Engaging students in their own learning: the Preuss School motivates its students in grades six to 12 to achieve by focusing on teaching for understanding, professional development, personalization, and school structure and organization

As principals, we look for signs of student engagement when we observe classes. We know that if students are not engaged in the work at hand there is probably little learning that is taking place. However, it is not enough that students are just busy, because one should not equate engagement with busyness.

I remember one class I observed where students were cutting out pictures from magazines in order to make a collage for a book cover, the object being to illustrate the book's theme or message. The assignment was the traditional book report. While students were seemingly engaged, the activity might have been better placed in a lower grade than in a 10th grade English class. The activity lacked the important ingredients of rigor, challenge and relevance, which are essential for student engagement.

In another class, however, I observed a few students engaged in much the same activity, but it was being done as part of a research project. They had hypothesized that fellow students were more likely to read a book if a classmate had illustrated it in an inviting format. They were putting together the different artifacts they would use to test the assumption. In this case, the activity was self-initiated; it was relevant to their work and the project involved more than just putting together a book cover.

How do we as principals help teachers motivate students so that they become engaged in their own learning? This question is key, as most of us are faced with high-stakes accountability in the form of standardized testing, students who are not attuned to the traditional tests, term papers and lectures and students who do not see connections between what they think is important and what their teachers want them to do. The result is student disengagement and poor student outcomes.

At the Preuss School U.C. San Diego, a grade six to 12 charter school for low-income students who will be the first in their families to attend college, staff members knew that a critical part of the mission was to use the best practices known that would ensure student success and preparation for the university. We had the opportunity in 1999 to plan a school structure and curriculum that would engage students as active learners, thereby ensuring better preparation for college.

The Preuss School was founded by key faculty at the U.C. San Diego campus with the explicit goal of preparing students who are underrepresented on the campus. By using the criteria of low income for eligibility to attend the school, our present demographics are 56 percent Hispanic, 20 percent African-American, 13 percent Indochinese and 10 percent Caucasian.

The students who we are targeting are typically under-prepared because they have not taken the right courses, do not have an adequate grade point average, and have a home environment that might not foster college-seeking activities.

The school opened with 150 students in grades six through eight, and has expanded each year by 100 students. In the current school year we have grades six to 11, and in 2004 will graduate the first class.

I was brought on after the San Diego Unified School District approved the charter. Once I hired the initial set of teachers, we set about planning how to accomplish this important task. We settled on for areas of concentration to address student motivation and engagement: teaching for understanding, professional development, personalization, and school structure and organization.

Teaching for understanding

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, who wrote Understanding by Design (1998), have developed an intensive methodology for planning that we have used to help teachers develop units of lessons that go beyond the textbook, worksheet, multiple choice, fact-driven activities. As teachers develop their milts they are more cognizant of planning backwards--from outcomes to activities--so they do not fall into the trap of making an activity fun without thinking about its relevance.

Students who are engaged have a personal stake in the activity. Early on, when we realized many of our students were not "motivated" to complete homework, for example, we discussed the role of homework and how it could he used to foster understanding.

While we haven't yet arrived at the one best answer, we are continuing to discuss it and next year will have a group of teachers come up with ideas and perhaps policies about assigning homework that will involve students in the planning.

Student exhibitions and projects are an integral part of our school culture. We strive to foster the kind of projects that are personally meaningful and relevant to the student. For example, as we move into the 11th grade we will be introducing a senior project that will tie in community service, an internship and an exploration into an academic field of interest. Already we are enlisting faculty mentors from the university to help students with both internships and development of their projects.

Finally, students reflect almost daily on their learning. In each class, students are asked to reflect, using either learning logs or what we call 1 Clear (an acronym for Inquiry, Collaboration, Evidence, Application and Research) forms. These forms are used in the advisory classes either to address areas in which students need help, or to give students opportunities to reflect on their learning for their portfolios.