Engaging Student Minds with Authentic Intellectual Work

In our work as educational coaches, we find that the challenge at the forefront of most teachers’ minds is engagement.  

How do I engage my students?  Why aren’t my students motivated? What are ways I can get and keep my students interested? 

Across the country, across disciplines, and across grade levels, questions like these are echoed time and again. 

These are critical questions and ought to focus any consideration of teaching practices that produce higher levels of learning.  Our view is that student engagement is the most authentic driver for deep learning.  Engagement is like being in the zone, where kids – totally engrossed in an endeavor to the point where time almost stands still and outside distractions almost disappear – are fully immersed and invested. To push learning beyond acquisition of basic skills and inspire perseverance, students need to feel connected to what is being learned.  If learners are not greatly interested and involved in the task at hand, we are lucky to get compliance, let alone real engagement.

This is, of course, not new thinking.  Engagement is a frequent topic at conferences, school-based professional development, and has inspired many “how-to” books and articles.  We find, however, that teachers sometimes assume that engagement requires “fun” assignments.  Often engagement and intellectual rigor are seen as a trade-off.  We’ll make it fun or we’ll make them work their brains hard.  But can we do both?  And can we afford not to?

At Abeo’s College Prepared Project, we’re turning these assumptions inside out as teachers learn how to engage students with work that is both relevant and intellectually challenging.  Using a framework known as Authentic Intellectual Work, we support teachers through collaboration, reflection and inquiry to ask students to construct knowledge and use disciplined inquiry to produce products or performances that have value beyond school. In the Project, cohorts of teachers learn to assess and fill the gap between the work they are asking students to do and the expectations students will be asked to meet in college. Teachers learn to design tasks and deliver instruction that encourage students to research into a particular discipline and create new knowledge for a real purpose and a genuine audience – the work of adults.  As teachers examine their own assignments and those of their peers, they’re asked to consider how each task expects students to use their minds well.  Is it rigorous and relevant?  Will it prepare them for college and beyond?

Why are the three elements of AIW so significant to college preparedness and engagement?  As we’ve guided teachers to be researchers into their own practice, here’s what we’ve learned.

Students need to construct knowledge.  In many facets of life we are required to problem-solve in order to make sense or meaning of a particular situation.  If successful, we have used information to make inferences and predictions; we’ve interpreted and synthesized input from a variety of sources.  If successful, we’ve analyzed and exercised some level of evaluation to make decisions.  And, if successful, we have created something purposeful.  These cognitive processes are routine for all of us in every day life; students exercise them routinely as well, but rarely in association with academic work.  We find that an expectation of creativity touches the spirit of what it is to be human and connects students to academic work in a powerful way. 

CPP participants link this element of engagement to intellectual rigor by considering the authenticity of the task and evidence of thinking.  Questions guide their work:  What is the purpose of the task? How are students being asked to think? Will there be a new idea or simply an evaluation of an old one? What will be evidence of new thinking?

Students need the opportunity and expectation to learn deeply. Disciplined inquiry emphasizes depth of knowledge versus breadth of knowledge.  When students are taught and asked to approach content or subject as disciplinarians, students learn the ways of thinking, reading, writing, and communicating that occur within the field. Students engage deeply with the subject to understand the content, processes, and forms of communication unique to the discipline.

As CPP participants collaborate around their work, they look for evidence of disciplinary research, thinking and communication. Questions guide their work:  How is knowledge acquired? How are students being asked to think and use knowledge?  Is there deep knowledge and how is that expressed?

Students respond powerfully to real work.  Purposeful work is relevant work.  No one wants to engage in tasks that are pointless and serve no purpose.  We have learned that student detachment isn’t a sign of low motivation or laziness; it’s a natural response to work that lacks purpose. When students are asked to tackle the kind of open-ended and undefined tasks that are encountered in daily life, we see an investment of energy that comes from doing something that matters.  There is a “so what” to the hard work they are being asked to do.

CPP participants examine and design tasks to ensure that this dimension of relevancy is present and that student assignments provide opportunities for authentic purposes. Critical questions become a lens for their scrutiny: What value does it have beyond exhibition of knowledge? Are there a purpose and an audience for the work? Does it mirror the adult world?

So what engages students? Authentic intellectual work that incorporates rigorous and relevant tasks, where learners are asked to use their minds well and to originally apply knowledge and skills.  If you ask students to go beyond the routine use of facts and procedures, carefully studying and resolving a challenging problem that has meaning beyond success in school, they will engage authentically and learn well and deeply.

If we want students to be fully present and interested in learning, we need to routinely ask ourselves if what we’re offering them is authentic intellectual work.

From Abeo Partners, 
Chris Hoyos and Harriette Thurber Rassmussen