Junior High Takes Student Engagement To New Heights

By Caroline Phillips, 7th Grade History Teacher

After attending the fantastical Ron Clark Academy last spring, reading Hope and Wade King’s The Wild Card this summer, and really just having Tyler Eatherton as a principal, it would be a real feat to not have grown as an engaging educator in the past year. In fact, I think I would have had to shut my eyes, cover my ears, and dig my heels in to get away from it. Growth in this area is simply a by-product of working in the Junior High at Little Rock Christian Academy. As a result, student engagement is part of what makes the Junior High the House of Enthusiasm!

Focusing on student engagement means that with everything you plan and do as a teacher, you’re constantly thinking about the degree to which those activities and interactions will “hook” your students. That sounds violent, but I promise you it isn’t! Take my class as an example. I teach history to seventh graders. Most of them are not naturally pumped to hear about things like the Middle Ages or the Age of Exploration or even the world wars. Trust me, they are completely content making faces at each other, dreaming about lunch, and coming up with the next hilarious thing to say. So, it’s my job to not only present the content to them, but to do so in a way that gets them involved in the process. Do I succeed everyday? Definitely not! You need only to ask my own students. But I would be willing to bet they would also tell you about the time they reenacted the Crusades with Marvel men, mapped out the routes of the explorers with yarn onto my wall-sized map of the world, and probably what they learned about their own families related to World War II. These were the kinds of days that made us all smile.

Creating an engaging lesson does take some planning, but not much more than any other type of lesson. Think about it. Creating slideshows of notes (which I still do from time to time), burying students with mounds of worksheets (which the TEACHER has to grade), and designing written assessments still consumes large amounts of time and effort to create and grade. In those instances, it’s a given that the students will surely hate it (well, there are a few gems who just love a good essay) and you will spend hours grading. But…will you be sure they have learned anything? All you have to go by are their written answers versus your answer key. Could they have just misread the question or gotten lucky on a multiple choice test? And more importantly, where’s the love of learning in that anyway?

If you can switch your focus as a teacher to think like a thirteen-yearold (in my case), you instantly become a lot more creative! “What is cool about this?” “How can we play?” “What information really needs to stick and what can be presented but not required for memory?” When you see them walk around your “Renaissance Art Museum” correctly identifying pieces and artists OR when you hear them explaining to each other how the discovery of iron changed the game for early Africans OR you watch them make connections to medieval feudalism over a handful of jelly beans - the teacher slowly fades into the shadows, while the young minds rise to the challenges for which she has equipped them.

I am no expert (and I do have plenty of multiple choice questions on my tests), but I have put an emphasis on sprinkling in those carefully crafted moments in my classroom - the ones that leave my students with a tangible memory connecting laughter and creativity to “boring” ol’ world history. My hope is that what they remember of my classroom is a time where they were pushed to grow and create and a time where they were seen and loved by a teacher who absolutely adores them!