Of Monsters and Math

Keven Kroehler is the Director of Operations at EdVisions Schools in Henderson, MN. In this post, he explores student engagement and the lessons from the Pixar film, Monsters Inc. (Just in time for Halloween!)

Think about it. Engaged students might learn more than unengaged students. Yep, that makes sense. So the solution to our education woes may be as simple as engaging our students. But how easy is it to engage students? Teachers plan song and dance presentations, teachers try to apply topics to real life, Madeline Hunter recommends an amazing opening set, and some teachers bribe the students. Engagement seems a bit elusive. Well, it turns out that engagement is really not that elusive! Students engage all the time! Sometimes they even engage in school.

Over the past number years Dr. Mark Van Ryzin and Dr. Ron Newell have done research around the idea of engagement. The results of that research give us some interesting insight into how we might increase student engagement. Research shows that engagement is a product of other variables. It’s not an element -- it’s a molecule. It’s not the flour or chocolate chips in cookies -- it’s the cookie. If you want to make more engagement you need to add more of the base ingredients. You can’t just focus on engagement and get more engagement; you need to focus on the ingredients of engagement to increase engagement.

The research proven recipe for increasing student engagement includes things like:

Notice that this recipe for increasing engagement does not include extra seat time, detention, more tests, common core of curriculum, or even another homework assignment.

Thirty years of research shows that engagement goes down the longer students remain in schools. Not good news for those of you at the high school level. I would guess that adding extra math and reading classes would only accelerate the disengagement. One anomaly to the engagement dilemma in schools has been a network of full-time advisory schools! The longer students remain in these schools the more engaged they become, and this increased engagement has been correlated to increased academic scores! Research shows that spending time focusing on kids first, content second leads to significant increases in academics.

Consider the movie Monsters Inc. At the beginning of the movie the monsters worked hard to “scare” the energy out of the sleeping kids. By the end of the movie they gathered much more energy by encouraging the kids to release the energy willingly. Students have plenty of energy for learning, maybe we could get more content out of them by focusing on engagement.