Student Engagement

It is difficult to engage students. When you use self-directed activities the drive must come intrinsically. The outcome should be the motivation. It would be necessary to put in place some framework to help students work toward a final product. It will be a careful balance of guidelines and freedom. Students will also need a base of basic skills. A teacher needs to model how to self direct when creating a project. Currently in my classroom students are writing newspaper articles about revolutionary war events. They are given a topic and some background information. Students then have the freedom to create the article on their own. They have the choice of point of view, factual information, organization of the article. This is mostly self directed. As the project moves forward more freedom is given until we get to the end when the students start creating their own topics. If anyone has feedback feel free to share it.