On today's episode of the Innovative Schools podcast, we are talking with professor John Almerod about student engagement, entertainment versus engagement, and how to hook your students into that wonderful lesson you work all night on. Come on. Let's learn together. Hey, everybody. I am Jordan, your host for this episode of the Innovative Schools podcast.
Jordan Bassett:Today, we are talking with James Madison University professor, John Almerod. John, welcome to the podcast.
John Almarode:Hey. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. I am too. You know, I was really excited when we were planning out the podcast for this season, and we said, we need to get John on this podcast and and talk to him about all of the different work and different things that you you do. I'm a I'm a little upset because I know you best with a bow tie, but there's no bow tie today. You went with the the blazer over the hoodie, but you're repping JMU.
John Almarode:I am. And and this is my, let's sit down and have a conversation about top issues, versus the, let me look so professional that if you come up behind me and scare me, I'll break. So it's a little bit of a of a different approach.
Jordan Bassett:Got it. Okay. Well, we'll run with it. If you look up John Elm Road online, if you just type his name in, you will see the bow ties I'm referring to. Do you wear the same bow tie twice, or is it always a new one?
John Almarode:So I'm embarrassed to share that I have it set up so that I don't repeat in an academic year.
Jordan Bassett:Okay.
John Almarode:My students will call me out, and so some of that is out of necessity because they'll say, you've already worn that one before. But let me be very clear.
Jordan Bassett:Is there like a bow tie bingo that your students What?
John Almarode:Yeah. So, I think probably internally, is there one formally? I don't know that. But just to be clear so that it doesn't come across as, gluttonous. Remember, I teach at a university, so I do not see them every day from August till May.
John Almarode:And so I do not have a 86 bow ties. No. Not even half of that, not even a third because I see them once or twice a week. So, yes, I I Got it. Different bow tie every class.
Jordan Bassett:Gotcha. Gotcha. So speaking about you, teaching at JMU, what what's your role there? What do you what do you do for James Madison University?
John Almarode:So I'm in the college of education, which means all of my students are future classroom teachers. Now there are other programs in the college that are not pre k through 12 destined, individuals, but the program and the department that I work in, all of ours are going to be classroom teachers, and I teach methods courses. And so it's that transition from theory to practice and how to implement it in in the context of a pre k 12 classroom.
Jordan Bassett:Got it. Yeah. That's super relevant stuff to our audience. So I'm glad that they get a little piece of kinda what you teach and and what you do. There's, there's two other things I wanna I wanna bring up about you personally is I was looking at your website and reading through your biography, and what you have written there.
Jordan Bassett:And you have a very special teacher to you that kinda sets you on this path. Can you talk a little bit about miss Cross?
John Almarode:Absolutely. Yeah. I'm always happy to talk about miss Cross. It's I've always I've always wanted to be a teacher. I grew up in a family of teachers, aunts, uncles, cousins.
John Almarode:And so so being a teacher was always something I wanted to do. Now I'm more comfortable sharing this. I was much more embarrassed by it, when I was younger. I used to play school all the time. Whatever I learned that day at school, I would come home and teach it to myself, which is probably why I retained it.
John Almarode:Yeah. I learned the science of learning. It wasn't until I walked through, the threshold of Room 30 at Steward's Draft Middle School and met miss Cross that I really locked in that I wanted to teach science and I wanted to teach science a certain way.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah.
John Almarode:And a lot of what we talk about today is gonna tie back to the way that miss Cross set up her classroom, and the experiences I had in that classroom. It's driven a lot of my research, it's driven a lot of my decisions in the classroom. But more importantly, what's cool is that if you were and there's no way this means anything. But as a point of reference, if you go two tenths of a mile that way, you will be on miss Cross's doorstep. And my children affectionately refer to her as grandma Sally.
Jordan Bassett:Oh, that's awesome. So she continues to be someone in your life. That sounds like a a really special teacher, educator for you. Yeah. Absolutely.
Jordan Bassett:That's wonderful. So you mentioned a little bit about your research and things, and you've done work with John Hattie's Visible Learning. Can you tell us a little bit about what what you've done with that? I just kinda just, you know, maybe a 50,000 foot view or whatever of of your work with John Hattie's Visible Learning.
John Almarode:Sure. The way I the way I met John Hattie was is a bit of a twisted story. I was handed his original visible learning book. It was no pictures, no color photos at all. It was nothing but a book about 800 meta analyses on how students learn and achieve.
John Almarode:And I thought, gosh. What a boring book. So I gave it away. And then someone gave me another copy, and I gave that one away. And it wasn't until I had the third copy in my hands that I said, something's up here.
John Almarode:Why is this the third time this one has been handed to me? So I read it, and I was like, wait a second. This is really important stuff. Somebody has actually brought all the research together. So jump ahead.
John Almarode:I had the opportunity to interact with him and get to talk with him and and and share some ideas and found myself then collaborating with him. So my role primarily now with with John is to help with the translation of meta and analysis and the influences into classroom practice. And so Gotcha. While I help gather the metas and help analyze the metas and help maintain the visible learning database, my primary function is to work alongside him and his team to say, okay. So what would this look like in a middle school in Texas or Nebraska or and and start that transition work?
Jordan Bassett:So let's get into engagement and talking about engagement. That's what we're really, really here for. So just at first, I feel like sometimes engagement is this buzzword kind of thing you hear. You have to engage your kids or your students, and engagement is important. And all you know, there's a lot of things about engagement.
Jordan Bassett:I guess to just start this conversation is how do you define engagement, or how do you feel about it being a buzzword? Just what's kinda, like, your your overall starting view of engagement Yeah. In the classroom?
John Almarode:Yeah. In so and I mean this. I don't mean this as criticism, but it has become, a jargon term or or or it's very jargony. And I think some of it is our desire to oversimplify things, to try to get an impact. So so we picked engagement, and we said, alright.
John Almarode:It's this term. We overuse it, and it's become this mysterious thing. So with alright. Let's simplify it down. So the only way to do that is to say students are engaged or they aren't engaged.
John Almarode:The minute we turned it into a dichotomy, a yes or no situation, that's where it starts to get really, really tough, and it becomes an even more jargony type word. Mhmm. So there are three things I would say about the word engagement. Number one, we've oversimplified it to a yes or no situation. Number two, we tend to view engagement through our own experiences and and the lenses that we have in front of us.
John Almarode:Failing to recognize and, again, this is not critical, and there's no malintent here. But failing to recognize that I may engage with something differently than you might or you might or this person might engage. And so we tend to view engagement through our lens. And the third piece is that we try to then, through the oversimplification and then looking at it through our lens, we then try to generalize it, and try to explain it in ways that actually take us farther away from something that might help us truly up the engagement in, say, seventh grade social studies or twelfth grade literature or fifth grade language arts and mathematics. And so that has led to some recent research to try to make sense of engagement.
John Almarode:What does it mean to be engaged? And if you're listening to this podcast, I would ask you to say, alright, what does it mean to be engaged in your classroom?
Jordan Bassett:Yeah.
John Almarode:And that's how I define it. What does it mean to be a good learner in your context? What would a learner say or do or how would they feel, if they were truly making progress and growth in your learning environment. And that does several things. Number one, it recognizes that context matters.
John Almarode:If I'm in EMT class in a career technical course, that engagement is gonna look different than if I'm analyzing Beowulf. And it's gonna look different if I'm learning about overhand throwing in physical education, and it's gonna look different than if I'm understanding, the elements of a thesis statement and how to write a narrative in sixth grade language arts. So engagement to me means what is the student actively doing? How are they actively interacting with the environment to make progress in their growth and their learning? And the reason I asked that of the listeners is it's gonna differ based on that context and recognizing that as the first step to getting out of the jargon and into the action.
John Almarode:Yeah.
Jordan Bassett:I think that's a really good point that you make of how the your context really changes your perception of engagement or what engagement should should look like. Like you're saying is that engagement looks different between, you know, PE or physical education where you're learning how to throw versus how to write a a paper. And really, you know, think I'm even just sitting here now as we're recording this, and I'm thinking, okay. How what am I expecting of myself being engaged in this conversation? Like, answering that question because I think I think you can't really expect a student to engage if you don't know what that looks like.
Jordan Bassett:Right? You're kind of asking them to just hunt in the dark to figure out what it what it means to engage. One of the other jumping back to kinda at the beginning, you're saying that engagement is a yes or we've looked at it as a yes or no. So I'm reading into that thinking that maybe there's other levels to engagement from your perspective what you're saying.
John Almarode:Absolutely. So what we've done, and when I say we, it's the royal we. While I've done some of of, of the research around engagement, there are many other studies. So when I say we understand, it is the royal we. What's interesting is that if, again, if you're listening to this podcast, you are likely going to have different levels of engagement Here, if you're driving home from work and listening to this podcast, your engagement is gonna be fundamentally different than if you're sitting at your kitchen table listening to it and have the opportunity to pause and answer the question that I posed earlier.
John Almarode:What What does it mean to be a good learner? So you might pause it and actually write that out. You might discuss this with a neighbor. You might talk to yourself in the car, but if you're driving your vehicle, you are limited. So there are even different levels of engagement, but it doesn't mean the person in the car listening to this podcast is somehow less engaged or not as interested and motivated as the person sitting at their kitchen table or talking it out with a colleague.
John Almarode:It's just a different level. And what's fascinating is if you pull together what engagement looks like across different contexts, physical education, twelfth grade literature, fifth grade mathematics, seventh grade, ag science, there are some commonalities. There are some commonalities. And what is that's allowed us to do is to lay them out on the table and say, okay. Can we think about engagement not as a yes or no?
John Almarode:Because that's not healthy, and it's not helpful, because you may have a learner sitting in the desk. And if you're listening, I I need you to either amen this or nod your head at this one. If you have a learner that's sitting in your classroom staring out the window, your first assumption is little Leroy is not paying attention. But what if little Leroy is playing out in his head how the water cycle actually works, and they just needed to break eye contact with
Jordan Bassett:the Sure. Yeah.
John Almarode:Board and kinda think through it. And they're actually visualizing in their mind what the water cycle looks like, feels like, and sounds like. We've made assumptions on Leroy's body. And by the way, Leroy, because where I come from, that's what we name our kids. We we make some assumptions.
John Almarode:So yes or no doesn't work. There's gotta be
Jordan Bassett:more
John Almarode:to it. So there's a continuum of engagement. While it was first made famous by Amy Berry, a researcher out of Australia, it's become the prevailing view of engagement going from, what I would say would be active disengagement, where the learner is tearing that room up. They are actively disrupting to passive disengagement, where they are staring off into space, thinking about the weekend. If you're in a faculty meeting, and this is gonna really resonate with some of your listeners, you're in a faculty meeting and you're looking to the front of the room, but you're doing email.
John Almarode:That's that's passive disengagement.
Jordan Bassett:That's that's what I'm doing right now in this podcast. No. I'm not. Yeah.
John Almarode:And my pauses are because, you know, I'm reading text messages.
Jordan Bassett:We all do it.
John Almarode:But there's that pass you're not actively disrupting anything. You're you're behaving, but your mind's somewhere else to then passive engagement where I'm just following directions. I'm doing what you tell me, but nothing more all the way then to active engagement where here we go. Where we bring together all of the answers to what makes a good learner and we find commonalities. And so learners are setting goals.
John Almarode:They're asking questions. They're seeking feedback. They're giving themselves feedback. They're monitoring their progress. They're evaluating their current level of understanding.
John Almarode:So there are all of these commonalities that come out of the answers to those questions that have become known as active engagement. But we can slide up and down that continuum on a daily basis for lots of reason. There are lots of reasons why I might not be actively engaged now, but then come back to it. So it's a continuum. In my opinion, that is the best way to think about it Yeah.
John Almarode:As a continuum.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. Yeah. That's great. So we so we did some research just trying to figure out see kinda to bring some clarity to engagement, like, what's actually happening. Are kids engaged?
Jordan Bassett:Are they not engaged? How like, whatever things. And so we did find in in 2018, I guess, there was a a study done. This says it was 5,000,000, students. 47% of the students surveyed said that they said they were engaged.
Jordan Bassett:But then, like, you're talking about that that continuum, 29% said that they were not engaged and 24 were actively disengaged. And I think that's a great clarity to bring to this whole idea of engagement because I even think with with my daughter, she's seven right now, is I can be trying to help her with her homework and telling her something or talking to her, and she looks like she's on another planet just taking in the views of whatever's there. And I'll say, are you listening to what I'm saying? And she can tell me every single thing that I said, like, and how to do it, and then she can, like, get into her work. But I make that assumption about, her looking, participating, so to speak.
Jordan Bassett:Her lack of participating or what I'm interpreting isn't participating is her not engaged in what I'm what I'm saying. So with that, like, talking about I wanna talk a little bit about kind of getting into that conversation of engagement versus participation. You said it a little bit, but just kinda helping the listeners maybe identify or look at how do we actually identify engagement versus some other things that like you're saying, they're staring out the window, and they're just processing it and playing it in their head versus not actually engaged.
John Almarode:Yeah. And that is that is a huge challenge. Unless you have, an fMRI, or a PET scan, or a MEG machine in your classroom, what we're trying to capture is what's happening inside the learner's cognitive architecture in Room 30, Sixth Grade Science classroom. And so that creates a bit of a challenge because it means we rely on other cues and clues to tell us what's and so your your daughter, that's a great example. If I rely too much on behavioral cues without gathering evidence, I'm gonna make some assumptions that may lead to mistakes that actually disengage a learner that was engaged because we fuss at them.
Jordan Bassett:You know,
John Almarode:I need you to pay attention. Look up here. Quit staring out the window. So then what we do is we mess with their emotional, feelings about the classroom. And so then they check out because now they are like, wait a second.
John Almarode:I'm not safe. I just got yelled at. So you have just captured exactly what makes this so hard. The old model of engagement, in addition to yes and no, was there's cognitive, there's behavioral, and there's emotional. And while that does explain the three levels of engagement, what it forgets to do is how they is explain how they're integrated, and it ignores the fact we really can't capture some of that.
John Almarode:And so what you're talking about here with your daughter and my daughter experiences the same thing, my son, is is much, better about that because he's a 10 year old. Tessa is 13. And so as a teenager, she's not gonna show her hand. But the 10 year old will tell you. He'll just come out and sit because he's at that age.
John Almarode:And so how do we capture this? The answer I have right now, and that doesn't mean it's gonna be the answer I have later, is the University of Oklahoma at Norman, their k twenty center, did a lit review that is just phenomenal, and and they identified a term known as agentic engagement. And so what it does is it focuses on specific behaviors of the learner, but requires the teacher to make those behaviors visible. Mhmm. I'll tell you what I mean.
John Almarode:Agentic engagement is what we've talked about, asking questions, seeking feedback, engaging in self evaluation, metacognitive strategy, all those sorts of things. But it does require as a classroom teacher, for me to create experiences that make that thinking and learning visible. So I have to then make sure that I have students say, turn to your neighbor and summarize what you've just heard, and then I'm listening. Write out this summary. Hey, take a quick second and answer this question based on what you've just read.
John Almarode:Show me your active reading strategy. In other words, how do we make thinking and learning visible so that we can bring what's inside their brains out into the open? Contrast that with a student who sits in the classroom, watches a PowerPoint presentation, and does fill in notes for forty five minutes. You have no idea what they're thinking about. Yeah.
John Almarode:Nothing. You have no opportunity to let you know.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. So you have to have so as teachers and educators, we have to have a way to to really put facts, I guess, on on paper for us to, like, look at things because you can't tell what the exterior the way body language or anything always if they're engaged or participating or or any of that different stuff. So, you know, it sounds like what you're saying and and I agree with that. I've seen that in my own life that that's that's really important to verify the information that's being soaked in. Well, we are going to take a little break.
John Almarode:Okay.
Jordan Bassett:And when we come back from that break, we'll continue this conversation. We'll get more into this entertainment versus, engagement kinda question and, hopefully, a couple of thing a couple additional things because we've already given some of, things that teachers can do to try and help, with engagement in their students and everything. So everyone hang out for, a little bit, and we'll see you guys after the break. Hey. Welcome back everybody to the Innovative Schools podcast.
Jordan Bassett:We've been talking with doctor John Amroad from James Madison University about engagement. He's already given us some great things to think about, like, what does it look like in your classroom when engagement happens? Answering that kind of question, taking some time to reflect on that, and seeing because the context matters whether you're in an English class or math class or physical education or art. Engagement can look different in all of that. We've all also already kinda talked about how, you can't rely on the outside appearance of a student necessarily to know if they're engaged.
Jordan Bassett:We kinda talked about maybe that kid that looks like they are 50 miles away looking out the window, can maybe they're just processing what was just said, and they're actually still completely engaged and they're working through that. But so John's still with us. I wanted to get into this question, though, with engagement, engagement versus entertainment. Are they the same thing? Are they different?
Jordan Bassett:Pros, cons. You know, let's just talk about these two words, entertainment versus engagement.
John Almarode:Oh, that's a tough one. And and, boy, I wrestle with this one a lot because some of it is our desire to keep up with our learners. And we're almost forced into this. Right? I mean, one of the the the buzz sayings or the cliches that I use all the time is how do we get them to eat peas when all they wanna do is eat ice cream?
Jordan Bassett:Yes. I love that saying.
John Almarode:And the idea being is, how am I supposed to get learners in my own classroom when I taught high school math? How am I supposed to get learners to engage in trig identities when I'm competing with Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, block I'm not sure if I'm allowed to name official things on a podcast, but you get where I'm going with this. Here we are. Yeah. Here we are.
John Almarode:Yeah. The environments they have on their phones and their televisions, and I'm supposed to get them to be on fire for trig identities. Are you kidding me? And and so then what do I do? I choose to then entertain and hope that it leads to them being able to use trig identities to solve so first of all, education, entertainment, and educational engagement are two very different things.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah.
John Almarode:The old slogan, you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, it applies here. So there's nothing wrong with engaging learners with a hook, something that grabs their attention. In science, it might be a demonstration. In language arts, it might be some a provocative question. In social studies, it might be a scenario where individuals are personally attached, civil rights related.
John Almarode:In physical education, it might be a game. There's there's a difference between hooking them and then using that hook then to build in the necessary skills, concepts and understandings. They are very different.
Jordan Bassett:Sure.
John Almarode:Does entertainment work? Well, here's the deal. How many times have you watched a great movie? You've read a great book, but then when you went to tell someone about it, you struggled to give the details. You had to speak in generalities.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. Yeah. That's a great example.
John Almarode:You even said well, you know, well, I I can't think of it right now, but go watch it.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love it.
John Almarode:Well, you can't if you entertain on it, in in science, they can't get to the test and go, well, I can't think of it right now, but you should go take the class. You'll figure it out. No. It doesn't work. So we have evidence that entertainment only lasts so long.
John Almarode:One more example of how we know this, you hear a great joke. It makes you laugh. I mean, you you belly laugh at it. You go to tell it to someone else. You're almost guaranteed to screw up the punch line.
John Almarode:Why? Because it entertained you, but it you didn't retain the information in that joke. So they are different. They are very different.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. I think so, I love movies. And so you're using that as an example. My wife and I actually we, when the best picture nominations come out every year, we try and watch all of them. It's just a thing that we do.
Jordan Bassett:It's we've done it our whole marriage. We try and watch them all. And I can think back to some of my favorite movies and how they, you know, engage me to go and talk about them, but I can talk about them in specifics. Or even it it makes me want to go and look up online what other people have said or look more deeply into the subject or whatever is going on, opposed to a movie that I'm like, oh, that's fun. Maybe maybe thinking, like, I love Marvel movies.
Jordan Bassett:Uh-huh. And sometimes, maybe one of them, I don't know that much about the specific hero in that movie, but I'll go and look at it. But most of the time, I'm like, yeah. It was a fun movie. It had explosions, and they saved people, I guess.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. I guess it was fun. Or but watching, you know, something that's a little bit more engaging of, like, oh, I can really understand that person and then drawing me in to do more research and to look and seeing that difference between the entertainment and and engagement. So I've seen a a trend, I don't know if trend's the right word, on social media about trying to engage students and would like your your take on this of sometimes I see these teachers who are standing on desks Uh-huh. Or they're, making kind of elaborate I think I saw one the other day of a teacher who turned their classroom into an airplane so that their kids could be, like, on the airplane to go and learn about another country.
Jordan Bassett:Like like, they took the airplane. Like, they had, like, sit and like, the whole room was covered. And just to make it look like the inside of an airplane, they had tickets and things that they had to to do, and then they had a layover. And also so I don't know. I I guess my question is is thinking about engagement versus entertainment, a little bit more of where's that line?
Jordan Bassett:Do these things Yeah. Work to do these these big elaborate things, or is it maybe sometimes they work, maybe they don't? I don't know. What what's your take on stuff like that?
John Almarode:So probably, the most disappointing answer you could ever expect, on a podcast. I have no idea. But here's what I mean. Here's what I mean by that. There's a reason I am pretty confident to say I don't know.
John Almarode:If if they come into the room and they have their tickets and they sit on the airplane and they travel to, Cairo or Alexandria. That might have a huge impact on their learning, or it might just be they get so wrapped up in the airplane, so pretending that they're traveling that they no longer listen. So the trend is and the connection here is it depends on what happens next. Got it. It depends on what strategies, approaches, interventions, techniques that the teacher uses following the airplane ride that determines whether information is acquired, consolidated, and stored.
John Almarode:The airplane is the attention getter, but what I do when I have their attention matters most. Otherwise, it's nothing but smoke and mirrors. So Gotcha. The reason I don't know is because in that classroom, I would wanna know what did you do next once you had them on the airplane and they were ready to go? What did you do next when you stood on the desk?
John Almarode:What did you do next when you taught them the song? It's not the song, the desk, or the airplane. It's what happens next that determines whether that makes a difference or whether you're just a carnival act for a room full of six year olds.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. I think, you know, that's a really great distinction, to think. It it could be helpful. But like you're saying, the the more important part is what you do once you have their attention. I can make a loud noise and get the attention of a room, but what I say after that is more important than me just yelling to to get to to get attention.
Jordan Bassett:So let's talk a little bit about that that next step then. You said a little bit in the in the first part of the podcast about how, we you have to kinda collect data from your students to know if they are engaged. You can't look at their facial expression or kinda what's going on, but you have to collect that data. How what's a good way or some good ways for educators to collect that data? And then, well, the next question will be, what do we do with that after it's collected?
John Almarode:So the the the next steps, there are some general guidelines, principles, that the science of learning gives us that helps make decisions post airplane, post getting on the desk, post teaching the dance. Okay? So here here's number one. What are the students actively processing? So general principle number one is students must be actively processing the content, the skills, and the understanding.
John Almarode:In other words, we shift the lift. Who's doing the heavy lifting? If I'm doing all of the talk about Alexandria and ancient Egypt when they get off the airplane, then they are passively engaged on that continuum. Sure. Yeah.
John Almarode:I am simply lecturing to them, about the order of operations after I've gotten on the desk and acted it out, then they're just passively engaged. And the same thing goes then for the song or the dance. So guideline number one is, are they doing the heavy lifting, or are you doing the heavy lifting? Am I doing the
Jordan Bassett:answer? Yeah.
John Almarode:That's number one. Number two, in that heavy lifting, am I generating visible evidence of their thinking? It's the difference between a matching worksheet and a three minute writing task where they have to write a summary of what they learned. In the matching task, I just know whether a was matched with 17 or 17 match. With the writing task, I get to see what vocab they used, what connections they made, how they sequenced their summaries.
John Almarode:And so am I giving them tasks that make their thinking visible that I then can see where they are?
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. That sounds a lot like what I whenever I learn something new, my wife get she might get a little annoyed with this, but I go home and I wanna talk to her about it. And she's like, I don't care what you're talking about. I was like, I don't care if you care. I wanna see if I can explain it.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. I I wanna see if I've gotten this well. And if if I can explain it to you, then I feel like I've actually learned whatever the concept is. It sounds a lot like that kind of concept.
John Almarode:Absolutely. Richard Mayer is, is a professor I think he might be professor emeritus now at a UC Santa Barbara, and he coined the term generative learning. Generative learning, and generative learning strategies are those strategies that actively ask learners to to select, organize, and, integrate content. And so there are a specific group of strategies that are known for having higher levels of impact on student learning, but it's because they are doing the active processing. They are actively engaged, and it makes the learning visible so the teacher can see it.
John Almarode:Jump ahead to the visible learning. One of the things we've noticed in the visible learning databases is if you go to the section in the database on learning strategies and teaching strategies and you pull those down, those that are the highest, effect size strategies, in other words, those are the strategies that have the highest potential to move student learning forward, they all have one thing in common. And the that thing in common is the exact opposite of those strategies that have a lower effect size. For example, lectures versus classroom discussion. What's the difference?
John Almarode:In the high effect size strategies, they all require the learner to select, organize, and integrate, and make their thing visible. Versus a lecture, you don't do anything, which is why a lecture has an effect size of negative point three five. It's awful. Lecture never works. Never works.
John Almarode:No matter how you try to defend it, no matter how you advocate for lecture, there's not a zero there's zero shred. There's no shred of evidence that says it works. So that leads back to that third guideline. What do I do when I do this? Give feedback and have the learners give themselves feedback based on their summary, based on the classroom discussion.
John Almarode:And so the data seems to point strongly to this idea that on that continuum to bring it back to the very start of our conversation, take it all the way back. Active engagement is correlated with higher learning outcomes because of the science of learning and the things that our cognitive architecture needs to acquire, consolidate, and store that learning.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. Yeah. That that makes a lot of sense, and I I see that in the way that I am in like, even researching to talk to you. I found myself reading your your bio and looking at some of your books, and then I was selecting that the information, trying to store it and talk to somebody else about it or write it into a script or something like that. And then having them someone else check and be like, does this make sense to you?
Jordan Bassett:Does this does this work? And it sounds like or not sounds like this. I've is what you're saying is teachers need to make sure that they're not doing all the lifting. When you're doing a lecture, you're doing all lift. You're just spouting off facts or whatever.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. And you you could have worked all night on that lecture, and you're like, I have crafted these words perfectly, and I'm I'm gonna present them well. I'll you know, everything like that. But it its effect size is small. And I even think to myself, I think, probably back to the the subjects I had the hardest time was teachers who just kinda got up there and and and spoke.
Jordan Bassett:And I started I was actively disengaged. And today, there's there's so many more ways to be actively disengaged than when I was in school. I mean, we had daydreaming. Now there's phones and social media and all this different stuff. You know, whatever concert tickets just dropped, and I need to get those.
Jordan Bassett:There's so many different ways to to be actively disengaged that you said this earlier that it there's there's more going into. And I I think that's where educators can fall into that trap of trying to just be entertaining and not truly engaged, or being well, the teachers are engaged, but getting the students engaged, they're just they're just trying to put on a show. So I think this is super important information and things for for educators to to consider.
John Almarode:And I'm guilty as charged. Right? I mean
Jordan Bassett:Yeah.
John Almarode:Because I spend my days with 20 year olds
Jordan Bassett:Yeah.
John Almarode:Who are in sororities, fraternities, service groups. They're trying to pad their resume. Some of them are working two jobs to be able to pay for college. Some of them are taking care of parents. Some of them have siblings.
John Almarode:And here I am teaching a methods course. And so there are days I have to resist edutainment.
Jordan Bassett:Mhmm.
John Almarode:But then I have to have an a reasonable alternative because if I ask a 20 year old to choose between a lecture, which, by the way, I do not lecture. If I ask them to choose between a lecture and an event on Friday night with their sorority or fraternity
Jordan Bassett:Mhmm.
John Almarode:I know what they'll pick. I'd have picked the same thing.
Jordan Bassett:You're losing every time.
John Almarode:Yes. Guilty church. And and you you said something that I do not wanna to leave. And I think as we as we wind down, we gotta grab that. You said that even if the professor spent all night crafting their words, and writing a beautiful lecture, the professor did all the active engagement, which means the professor's gonna know the lecture.
John Almarode:The student had no active engagement at all, and so and and they do not care about pointillism in modern art history the way you do. And so Yeah. I'm telling you, this active level of of processing, I think, is gonna be incredibly beneficial to our understanding of engagement for years to come. And I'm grateful that researchers that we have moved in this direction away from a dichotomous approach or a, well, that's emotional, that's cognitive behavior to a more comprehensive, contextual based understanding and putting the entertainment part where it belongs, the hook Yeah. Or the consolidation, but not the main course.
Jordan Bassett:Yeah. No. That's great. So, I would put this challenge out to our listeners is for them to take what they've heard here, organize it, you know, select, organize, and go talk to somebody about what you learned here to help you kinda ingest that a little bit more for you to to make sure that you understand it. And then even check back, listen to the podcast again.
Jordan Bassett:I'm not just saying this for views and downloads, but to validate that you you absorb the information, really, really challenge yourself to reflect on your own engagement with this podcast or whatever it is that you're you're learning and what what's going on to hopefully help you analyze and understand your students better. John, I thank you so much for for joining us. I I wanna just do a couple talk about a couple of things that you have. So you have a lot of books, that that you've published or that you've you've authored and coauthored and all this different stuff. There's a couple that, I wanna talk about.
Jordan Bassett:One is, teacher clarity, which should be out by now, right, when this when this podcast goes out. That talks somewhat about engagement and what we talked about here, maybe a little bit more in-depth. You have two others, how learning, works playbook and how feedback works playbook, which play into this too of being able to get feedback from your students to know if they're engaged. Yeah. So I wanna encourage our listeners to, check those books out.
Jordan Bassett:We'll put links in the show notes. If someone wanted to connect with you, John, what's the best place to to do that?
John Almarode:So they can connect with me on x, at JT Almerode. I'm on Facebook, but you can also check out, and this is just for lack of a creative name, JohnAlmerode.com. There's a way to click on a button, and that email comes directly to me. I'm happy to answer questions, keep the conversation going, take feedback. Maybe you weren't engaged during this podcast and you need to let me know that
Jordan Bassett:Yeah.
John Almarode:Podcast on engagement was boring as all get out. We can go there too. So, yeah, reach out any any way. I'm happy to keep the conversation going.
Jordan Bassett:That's great. Yeah. So make sure you you check out John, and the work that he's done to help you in your classroom. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please rate, review, and share this with anyone in your life that would benefit, from engagement or one of our other episodes. We wanna help as many educators as possible be the best versions of themselves as possible, and that happens through sharing and reviewing things like that.
Jordan Bassett:Education is one of the hardest jobs in the world, but it's also one of the most rewarding. And, we here at the Innovative Schools Podcast wanna empower all educators to be their best. We hope you learned something today that you can use in your classroom later today, maybe later this week, or whenever the next time you find yourself teaching. So thank you for joining us. Thank you, John, for helping us explain engagement, and we will see you guys on the next episode.
