In my District I am part of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) with other administrators. The focus of our PLC is the Classroom Walkthrough practice as a tool to improve student achievement. During our professional day in October we decided to collect data on whether or not student-centered learning was taking place and present our finding to our respective staffs in January. As a group we decided to zero in on whether or not students were engaged in order to determine if student-centered learning was taking place using the following criteria/definitions:
- Actively engaged in individual practice
- Not note taking or viewing a video unless connected to an accompanying activity
- Cooperative learning/Group work
- Instruction expects students to be participants
- Students should be engaged in an inquiry or discovery based activity
- Common question asked to students - Can you tell me what you’re learning about in this lesson?
Defining what constitutes student engagement can be extremely tricky and quite arbitrary at best. How would you define or describe whether or not students are engaged during a lesson? What should administrators look for? I would like to expand or alter the list above based on your feedback.
If you would like to learn more about PLC's check out AllThingsPLC.
