Engaging Children: Igniting a Drive for Deeper Learning

What motivates us to learn?

We all want our students to be engaged learners, but we often struggle with getting them excited about and responsible for their own learning.

In Engaging Children, Ellin Oliver Keene explores the question: What can we do to help students develop internal motivation or, better yet, engagement? Differentiating between compliance, participation, motivation, and engagement, she shows how to develop and recognize true student engagement in your classroom and help students take more responsibility for their learning.

Explore the conditions where student-driven engagement flourishes.

As a teacher, instructional coach, or principal you will learn to cultivate an environment for increasing student engagement. You will also explore four pillars of engagement that provide a framework for considering what it means to be engaged:

• Intellectual urgency: The compelling drive we experience when we choose to invest time and effort in learning; using questions to propel our learning forward.

• Emotional resonance: The ability to describe when a concept is imprinted on our mind and our heart; experiencing a strong emotional connection to what we learn or read.

• Perspective bending: An awareness of how others’ knowledge, emotions, and beliefs shape our own; adjusting our thinking when challenged and relishing the opportunity to impact others with our ideas.

• The aesthetic world: A recognition of moments when we find something uniquely beautiful, captivating, hilarious, or meaningful; discussing a book, an illustration, a painting, or an idea that seems to have been created just for us.

Truly engaged children are more likely to remember and reapply what they learn. Engagement provides authentic motivation for students and helps them become citizens who act on their learning for the betterment of the world. With Ellin’s guidance, you’ll discover how to help all children uncover their drive for deeper learning.

Join the Engaging Children Facebook group: facebook.com/groups/EngagingChildren

Ellin Oliver Keene has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, non-profit director and adjunct professor of reading and writing.  For sixteen years she directed staff development initiatives at the Denver-based Public Education & Business Coalition.  She served as Deputy Director and Director of Literacy and Staff Development for the Cornerstone Project at the University of Pennsylvania for 4 years. Ellin works with schools and districts throughout the country and abroad.  Her emphasis is long-term, school-based professional development and strategic planning for literacy learning.

Ellin recently published The Literacy Studio: Redesigning the Workshop for Readers and Writers which is focused on an up-to-date conceptualization of Readers/Writers’ workshop. She is the author of Engaging Children: Igniting the Drive for Deeper Learning (2018), is co-editor and co-author of The Teacher You Want to Be: Essays about Children, Learning, and Teaching (Heinemann, 2015); co-editor of the Not This, but That series (Heinemann, 2013 - 2018); author of Talk About Understanding: Rethinking Classroom Talk to Enhance Understanding (Heinemann, 2012), To Understand: New Horizons in Reading Comprehension (Heinemann, 2008), co-author of Comprehension Going Forward (Heinemann, 2011), co-author of Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction, 2^nd edition (Heinemann, 2007, 1^st edition, 1997) and author of Assessing Comprehension Thinking Strategies (Shell Educational Books, 2006) as well as numerous chapters for professional books and journals on the teaching of reading as well as education policy journals.