My tools for unlocking engagement in English FE (pt1)

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at #APNorth - A day of sharing practice in a range of areas, including English. Today more than ever, I feel inspired to share my practice beyond my mind.

One of the most difficult challenges we face in Post -16 education, specifically in English and maths is maintaining the engagement of our learners. I'm not talking about keeping them engaged for 5 minutes, but keeping up those levels of engagement lesson to lesson, term to term. How can we maintain them? 

Of course it all starts at the beginning: embedding our routines and rituals and having good rapport with our learners. But it isn't as easy as that. "Just contextualise", they say. Contextualisation can be both friend and foe: on one hand we have the upper hand of knowing something small our learners like but how long can we contextualise our resources for until we have to jump back into reality with 'exam like' materials and themes in preparation for the big day. 

On the surface it's easy to say our learners are disengaged, nevertheless we need to look at the motivation side. Why are they so unmotivated?

Wallace (2017) discusses the 'four big demotivators' 

• Fear
• Boredom
• Previous Negative Experience
• Loss of Hope

We must note that our learners do not fall into just one category of the demotivators, at times it can be a mixture of two and in serious cases of demotivation it can be all of them. Good relationships with our learners and their tutors can encourage our learners to speak out more about their demotivation. Previous negative experience is one which resonates with most the learners I have taught. I see this as my challenge to try and make my sessions a positive experience. A negative experience can cause unwanted anxiety within our learners which is similarly seen in maths - recent studies surrounding this have  studied 'Maths anxiety' and experts are now out delivering training to teams across colleges to combat this. 

In the past year I have took part in Action Research studies
where I specifically looked at strategies for motivation and engagement in GCSE resit learners. The majority of them had a positive response but having been on the front line (teaching), especially during these times of change, I have been able to try and test a few more tools for both online and face-to-face (F2F) learning. 

Here are the top three strategies which have been the most successful during the last year.... 

Project Based Learning - Writing Projects 
Some teachers hear writing projects and roll their eyes, yet for me writing projects have really added value and focus to sessions. 

At the end of each half term this year I have set a writing project in the last week surrounding a different theme ('resilience, pandemic, the future' being some from this year). It has enabled learners to tap into skills which they are using in their vocational area (e.g research, reflection) and bring them into English too. This supporting our links with vocational area and enabling learners to see the skills links themselves. 

The writing projects can be rewarded and recorded. This term we had a teachers top pick and we're in the middle of creating a project with not only my classes work but other teachers too. I work in a specific vocational area (Creative Industries), and we have been able to embed Art into their writing and Art have been able to embed the themes into their sessions. 

Giving learners the freedom to explore and produce writing in whichever way they would like to interpret it takes the pressure off them. Of course we know that some learners struggle to get onboard with the idea of the project, mainly because they can struggle with conjuring ideas themselves. By teaching/embedding the theme of the writing topic into work a week prior to them going off and exploring themselves, you have pre-empted some of the material.

Live Marking 
Yes you heard me right and yes I know most of us already do this, but do we really know the full benefits of it? From my own action research, this is one of the top methods which teachers said supported the engagement in sessions.

Live marking first and foremost helps us as teachers to decrease our own workload - In current times this is not advised, but when working online, tools like Class Notebook allow us to see writing in real time. 

A colleague once said to me  'If teachers don't mark their learners work, why would learners want to produce any work? If you're not going to look at it anyway, why would they write anything?" - This stuck with me. She's absolutely right. Marking in any case shows our learners that we care and that we are a part of the learning journey with them. They need our input in order to progress but they cannot do that if you are just ticking their work or even worse, not doing any form of marking. 

Live marking helps us to create a dialogue which can be ongoing and live marking leads to live correction/development. By marking live in the session, learners can respond to your feedback immediately whilst they are still on the task. You have the ability of checking that they understand the feedback, do they know where they went wrong? Once learners have responded to the live feedback, even after the session you can continue the dialogue if needed within their books. 

'I do, we do, you do'  - Modelling technique.
Not only as a part of differentiation and scaffolding, many of our learners need a model answer for them to be able to make the links to the question. This method of modelling supports learners at all stages of writing. 

I do - Completed by the teacher prior to the lesson

We do - Completed with the teacher as a class in lesson

You do - Completed independently. 

This is a great model to start with right at the beginning of the year. Learners are shown how to answer a paragraph of work.  With I do  You are able to talk through why the paragraph is a good piece of work and where it meet the criteria. The next stage is you holding the learners hand through the answer. You can discuss together why this is a good answer/content. You  do allows the learner to reflect on the work taught in order for them to produce the answer. For some of our learners, they may still need extra support, but the majority are maybe more confident in answering as they can visually see two responses already. This modelling can of course be flexible. For high flyers in your group, you could ask them to write the 'I do' for the class or encourage peer teaching and  in groups get them to walk through the 'we do' with their group. 

Learners feel part of the learning process in a positive way. They know that for this, they have to tackle it as a class together first rather than racing in on their own or even in pairs.

As ever, it is not a one size fits all approach and my approaches above are just the top 3 I have been working with both online and in a F2F scenario. Each group and learner required different types of engagement.

So, where do we go from here? - We need to keep trying out and testing the strategies which are out there and further share these experiences with teachers on the front line because who knows better than the educators tackling demotivation head on.