James Sturtevant Hacking Engagement

Teachers need to go where the kids are. When in Rome…do like the Romans. When it comes to reaching contemporary youth, please understand that they love video. Whenever there’s downtime, kids immediately start watching video on their devices. Educators need to embrace this tendency.

Unfortunately, in many classrooms, video is handled in much the same way as it was in the 1950s. The entire class watches on a big screen at the same time. I loved “Movie Day” in high school. It was a great opportunity to zone out for 50 minutes!

In this episode, Tracy Enos and her adolescent posse will clue you in on an amazing free tool which will revolutionize the way you present video. EDpuzzle allows you to embed questions inside a video.

Last month...I was chilling in my room 2 days prior to Christmas break. As I surveyed my diggs, I became disgusted with myself! My room was a mess. I had just been enlightening my students about the awesome Asian concept of Chi...an invisible source of energy that permeates the universe. Chi flows through the environment, animals and people, as well as man-made structures. Acupuncture and Tai Chi stimulate the life-giving flow of Chi through a person. The ancient interior decoration practice of Feng Shui can do the same for your home or work-space. I felt like a hypocrite.

I decided my room was in desperate need of a Feng Shui makeover! This exercise had great informational power for many parties:

I could apply a complex topic from class in a demonstrable way

I could become more approachable to my students as they cheered me on in my noble quest.

I could also inspire kids to apply Feng Shui to some aspect of their lives.

This was an epic exercise in student engagement!

I'll wager you'd like to dramatically improve your class discussions! You yearn for discussions where all students participate. You dream about student conversations that tackle compelling topics with DEEP analysis, inquiry, and speculation. I'll also predict you'd love your students to enthusiastically plunge into primary sources evaluating the perspective of the author, contextualizing what they wrote, and then corroborating the source with other primary documents.

Last week, my students did exactly this with Lin Zexu's letter to Queen Elizabeth imploring her to end the opium trade in China. It was an epic performance by my students! The instructional template is Philosophical Chairs. What inspired this wonderful class was the Stanford History Education Group. Today, Joel Breakstone, from SHEG, will discuss:

-The Stanford History Education Group
-Philosophical Chairs
-Empowering students to devour primary sources
-Inspiring kids to dramatically up their class conversation game

Just yesterday...I was making copies in the Teacher's Lounge when I realized I'd made a mistake and forgot to double-side and staple the set! The practical upshot of this wasteful frenzy was the destruction of innocent paper.

Teachers go through reams of paper daily. I must plead guilty to laying waste to forests in my efforts to educate modern youth. Sadly, many of these sheets of decimated vegetation were used by students only temporarily, then discarded often bypassing the recycling bin in route to the landfill. But the tide of history is urging educators to alter their standard operating procedure. It's time to do a "Paperless Week".

This paperless approach has the potential to engage your students. Sound interesting? I thought so! Give a listen to Kristen Kovak...a paperless guru...the modern Lorax!

Educators have an unquenchable thirst to explain. I have this urge. If some students don’t get it, it’s my job to clarify. Unfortunately, this tendency can disengage students who got it the first time.

It’s been my observation, both from the standpoint of being a student...and then working with colleagues as an adult, that teachers aren’t the best at weighing the trade-offs of their marathon explanations, presentations, and lectures. Let’s be less windy. Let’s become more attuned to nonverbal cues from our students. When we’ve lost the eyes, when their heads start to droop, when they get fidgety, when they’re unresponsive to prompts, they’re disengaged and we need to adjust. A great template for teacher presentations is the ubiquitous TED Talk.

Okay...here's the situation. The semester is winding down and you need to include one more Socratic Seminar on an important topic. But...you look at the calendar and there's no time! Sound familiar? It's a classic necessity is the mother of invention situation.
I was faced with just such a scenario one month ago at the conclusion of the previous semester. So...I IMPROVISED! What materialized was awesome and will become a standard activity every semester, till I hang up my spikes! I decided to take my Socratic Seminar virtual and make it a class Twitter chat.

When your students are asked to describe themselves....wouldn’t it be cool if they replied, “I’m a proud member of Mr. Sturtevant’s class!” Two awesome students Caroline Gose and Simon Srisongkham are going to explain why this is important and how you might create such a dynamic.

There are so many things in education that we do simply because they've always been done...and done a certain way. Take the school calendar. We follow an antiquated model that was crafted to serve our agrarian society in the late 19th Century. But most are accustomed to the typical school calendar regardless of whether it makes sense educationally. The same could be said of homework. Teachers, parents, and administrators must reevaluate the entire homework paradigm. Students are also a crucial voice! It's time to evolve! Connie Hamilton and Starr Sackstein are here to help. On today's episode, they'll talk about their new book "Hacking Homework".

In 2014, my book You've Gotta Connect, which gives teachers tools to forge strong relationships with students, was published. I promote that teachers be approachable and then inject some enjoyment into their courses. This hack will succeed on both counts!

On a recent commute to school, I came up with the hairbrained scheme of pulling my students into one of my ridiculous weekend body weight workout challenges. In order that we could all keep tabs on one another, we utilized Voxer...the 21st Century walkie-talkie.

This program will tell the story of this AMAZING classroom adventure through the stories of two remarkable high school seniors...Abigail Myers and Mason Wright. Please give a listen and give a weekend challenge, of some sort of activity it certainly doesn't have to be physical, a try.

I recently walked into Noah Heath's room. Noah teaches Psychology. I noticed some interesting art work on the wall. I asked about it. The next 10 minutes simply evaporated as Noah described his recent assessment experiment, “I have a lot of students who are uncomfortable with traditional tests. I wanted to give these kids an option. I let them opt to use art to demonstrate mastery of altered states of consciousness. They were to compare chemically altered consciousness (through drugs) and non-chemically altered consciousness (through hypnosis, meditation, and biofeedback). Traditionally, I give students an essay asking them to compare and contrast. Students who participated in my experiment still had to include a writing component, but it was to explain their artwork. Their creation did the job of comparing and contrasting!”