Engaging the imagination of students

Engaging the imagination of students: An introduction to flow

It can be challenging to know whether students meaningfully retain what is being taught. Some students automatically connect with certain concepts, while others may forget the material before the next lesson. This is a symptom of a bigger problem — engagement. Back in 1990, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi[1] published a book on flow, a helpful concept for increasing engagement and student learning. While not a new theory, flow remains underutilized in many classrooms.

What is flow?

According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a psychological state people experience when an activity is engaging and appropriately challenging according to one’s skill level. When students are in flow, they are deeply absorbed in an intrinsically motivating and interesting activity. Understanding the concept of flow is important as it provides insight into student engagement and can be a prerequisite to deeper learning. There are four basic combinations of skills and challenges students face in various learning experiences as shown below.

Flow is not just an abstract concept. In fact, it is one of more than 80 measures found in the OurSCHOOL student survey. Schools can get an accurate picture of whether students are engaged and challenged at school and can benchmark their results against national norms, as you can see in the image below.

How can we get students in flow?

Low skills and low challenge: Provide supports and increase the level of challenge appropriately as opposed to simply reducing the complexity of a task or reducing the skill level.
Low skills and high challenge: Provide support and align the challenge to students needs and strengths. Provide planned and intentional scaffolding built around concepts that are essential to master the material being taught.
High skills and low challenge: Introduce more challenges. There are a number of ways to engage learners who are excelling, for example, by increasing the difficulty of tasks and problems or asking broader, more open-ended questions that allow for multiple interpretations. Encourage students to reflect on and take ownership of their learning.

Knowing your students

Teachers need to be “students of their students”, as educators Hillary Dack and Carol Ann Tomlinson put it[2]. The knowledge we have of our students should directly influence our lessons in order to engage students imaginations and bring them into a state of flow and deeper learning. In the words of education researcher and The Learning Bar founder, Dr. J. D. Willms, teachers should aim to design “flexible, adaptive learning environments that can be manipulated according to the emerging needs of learners and the learning situation[3].” That environment is reliant on knowing the students in our classrooms.

Educators can help students find flow and enhance a positive learning environment by:

Building positive student-teacher relationships
Setting high expectations for success
Communicating clear expectations for behaviour
Setting appropriate instructional challenges and goals
Ensuring that material is relevant to everyday life
Ensuring that students value schooling outcomes.

By helping students get into a state of flow by creating an engaging environment, schools can have a larger and more positive impact on students’ lives.

Footnotes

[1] Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row.

[2] Dack, H., Tomlinson, C. (2015) Inviting all students to learn. Educational Leadership. Volume 72, Issue 6. P. 10-15

[3] Willms, J. D., & Friesen, S. (2012). Report Number Two: The Relationship Between Instructional Challenge and Student Engagement. What Did You Do In School Today? Research Series. EdCan Network.

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Essential Strategies for Boosting Staff Well-Being in Educational Settings

Essential Strategies for Boosting Staff Well-Being in Educational Settings

Introduction

In today’s challenging educational landscape, the well-being of staff is not just an add-on—it’s a foundation for thriving schools. Teachers and school staff play a pivotal role in shaping student success, but their satisfaction and overall wellness are equally critical. A positive school climate benefits everyone, creating an environment where both students and staff can flourish. While there are various tools and frameworks available for assessing staff well-being, finding the right solution that aligns with your school’s specific needs is key. This blog delves into essential strategies designed to prioritize staff well-being and build a resilient and supportive educational community.

Understanding the Challenges Faced by Educators

Educators today navigate a complex array of challenges, from increased workload and accountability to adapting to rapid changes in educational environments. These challenges can lead to stress, burnout, and high attrition rates, making the well-being of staff a priority.

Creating a Positive School Climate

A healthy school climate transcends physical infrastructure, encompassing nurturing social interactions and emotional experiences. This environment is critical for both educator and student success, influencing factors like commitment, burnout, and overall school connectedness.

Strategies for Enhancing Staff Well-Being

Empower Through Autonomy: Allowing staff to have control over their work and decisions enhances job satisfaction and performance.
Promote Collaborative Culture: Involving staff in decision-making processes and fostering a team-oriented environment boosts morale and job satisfaction.
Prioritize Clear Communication: Effective communication is key to ensuring staff feel informed, valued, and part of the school community.
Balance Workload and Personal Life: Actively managing workload and encouraging a healthy work-life balance are essential for preventing burnout.
Define Roles Clearly: Avoid role ambiguity by clearly defining job roles and expectations to reduce stress and conflict.
Recognize and Celebrate Achievements: Acknowledging staff achievements fosters a sense of value and appreciation.
Foster a Sense of Belonging: Creating an inclusive environment where every staff member feels valued and connected is crucial for a positive school climate.
Cultivate a Supportive Environment: Encourage open discussions about challenges and provide support for mental health and well-being.
Encourage Professional Growth (Eudaimonia): Support staff in pursuing professional development aligned with their goals and interests.
Address Bullying and Inclusion: Develop clear policies and training to handle bullying and promote a culture of inclusion.

Finding the Right Solution for Staff Well-Being Surveys

While implementing these strategies, it’s important to have a mechanism to assess their effectiveness. Choosing the right staff well-being survey tool is crucial. The ideal solution should offer comprehensive insights into crucial aspects of staff well-being, be adaptable to your specific school context, and provide actionable data. Click here to access detailed strategies to support staff Health and Well-being.

Conclusion

Investing in staff well-being is not just a necessity but a strategic approach to enhancing the overall educational experience. By adopting these strategies and selecting a suitable tool for assessing staff well-being, schools and districts can create a more supportive, productive, and fulfilling work environment. This, in turn, positively impacts student achievement and contributes to a thriving educational community. 

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Blog - Educational Prosperity - Looking Beyond Equality to Equity

Educational Prosperity: Looking Beyond Equality to Equity.

By J. Douglas Willms, President of The Learning Bar Inc.

The educational prosperity framework that I introduced in a recent blog provides an essential structure for understanding the holistic and cumulative ways that children develop, learn and thrive. The benefits of the framework are hardly theoretical: they provide an important and practical guide for ways that monitoring data can—and should—be used to create smarter and more effective policies to help young people thrive.

It’s time to rethink our policy model until now, for no other reason than the less-than-impressive stagnation of global reading scores over the last 15 years. The educational prosperity framework advocates for reliance on monitoring data, as well as a frequent—and early—collection of indicators. These can be used to target policies at the local and national level that bring us closer towards the global education goal (SDG 4). We need to move away from a cause-and-effect model that tries to attribute outcomes to a specific intervention and instead recognize that multiple, nonlinear events lead to change. As education practitioners from around the world meet next week in Hamburg for the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML), it is critical to focus on the link between the smart use of data and policies that provide an opportunity for all.

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Early Years Evaluation - Allocate educational resources

Effective Feedback is More Than Just Correcting Student Work: How to give better feedback to improve student learning

Teachers have never-ending opportunities to provide feedback to students. Amidst all the different sources of feedback students receive, neither marks or grades have the biggest impact on student learning. These matter, but they give students little information as to how they can increase their learning or demonstrate more accurately what they have learned. Written and in-person feedback that is specific to the task at hand has the greatest impact on improving learning outcomes.[1] Feedback, when done well, has a powerful influence on student learning.[2] In fact, research suggests that spending slightly less time teaching in order to provide more constructive feedback increases student learning.[3]

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Blog - Educational Prosperity - Teacher

The Educational Prosperity Framework: Helping Countries Provide Foundational Learning for All

By J. Douglas Willms, President of The Learning Bar Inc.

On World Teachers Day, this blog presents an assessment framework, called Education Prosperity, that can be used to track the success of teachers, families, communities and public institutions in developing children’s cognitive skills and their social, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being.

As the president of the International Academy of Education, I am often invited to share ideas about school reforms. During a recent trip to Latin America, I found myself in a discussion focused on classroom improvements as a way to boost PISA scores. The conversation was illuminating, because the policymakers in that room—like so many others around the globe— had the best of intentions, but were nevertheless stuck in a model that had them looking in the wrong places.

As I told the group, the foundations for learning are established years before students sit down for the PISA exam or even enter a classroom. In a country that suffers from maternal and child malnutrition, where that particular meeting had taken place, understanding the ways that achievements in education are interconnected—and cumulative— is key to making policy changes that ensure our children are thriving.

These interactions form the basis of my new paper published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Learning Divides: Using Data to Inform Educational Policy. As the international education community prepares for the meeting of the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (17-18 October in Hamburg), understanding the interconnectedness of children’s learning processes is critical to measuring progress towards key SDG 4 targets.

Understanding and using data to inform policy

Despite our best attempts, students’ reading skills have not improved over the past fifteen years and if we are to move forward and make real progress, we need a better way of understanding data to inform policy. Indeed, ahead of the GAML meeting, we need to be advocating for a comprehensive and holistic framework—what I call “educational prosperity”— that acknowledges the importance of the foundations for successful learning. Our framework increasingly needs to embrace a life-course approach that considers the impacts of various processes from conception through late adolescence—and we need to be using these data to craft more effective policies.

Traditional approaches to measuring education progress have proven to be insufficient and are failing to capture a critical nuance: Looking at exam results for 15-year-olds—or even 10-year-olds— is misleading. Many of the existing frameworks have misled policymakers for decades because they ignore the cumulative result of a number of factors that affect children’s development. As researchers would put it, we’re using test results to make causal claims and while assessment is critical, it only captures the reality of a specific moment in time, rather than the cumulative and foundational factors that led up to it. Poor reading results in fourth grade, for example, are often the result of poor foundational support for literacy in the early years—and so may be an indication of misguided early childhood development policy or insufficient family support and not necessarily school policy, poor infrastructure, or low teaching quality.

An alternative approach through the education prosperity framework

The “educational prosperity” framework presented in the new UIS papers offers an important alternative that can use existing monitoring data to track the success of families, communities and public institutions in developing children’s cognitive skills, as well as their social, emotional, physical and spiritual well-being. The framework provides a multi-dimensional understanding of development at each stage that looks at the role of families, institutions and communities. These ‘Foundations for Success,’ which drive outcomes along six stages of development, provide an important visualization of the ways that success can be cumulative and non-linear.

For example, prosperity outcomes for children in early primary school may include literacy and numeracy, but success is not dependent on institutional factors such as quality instruction and adequate learning materials alone. Rather, the framework operates under the understanding that success is also built on family factors such as parenting skills and family involvement, as well as community factors such as adequate resources and social capital. The framework uses a wider lens for understanding student outcomes—recognizing the reality that school factors and inputs alone are not the sole foundations for student achievement.

Focus on early reading

The educational prosperity framework is based on three interconnected premises. The first is that early reading needs to be the primary focus of educational monitoring systems. The reason is simple: literacy is a pre-requisite for later success in lower and upper secondary levels and provides the scaffolding for developing so many other skills, including numeracy, problem solving and socio-emotional know-how. Indeed, a failure to develop strong skills during the early years increases the risk of school failure.

Second, to better capture ‘school effects’, we can build an informative educational monitoring systems which incorporate the findings of over twenty years of research on the causal factors that lead to better student outcomes.

Third, results from the international studies need to be coupled with national studies and small controlled experimental studies, which can provide educational administrators with information for setting achievable goals, allocating resources, and creating policies for change. We don’t need to keep gathering data on things we already know and instead, should focus on the small-scale testing of reform and studies that focus on a small number of factors. We need to be measuring these in greater detail while tracking them longitudinally.

To be clear, I am not calling for the abandonment of large-scale international studies. Much of my research is based on PISA data, which has played a critical role in helping countries understand how well their students compare with students in other countries while generating the political will for investing in education. But it’s time to look beyond the international studies and consider additional ways to measure and guide our educational policies.

As countries decide to join cross-national assessments or continue to develop their own, I am hopeful that the “educational prosperity” framework will be an essential guide for individual countries—and the global community as a whole—to craft effective strategies that promote educational opportunity for all children.

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Blog - Using student data to reduce anxiety and enhance school climate

Using student data to reduce anxiety and enhance school climate at St. Dominic Fine Arts School, Calgary, AB.

Implementing the OurSCHOOL Student Survey at St. Dominic in 2015 allowed former Principal Kevin DeForge and Assistant Principal Joelle Marshall to learn that 32 per cent of students reported feeling medium to high levels of anxiety at school. Knowing it’s not just the data that matters, but what you do with it, Kevin and his team sought to understand what was driving this.

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Are your students ready for life after graduation?

The critical process of career planning starts in early childhood and intensifies during adolescence. Despite the emphasis placed on identifying a vocation before graduation, less than 20 percent of students make a stable career choice by age 17.

Do you have the complete picture?

 

The new Career Pathways module was developed by our in-house research team to help educators better understand and support their Grades 7-12 students’ transition from school to higher education and employment. 

The module, a part of the OurSCHOOL Secondary Survey, consists of 10 main question areas which capture:

student aspirations after graduation;
level of commitment to a particular job;
current exploration into career options;
students’ career knowledge;
perceived obstacles;
current use of school-level resources and opportunities; and,
perceived importance of specific skills.
How can you use the data to prepare your students for success?

A Thematic Report outlines student goals, vocational knowledge and career identity. Make informed decisions on the support and instruction students need to explore careers, guide them to relevant programs, and gain the vocational experience they need to succeed.

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