedback in A) comment-only, B) grade-only, and C) comment+grade formats. The short of it is that any mention of grades (B & C) meant that comments didn’t get read and no improvement was seen. Both grade-only, and comment+grade led to no future improvements. Wiliam points out that the first thing a student looks at is a grade and the second thing they look at is their friend’s grade. Successful graded students feel don’t need to read feedback and unsuccessful graded students don’t want to read it.

Sneaking grades into a comment-only mastery environment

The key here is to not issue grades that illicit an emotional response but to make the grading visible for the students to check on. Here is a picture of a wall in the classroom outlining different artwork at different levels. Now those grade examples can become part of the personal mastery system and help to show what students need to do to raise their output to the next level. Now the autonomous learner can combine my regular feed-forward with the examples on the wall to understand improvements. This wall could be example paragraphs with highlighted features, levels of Math, or labelled photographs of movement and expression in Physical Education or performing Arts.

No Grades, Comment forward, and careful with topics.

I hope this paints a picture (excuse the pun) of how powerful a Learning (Mastery) environment is over purely a topic delivery environment. Remember you can run a mastery programme across topic units and experience this rapid development but it will require considerable planning as to how the learning will be built on in the next unit and how will the progress and development across the topic units be showcased and made visible.

Another approach is for any school to focus their earlier school years on developing self-efficacy and seriousness about learning in a personal mastery environment, knowing it will be easier and more successful later to cover particular topics or themes with students who know they can be successful in subjects.

I am happy that my first attempt to teach Art used the intrinsically motivating nature of actual learning to turn Art haters into Art lovers. Truely feeling weekly development in any subject is all that is needed to engage all students. Personal growth is purpose enough.

Personal Mastery = Engagement

An optional extra video below from a Mastery Expert, Robert Greene also aligns with the advice on intrinsic motivation.

Greene’s Mastery steps:

1. Work on something you care about
2. Value learning over product/output
3. Find a Mentor (teacher) to indicate you next steps
4. Build a learning team around you (Peer review) and help others.
5. Now attempt some originality as part of your learning, something you haven’t seen before.
6. Now shift back and forth between learning and original idea testing and you’ve achieved the flow of mastery.