Tensions of an Educator: The Engagement Spiral
Could focusing on making lessons more relevant and engaging actually have some unintended consequences?
There are a lot of tensions in the field of Christian education; some obvious and some not so obvious. Many believe the simple narrative of high school pedagogy (a kind of philosophy of teaching) is a transition from boring teacher centered classes to more engaging student centered classes. You remember your high school experience right? Can’t it be simplified as teachers lecturing while you took notes, you read the textbook and completed busy work, and then you took some tests? Thankfully, the narrative goes, that we know better now and classes are centered more on making the lessons relevant and engaging to the student. These classes are now filled with rigorous activities, group projects, advanced discussion tactics, energizers, and technology. Is this narrative true and how could there be any tension in making classes more engaging and relevant?
First, let me clear that this isn’t some expansive cumulative take on student-centered learning, nor do I think the ideas of making lessons more relevant and engaging through various student centered tasks is equivalent to “student-centered learning.” It’s obviously much more complicated and those terms and activities fill many roles. Please, take this more as a pedagogical musing than some kind of statement for or against some educational practice. I’d like to highlight here some unexpected negative consequences I found after working hard to make my classroom a more engaging place.
I teach at a Christian high school and though it is a covenant school (meaning the families attending are self-declared Christians) it should not be a surprise to the reader that teenagers, even “Christian” teenagers, don’t always have a burning passion for their Bible classes. Getting students to read/memorize significant portions of scripture, pray out loud, and share openly about their faith was can be extremely difficult. I think it’s a fair simplification to say that about a third of students genuinely want to be in Bible class, a third genuinely want to be anywhere else, and there’s a middle third that could be convinced either way depending on who is the most vocal group at the time. All of this to say that the Bible classes I teach aren’t enthusiastic or bought in by default. If I am going to engage more than a third of the class it would have to come from more than just the students and the content.
To this end, I have tried to layer in many of the best teaching practices and activities I could find to make Bible lessons more engaging. The structure of my lessons largely came from the Teaching for Transformation pedagogy with a slew of activities from other places thrown in. To make room for these activities, I often identified places where I thought the curriculum had too much busy work or got bogged down in technical terms and ideas that might be interesting and rewarding to the top 10% of students, but would only serve to further disinterest the majority of in the class.
Has this produced the results I wanted? Yes…and no. I’ve certainly witnessed (and have data to prove it!) students becoming more engaged and interactive with the lessons. Requiring students to think, interact, reflect, discuss, create, and more are great ideas that bear CAN bear a lot of fruit - the most obvious is a student “doing” more than just passively sitting and listening. I think there are definitive improvements in my Bible classes and seen many students grow in their faith as a result. So what’s the catch? Where’s the tension?
The issue I want to identify is what I will call a negative engagement spiral and it’s first problem is a problem of the heart. To understand this issue, let me give you a quick scenario. Let’s say you are swamped at work, overwhelmed in your personal life, and your boss makes you attend a weekend workshop on a topic you don’t care about. What would be the worst experience for you that weekend?
Scenario 1: The workshop has a few speakers who just talk while you sit at your table, take some notes, and scroll your phone. Some of it you find interesting, but most of it is background noise. You put up with it and then go your way.
Scenario 2: You walk into the workshop and are immediately handed a nametag and placed into a “community” where you have to go through a series of introductory activities. There’s some lectures, but you are constantly forced to turn and talk to your table, produce visuals, and are called up to the stage to share. You are given work to take home and engage your family in a series of questions on the topic and report back the next day of the workshop.
Even though scenario 2 produces much better engagement and likely demonstrated its relevance much better, I think many people would agree the experience would be worse. Why? Because greater engagement on a topic you care little about can often make you more bitter toward the topic. To use more religious language, higher engagement without desire can lead to a hardening of the heart. In the case of many, scenario 1’s more hands off approach would be preferable - even if there was less engagement and relevance. Scenario 1 gave more opportunity for those in attendance to self select how deep their engagement would be. Ironically, for those not interested in the topic, scenario 1 might even have a better chance at making them more open to the topic in the future. Despite the worse design on paper, scenario 1’s take home experience for those uninterested would likely be more educative.
This is exactly what I have seen in many students in my Bible class. The higher level of relevance and engagement forces them to confront and interact with something they don’t desire and this can have the negative consequences of hardening their hearts towards faith. I’m not saying the answer is to just leave this students alone and not bother them with faith - I’m just saying that forcing them to a higher level of engagement can often produce results we don’t want. One unintended consequence is hardly a spiral though.
A second major negative consequence powering the engagement spiral are the diminished returns of activities designed for furthering relevance and engagement. When the majority of your school is doing lecture and notes, it can be refreshing to walk into a class using different methods. However, when nearly every class and every lesson is asking you to turn and talk, write an exit slip, create a project, do a gallery walk, jigsaw content, etc. it can become redundant and unhealthy. In classes with poor execution, these activities can actually reduce the engagement levels due to distraction and frustration. However, even in classes with good execution, students become can become numb to these activities and simply learn how to get them over with.
The third major negative consequence powering an engagement spiral (I could name more) is the trade-off in rigor and knowledge base. Since there is only so much time in a class and space in a curriculum, teachers have to make difficult decisions every day; fitting in a bunch of engagement activities means it’s generally the case that curriculum gets cut. That’s okay, I’ve always reasoned, “It’s more about the development of skills, attitudes, and quality of engagement with the curriculum than the quantity anyways right?” Well, that’s true to a point, but I’ve been reading more educational studies showing that it’s the development of wide and deep knowledge bases that are the larger predictors of academic achievement. To put it simply, the better way to developing students who engage in the material and find it relevant isn’t to cut it down to the necessaries and skills, but in the depth of knowledge they get on it. Additionally, students who grow up only learning through highly engaging activities will not know how to power their own learning later in life when it is not cut up and handed to them on a plate.
I’m not a perfect teacher and I’m certain that a better one could deepen the rigor of the Bible curriculum while still fitting in a myriad of engagement practices. The problem is that it’s not easy and often they are at odds. Circling back to the opening - lectures with notes and reading texts are some of the most direct and applicable ways to provide students with deeper knowledge bases for the different domains/subjects they are encountering. In other words, a student finding the book of 1 Samuel relevant and engaging is can just as likely be due to how well they already know and understand the words/history/culture they will encounter in 1 Samuel as it is the engagement activities we use. The obvious way forward is to find the harmony here of activities meant for increased “engagement” and relevance with activities that raise the rigor and knowledge base.
The negative engagement spiral I outlined above is powered by a lack of desire for the subject, diminished returns from repeated activities, and a drop in rigor. I find that these are rarely mentioned and deserve to be at least named as possible consequences. I don’t think there is an inherent contradiction in designing classes to be more relevant and engaging while also being rigorous and enriching to the student. This is why I call it a tension.
I think the wise teacher will keep this natural tension in mind and look to find the best balance they can in the design of their curriculum/lessons. Personally, I think the pendulum towards favoring engagement/relevance activities has likely swung a little too far in my own teaching. I think it would be fruitful to re-examine where I can raise the rigor, knowledge base, and guard against the negative engagement spiral I outlined above. What do you think? Have you seen this spiral in the classroom or other settings? How would you or have you addressed it?
This really outlines some unformulated thoughts I've had about lesson planning for a while. Thanks for this! Incredible!