Episode 35 Using Authenticity to Build Student Engagement and Motivation

In this episode, Dan interviews Kelly Pfeiffer from Dubbo Distance Education to get advice on remote learning given the current climate around the globe with schools being closed, or needing to close in response to COVID-19.Using Authenticity to Build Student Engagement and Motivation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Join the Facebook CommunityWatch the episode belowhttps://youtu.be/DQrOVzpzHTgShow NotesHi everyone and welcome again to the effective teaching podcast. I’m Dan Jackson and I am very grateful that you are giving me your time to listen to this episode. Recently I changed my podcast structure. I have removed my intro and outro based on some feedback I received and I hope it has improved your listening experience. If so, let me know.I have also decided that I am going to trial recording my episodes as video as well as audio. So if you would like to see me talking away to the computer, please go to teacherspd.net/35 and you can watch this episode as well. I would love to know if this is helpful for you. So please just leave me a comment on the page to let me know.OK.Today I want to talk to you about building authenticity into student learning, which is a great way to increase student motivation and engagement with the learning, which we all know will help students be successful and lead them towards becoming lifelong learners.I thought we should start by just talking a bit about the importance of motivation and engagement. Boredom1 thing that often gets overlooked in research are things that can have a negative impact on student learning. And the number 1 negative influence that can be modified according to research released in 2017 by Hattie is boredom. Hattie’s famous effect size for boredom is negative 0.49. To put this into perspective the hinge point for a teaching strategy being positive is 0.4 so to be negative 0.49 means students are unlearning information.Now I know there are some who have criticised Hattie’s methods, but I think that he hit the nail on the head with this one. We have all seen students in our own or in another teacher’s classroom who is bored and therefore does not engage with anything that is happening. The famous clip from Ferris Bueller's Day Off comes to mind here. “Anyone?”For me student motivation and engagement is the opposite of this. The more a student is motivated and engaged with the learning I think, the larger their learning will be. And one of the best ways to increase this is by building in authenticity to the learning.PBL UnitNow, recently, I have been working hard on creating a couple of Project-based learning units for my school. I have been doing lots of reading and collaborating with others and I’m thankful to Kelly Pfeiffer who has shared many conversations with me over the last few weeks. If you don’t know who Kelly is, she is from Dubbo Distance Ed and was part of the team that put together the Dark Skies Project for Stage 3 students across the whole of NSW, and is an avid PBL teacher.Focus on something currentAs I have been creating these units I have been thinking a lot about how to really ramp up the authenticity of the learning. So, to start with these units focus on the current Coronavirus pandemic that is sweeping around the world and across our country and state. It is already a very current issue for our students and so having our project and our learning focus on this should result in greater engagement and motivation from them. So, this was the start, you know, to use a topic that is current and applicable to our students. This of course could apply to anything you are teaching. Find a way to connect what you are teaching to current events that are relevant to your students. A simple example is to get students to apply their Math skills to the real world. From as basic as calculating the perimeter of the school grounds to measuring the distance and angl..