your guests? What attentive touches do you create? What preparations have you made? Consolidating learning is the meal itself—the thing that guests bite into.
Fisher and Frey’s (2015) model separates launching from a lesson’s instruction. This is an essential takeaway from the systems thinking model. You cannot succeed without planning for both launching and consolidating, and both exist to engage students in their own distinctive ways. Launching is the context you create for the learning, and consolidating is the work you structure with which students will learn.
Fisher and Frey (2015) open the launching section of their book with a story of student anxiety about school. Let me be clear—the anxiety is about school, not learning. A low-engagement class or school format and structure—not learning itself—create anxiety. I have some personal experience with this as a parent. My daughter experienced severe anxiety in seventh grade. She had an advanced mathematics teacher that she, despite trying to, couldn’t connect with. Her feelings manifested into severe physical symptoms around the tests in that class. Even though she had a near perfect grade, the anxiety overwhelmed her. We had never experienced this and didn’t know the cause. She missed two months of school while we visited all the best doctors in the area. In the end, two things re-engaged her in school: the volleyball team and a different mathematics teacher. If switching teachers isn’t possible, supporting that teacher so he or she can learn how to positively engage students is critical.
What Does It Mean to Launch Learning?
Launching learning is how teachers introduce content in the classroom. It “marks [students’] entry point” (Fisher & Frey, 2015, p. 8). Urgently scrutinizing our education practices (Holmes, 2012) helps us better reach students. Fisher and Frey’s (2015) driving questions about this aspect of instruction promote that scrutiny: “What are my instructional goals for students? Where are opportunities to make learning relevant? What misconceptions and errors do I anticipate? How can I invite students into learning? What expert thinking do my students need to witness?” (p. 174).
Use these questions when you are planning to launch the learning in your classroom. You’ll see in each chapter that I paid special attention to each of these questions in the teacher A and teacher B scenarios.
What Does It Mean to Consolidate Learning?
If launching learning is like setting the table, consolidating learning is the meal itself. Not every guest will eat every part of the meal, but each guest has a favorite. Consolidating learning is about what teachers do with their instructional time. The Unstoppable Learning model compels teachers to ask themselves the following driving questions about this aspect of instruction (Fisher & Frey, 2015): “How can I structure learning tasks to ensure complexity? How can I structure learning tasks to facilitate interaction? How can I design learning tasks to foster independence?” (p. 175).
These questions are the crux of developing lessons that will help students build competence through thinking through complex concepts, support each other through collaborative classroom activities, and find a level of independence in their learning. Each of the chapters on the student engagement mindsets takes these questions into account when looking at the instructional strategies. Finally, I wrote this book assuming you have read Fisher and Frey’s (2015) Unstoppable Learning. The mindsets are the frame around launching and consolidating learning. If you launch and consolidate in your classroom, using the student engagement mindsets to complement this work, you can engage students with different needs.
Student Engagement Mindsets
There are five mindsets. You may be tempted to silently label students instead of identifying mindsets and using them to guide your instruction. Reframe your thoughts if you catch yourself thinking, “That student is an agitator” or something similar. This contributes to bias, which can negatively affect students who are struggling (Friedrich, Flunger, Nagengast, Jonkmann, & Trautwein, 2015). Watch for and work against bias in yourself.
• Agitator mindset: Students with this mindset are at the far-left end of the engagement continuum (see figure I.2 on page 8). They are less engaged than their classmates. Students with the agitator mindset actively work against the teacher, are overtly disruptive, and chronically underperform.
• Retreater mindset: Students with this mindset are withdrawn. They don’t attempt work, but they do not disrupt others. They also chronically underperform.
• Probationer mindset: Students with this mindset do their work only when outside forces compel them. They never complete high-quality work. They work to avoid punishment.
• Aficionado mindset: These high-achieving students think of school as a game, and they play it well. They do exceptionally well. Extrinsic motivators (like earning high grades, making a positive impression, and winning awards) drive them to complete work and achieve accolades. Most educators identify with this mindset, so pay attention to whether you’re seeing through that lens as you read.
• Academician mindset: Students with this mindset sometimes have enough knowledge to teach content. They have an internal drive for learning in that content area, and it shows in their behaviors. They fully engage in learning and sometimes move beyond extrinsic motivators like grades or awards. Learning is their primary interest.
These are the roles our students play based on their engagement. Each mindset benefits from specific tactics to increase or keep motivation. Using those tactics can help you move students up the student engagement mindset continuum.
How Not to Apply the Mindsets
Many teachers think they see students with the aficionado and academician mindsets in honors classes; they think they see students with probationer and retreater mindsets in remedial classes; they think they see those with agitator mindsets in detention or suspension. This thinking is an oversimplification. Thinking this way gives educators results like spotty engagement and inconsistent student success. Let us recognize that our current approach might be creating or reinforcing the harmful student engagement mindsets.
Furthermore, separating students into different classes (tracking) or classroom groups (ability grouping) based on their engagement mindsets is not the best option.
• Separating and grouping students threatens to increase bias: A Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings (Loveless, 2013) report warns that “grouping students by ability, no matter how it is done, will inevitably separate students by characteristics that are correlated statistically with measures of ability, including race, ethnicity, native language, and class” (page 15). Groups like these already struggle in the classroom under the weight of bias (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2002).
• Tracking and grouping have negligible, and sometimes detrimental, effects: Research shows (Betts & Shkolnik, 2000; Lleras & Rangel, 2009), for instance, those “lower grouped for reading instruction learn substantially less, and higher-grouped students learn slightly more over the first few years of school, compared to students who are in classrooms that do not practice grouping” (Lleras & Rangel, 2009, p. 279).
Remember: the mindsets exist to guide instruction—not to pigeonhole students or enable misperceptions about their abilities. Some kids are in crisis, but it’s up to teachers to engage them.
The Student Engagement Mindset Continuum
Student
