Distance Learning and WEI
As we find ourselves in this era of COVID-19, we find US education, as well as most of the world, stepping into an unprecedented experience of a massive turn to online learning. For those of us with a history in education, we remember that as early as the early nineties, there was talk that online education would displace schools in very significant ways. Most schools have played with blended and online learning but the medium for most school experience has remained the same. With the closure of school campuses, the US will experiment for the rest of this school year in ways it has never done before.
We at The Wellington Initiative believe that keeping students deeply engaged in their work is critical to their being successful in normal times, and even more so during this period of online learning. We define student engagement as the intersection of two phenomena happening for students: that they find their work deeply challenging, and that at the same time, they love the work. Student engagement should be a high priority in educating children. It is obviously very important for students to receive a grounding of knowledge and skills, but it is equally important to leave them hungry for more and eager to learn. We can only do this if students are deeply engaged in their work.
Much of our work is found in the process of measuring student engagement and analyzing the resulting data. If we want to know whether students are challenged by their work and whether they love their work, the best thing to do is just ask students: How challenged do you feel by your work? How much do you love your work? The Wellington Engagement Index is a web application that lets students provide feedback on their levels of engagement. The Wellington Engagement Index asks students to place each of their classes on a grid according to how challenged they feel in each class, and how much they love or hate the experience. We can then immediately analyze this data in a simple web application.
Schools can have their entire student population provide feedback on student engagement in as little as 3 minutes; this student engagement data is then available to teachers and administrators for analysis. Administrators have used this data to test new curriculum and classes; teachers have used this data to better hone their pedagogy, and counselors have used the data to identify disengaged students and help them.
Many teachers are deeply engaging by virtue of how they teach; these teachers are able to deeply engage students due to strong personal connection, captivating presentation of material, or simply by the fact that students are face-to-face with the teacher in the classroom. This has dramatically changed since schools began to close in February. The engaging power of individual teaching excellence has become less important as the value of student’s individual work at home has become increasingly important.
Because of this shift, we believe that measuring student engagement is more important now than ever. Teachers need to know if they are providing deeply engaging work to students — work that students find challenging, while loving it. If the work provided is disengaging to students, teachers need to know so that they can improve the quality of student’s lessons. Counselors can help identify students who are drifting away into disengagement, before they fully mentally or emotionally check out. Administrators can identify teachers who need additional support in designing remote lessons. All of this combines into telling a story of how a school is continuing to provide effective instruction to students, even under these difficult circumstances. The Wellington Engagement Index is even being applied weekly by some of our partners to ensure they are providing effective instruction.
The Wellington Initiative would also like to offer the Wellington Engagement Index to any interested school in the United States at no cost during the current pandemic — no strings attached. The web-based tool is very simple to configure for your school or districts, and training is fast and straightforward. Your school can easily be set up to record feedback from students in less than one week. It would be our pleasure to be able to assist any interested in school in measuring student engagement and using this data to improve instruction during this trying time.