Educating the Net Generation: How to Engage Students in the 21st Century

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Educating the Net Generation: How to Engage Students in the 21st Century by Bob Pletka

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Or, get it for Kobo Super Points! I believe that is the best way to understand their students and for the student to become comfortable with the teacher. The more comfortable the students are with the teacher, the more willing they will be to express themselves. By the time the end of the first trimester came, the grades that were posted online were not the grades that came home on the report card. By making it personal, he would take a greater interest in listening to the teacher and thus actually hear what he is supposed to be listening to.

This student engagement piece is critical to whether students tune into the learning or tune it out. For example, one parent wrote: Bring it to a level that interests them. Repetitious work tends to numb them and [they] rush to complete it rather than understand it. But there is no fun in algebra or memorizing the multiplication tables.

But [those fundamentals] eventually become freshmen chemistry. In contrast, parents want a rigorous curriculum, as this parent mentioned: Can there be competitions either group or individual that challenge all of a grade level? Parents want their children to be challenged in school, and even many students want to work hard when they see the relevance of the studies.

For example, even though some students in my research mentioned giving minimal effort in school when they found the work irrelevant, in the Emaze project these same students were willing to persist during difficulty, work long hours into the night, and work on the weekends in order to complete essays for the project.

A Tale of Two Classrooms Students who have expectations of going on to the university or youths who come from families and communities with strong academic support in a particular content area may come into classes knowing the value of a particular subject and having sufficient background knowledge e. However, many of our kids need assistance from the teacher, practitioners, or other more capable peers to help them build background knowledge, create connections from new concepts to their existing knowledge, and construct meaning from new information.

I remember reading E. What Every American Needs to Know , in which he argued that it is important that all students know certain fundamental facts, words, scientific concepts, people, and places.

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I was a first-year, idealistic teacher at a wealthy private school and found his argument compelling enough to require my sixth graders to memorize and define 50 words a week from the list of important words found in the back of his book. At the beginning of the school year, I started with his A words and moved alphabetically through his list. At the beginning of each week, I assigned the list to the students, and I received positive responses from parents about this assignment even though some students disliked it.

The following year, still a very inexperienced teacher, I taught sixth grade at the poorest public school in the Lake Elsinore Unified School District.

Educating the Net Generation: How to Engage Students in the 21st Century

I had a student whose mother was a prostitute, a boy whose father had been arrested for selling speed, and another boy whose father and two uncles were in prison for theft. There were also parents who had to work two jobs to support their families. Many of these parents worked long hours.

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The reception I received was quite different when I again assigned the list of words. The first week I assigned the words, most students failed to turn in the assignment the following week. To punish the students, I gave them detention, took away part of their recess, and even called parents—all to no avail. This did not deter me from continuing to assign the words from the list alphabetically and calling parent after parent when students failed to turn in the work mostly to no avail. One day, during another phone call to Mrs. Allen, whom I had not seen at back-to-school night or any of the other opening school events, she gave a long sigh on the phone.

I reluctantly admitted to myself that I needed to do something different. These were hardworking blue-collar parents who had to work long hours to support their families; and some, like Mrs.

Even though, at the time, I took Mrs. However, being a bit daft, again this did not deter me; I kept on assigning the words. But not long after that, on a hot day in September when the lake only a mile from the school had an algae bloom and the smell of dead fish wafted towards our classroom, one of the kids asked why the lake always stunk and why the fish kept dying.

The thought struck me that this might be the basis of a lesson unit, and I quickly jotted down some notes. From those questions, we created a list that we would work to answer through the course of the unit.

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I also arranged for a field trip to the lake to gather water samples for measuring algae, nitrogen, and phosphorous levels. I adjusted my infamous list to include words from our unit that would be due after we covered the knowledge and concepts as part of the Lake Unit. However, they were very kind to our kids, and they kept their concerns to themselves, eagerly giving our students information about the lake.

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Our class did experiments based on the questions students generated while other students began doing their own experiments using the data gathered about the lake. We incorporated some of our math concepts and formulas by doing algorithmic calculations of the results data.

After more than one month on the unit, students were ready to share their findings with the community and parents. As we were planning our presentation, the custodian, John, popped into the hall where we were feebly trying to create a makeshift stage for the presentation and asked if we needed any help. We were eager to accept his assistance, and his expertise became apparent as he built us a stage complete with props over the next week leading up to the presentation.

After he finished the stage and the students finished their research, the students presented their findings to a packed audience of parents and community members. Allen sat proudly in the audience that night as her son Danny, along with others, explained their findings. My kids were so proud of how hard they had worked and what they had accomplished. However, I think their parents were more proud.

As an ancillary benefit to the project, I became good friends with John the custodian, who, on a series of Saturdays on his own time, built me a life-size ancient Greek temple for our unit on Greece. Periodically, he checked on my kids to see how they were doing, and they responded to his interest by sharing what they were learning.

Later, he even worked with the students on weekends and after school to create a koi pond complete with a solar-powered waterfall and rimmed with flagstone. His interest and the community and parent support for the Lake Presentation all helped to create value for the learning we were doing and further engaged the students.

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