Engaging the "Squirrelly" Minds: How Autonomy and Scaffolds Spark Student Success

It’s springtime. The sun is shining. The playground beckons. 

Inside our classrooms, we might be wondering, “Why aren’t my students engaged? Is there anything I can do to engage them?” 

If you’ve experienced similar thoughts recently, I invite you to ask yourself: Am I challenging students? Am I giving them choice?

Challenge and Choice

Challenge: Sure, we’re teaching the standards, but are we choosing the standards that require students to think critically, analytically, and creatively?

And if rigor is missing from our standards, how can we go beyond them and add the challenge that makes learning exciting?

For the purposes of this article, we will define rigor as the top three tiers of Bloom’s taxonomy: Analyze, evaluate, and create. 

Sometimes our first thought is, “My students can’t think at high levels.”

Or, “Some of my students can do high-level work, but they won’t. They’re not focused or motivated enough.”

High-Level Thinkers in Disguise

In my experience, the students we think of as “squirrelly” are actually quite skilled at high-level thinking. I’d argue they might be some of the kids who are most eager for the opportunity to undertake something challenging in the classroom (even if they won’t admit it!).

Often these are the students whose needs might not be Special with a capital S. They might not have an IEP or even a 504 Plan, but they’re not big fans of sitting in their seats for long periods of time, and tend to buck at a request to complete a worksheet with more than 5 questions.

Anyone who has spent time in a classroom over the past three years has noticed an increasing number of students who aren’t responding to teaching methods that may have been effective ten years ago. 

These characteristics do not mean a student cannot think and work at high levels.

It just means that alongside challenge, we need to have scaffolds and options ready so that all kinds of students - squirrelly and others - can find a pathway to rigor. More on scaffolds shortly.

First, let’s explore some ideas for engaging the kids who traditionally might not be considered star students.

Strategy #1: Give students the proverbial teacher’s pen. 

Provide a set of problems with errors, and have them find, fix, and explain the errors. This is especially applicable in math class but would work well in an array of content areas.

This work asks students to evaluate, which is the 5th of 6 levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Hello, rigor!

And hello, engagement. Who doesn’t want to find other people’s mistakes and point out why they’re wrong?! 

Strategy #2: Design Your Own.

Give students lots of autonomy and agency by asking them to synthesize their learning to create something new… with bonus points if it’s relevant and practical! (Bloom’s level 6: Create.)

Here’s another math example for middle school students: 

Design a vegetable garden plot for a specific place on our school’s grounds, creating and solving a system of equations that determine the garden’s area, with the amounts of soil and seeds that will be needed.

Or, if you’ve studied 3-dimensional shapes, try this:

Design a new playground structure to add to our school’s existing outdoor play area. Calculate the measurements and create a diagram of where on the playground it would fit. Include the ages of the students who would use it, and suggest a few games they could play that involve this play structure. 

When I taught 8th grade ELA many years ago, a culminating project for our study of S.E. Hinton’s classic YA novel The Outsiders was squarely in the create level of BLoom’s:

Design a community center for all the Outsiders characters to enjoy together. Show your understanding of each individual character’s traits and each groups’ traits by including spaces and activity options for all. Show your understanding of the book’s themes by explaining how your community center allows for kids to find commonalities despite their differences.

Let Choice Lead the Way

“So… these tasks are great, but my students would need a lot of help to be successful. I’m only one person, and can’t help all of them at once!” 

Yes, that’s where choice and scaffolds come in. 

Here are some choices and supports for the error analysis problem above: 

Choice of Difficulty Level Label errors as easy, medium, or hard, and allow students to choose 7 of 10 to complete.

Model error analysis through a think-aloud at the board. 

Provide sentence stems: 

"I noticed the mistake in step __."

"The mistake happened because __."

"To fix the mistake, we need to __."

Highlight the error in each problem

Allow for pairs or groups to work together

The more choices we can offer as to who uses these scaffolds and how, the more engaged our students will be. They—like all humans—want autonomy. Optional scaffolds support the need for autonomy. 

If you feel your students aren’t ready for that level of autonomy, that’s ok.

We must explicitly (and repeatedly) teach students to hone their reflection and self-awareness skills, so they can make informed decisions about their needs.

Ideally, they can learn to answer the question, “Which supports will I need today in order to succeed at this learning task?”

Challenge + Choice: Your End-of-Year Secret Weapon

This partnership between CHALLENGE and CHOICE is an important one, and it will allow you to focus your energies in the right place as you strive to keep ALL students engaged in the waning weeks of the year. 

If you are curious about partnering with Teach Learn Thrive for some external support and accountability as you strive to increase student engagement at your school, please be in touch. We’re just an email away and ready to chat.