Topic: Engaging Children

Teacher engagement and student engagement in the focus on this PLC series. Featuring a video from Tom Newkirk and Ellin Keene.

In many ways, we still structure our classrooms and speak with students as if we value compliance and the look of engagement more than true engagement.

Even very young readers, while listening to text, and the rest of us while reading, can think about thinking. We can all be more active and engaged readers when we use thinking strategies to understand.

How do we recognize engagement? Today on the podcast, a special read aloud by author Ellin Oliver Keene from her new book Engaging Children: Igniting a Drive for Deeper Understanding.

If educators don't have a language to define and describe engagement—a point on the horizon toward which we're working—and if we don't incorporate talk of engagement into our discourse with students, how can we help children become truly engaged?

Engagement, in part, depends on what you feel and sense when you enter a classroom. It's the culture—unseen and unheard, but omnipresent, and it's a little tougher to pin down.

How can we help kids to identify when they have an engaged experience and how they can create the condition necessary to repeat it and create new ones? Consider these moves in your classroom

Our ideas about engagement were for formed in early childhood by our parents, and have been solidified by what our teachers did to 'motivate' us. In classrooms now, many of these old notions are concretized by what our colleagues believe about motivation and engagement.

Welcome to our Book Talk Live with Ellin Oliver Keene, author of Engaging Children: Igniting a Drive for Deeper Learning.

Ellin Oliver Keene helps us answer the question, what is the difference between motivation and engagement?

Ahead of the publication of Engaging Children: Igniting a Drive for Deeper Learning, Heinemann Fellows Aeriale Johnson and Jess Lifshitz read and reacted to Ellin’s soon-to-arrive book.

If you're interested in discussing the book with other readers, consider joining the new Engaging Children Facebook Group! It's a great online space to share ideas, read together, and stay up-to-date on Engaging Children news.

This week on the Heinemann Podcast, we welcome back authors Ellin Oliver Keene & Tom Newkirk to discuss Ellin's new book, Engaging Children: Ignite a Drive for Deeper Learning.