In this episode of Getting Unstuck

Dr. Eric Toshalis has served public education in a variety of roles including middle and high school teacher, coach, mentor teacher, teacher educator, union president, community activist, curriculum writer, researcher, professor, author, consultant, and research director. Recognized as Teacher of the Year by his school district in Santa Barbara County in 1997 and awarded the Certificate of Distinction in Teaching by Harvard College in 2002, Eric has long focused on what it takes to educate adolescents and adults who bring a diversity of cultural, ethnic, gender, linguistic, racial, sexual, and socioeconomic insights.

Dr. Toshalis on why this conversation matters

“Our public school system is perfectly designed to achieve the inequitable outcomes it produces. It is intentional. Nothing is broken. This is a matter of design. The hand-wringing about our regular pernicious and disproportional outcomes has to stop, and the hard work of redesigning our systems has to be taken up with moon-shot levels of commitment at all levels. If we’re willing to look in the right places and center the voices and expertise of those who know best, what we see in our many opportunity gaps and the education debt we owe to our most marginalized students is countless examples of how the system was designed to preserve advantage for White, middle class, English-speaking, Christian, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, documented, neurotypical kids and families.

I think there are four main areas that drive our inequities: tracking, assessment, discipline, and family engagement. Research-based, community-responsive, and system-supported efforts to change the design of those domains will bear fruit in the short and longterm. The only thing stopping us from achieving equity is the will.”

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How you can put this podcast to work

Early in our discussion, Dr. Toshalis details a lot of middle and high school practices that actually contribute to student disengagement. Which of those practices are at work in your school(s)?
Dr. Toshalis defines engagement as ”the student’s investment in a given activity. It’s the result of a motivational and social process that culminates in a person’s choice to apply effort, persist through struggle, complete a task and resolve discriminatory experiences. To be engaged is to be interested and emotionally activated; to try. It’s the student saying, “Yes, I can and will attempt this task because I want to.”
In a separate article, he goes on to detail 10 drivers of student engagement, which are annotated here. Looking only at the headings, which of these drivers would you like additional information on? Which do you sense that you or your colleagues routinely address? Which of them needs greater attention to support greater student engagement?
As an educator working with kids, how often do you find yourself seeking to understand a student’s disruptive behavior / lack of engagement vs seeking to intervene with punishment?