Whenever teachers plan their lessons and activities, besides making sure the content is right, their next priority is student engagement. We’ve talked many times before on the podcast about the idea of balancing the structure and novelty in your classroom. However, we’ve never fully explained what it is and how to effectively use it. So, in today’s episode, we’re sharing six ways to boost student engagement using structure and novelty.

For all the resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.secondstorywindow.net/podcast/boost-student-engagement

Resources:

• Classroom Seating Chart Tool
• Brain Breaks Bundle
• What is Quiet Time? by The Responsive Classroom
• Relax Kids: The Wishing Star by Marneta Viegas
• Kitchy Pizza Cutter
• Snow Patrol Album
• Connect with us on Instagram @2ndstorywindow
• Shop our teacher-approved resources
• Join our Facebook group, Teacher Approved
• Leave your review on Apple Podcasts!

Mentioned in this episode:

Grab The Holiday Headstart Playbook at https://theholidayheadstart.com/playbook And don't miss our new podcast, The Holiday Headstart: https://pod.link/1739162255

Do you have a question or concern that could use a teacher-approved solution? We'd love to answer your question on the podcast! Submit your question to hello@secondstorywindow.net and put "podcast question" in your subject line.

Emily 0:36

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. In today's episode, we're sharing how we use structure and novelty to increase student engagement, and sharing a teacher approved tip for adding some peace to your school day.

Heidi 0:49

We start our episodes with a morning message, just like we used to do at morning meeting in our classrooms. This week's morning message is what tech tool do you think more teachers should know about?

Emily 1:00

And we got a great list of responses from our community, including Plan book, EdPuzzle, Gimkit, Quizziz, story jumper and boogie board writing tablets. We'd love to hear about your favorite tech tool for teachers over in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Heidi 1:19

Today we are talking about how to fine tune your students engagement. But before we start, we want to share this podcast review from Ninette555. She says, Thanks for all the wonderful ideas. I love listening and recommend to all my teacher friends.

Speaker 1 1:36

Thank you so much for your generous review and for sharing, Ninette. If you're listening, please send us an email at hello@secondstorywindow.net so we can send you a little thank you.

Heidi 1:48

And if you haven't left us a rating or a review yet, we would love to hear from you. Just click on our show in your podcast app, and then you can scroll to the bottom, and then you can tap those five stars right there.

Speaker 1 2:00

Yeah, of course it's going to be five stars, right? Ratings and reviews really help listeners know that our show is worth listening to, and that is a big help to us. So if you've got a couple minutes, a five star rating would be delightful, and a kind review would really make our day.

Heidi 2:16

We've talked about how so much of student engagement depends on the balance of structure and novelty in your classroom. But as we recently realized, we never stopped to discuss what structure and novelty are. Oopsie.

Speaker 1 2:32

So to fix our oversight, we need to start this episode with vocabulary corner. First, we have to start by explaining what we mean by student engagement.

Heidi 2:44

Now it seems like the definition should be pretty straightforward, because it is very clear when you've got engaged students, and it is so clear when you don't. So I was surprised to find that there really isn't one set definition of student engagement.

Speaker 1 2:57

Yeah. So I guess to solve that problem, we're going to write our own definition, our teacher approved definition of student engagement. So we define engagement as the degree of students positive involvement and willing participation in what's happening in class.

Heidi 3:15

I think most teachers can probably agree with that definition. If you've got an engaged student, they are positively involved and willing to participate in lessons, in working with peers and meeting expectations. It makes teaching easier and more effective when you have an engaged student, and if you have a whole engaged class, well that's just that's teacher heaven.

Speaker 1 3:37

So how do we get that heavenly engaged class? We've shared this idea before, but imagine for a minute that student engagement is one of those old timey balance scales. One bucket is structure and the other bucket is novelty. In the middle, when it's more or less balanced, our students are engaged. If the scale tips too far to the structure side, kids are bored. If the scale tips too much to the novelty side, then kids are overwhelmed and possibly misbehaving.

Heidi 4:06

Right. Because kids that are either bored or overwhelmed are not engaged, they're checked out. They're causing problems, they're pestering their classmates, they're doing the things that give their poor teacher a headache.

Speaker 1 4:17

So I think we can all agree that it's important to maintain that balance between structure and novelty. In a perfect world, we could just set this scale once and it would stay balanced all year. Set it and forget it. Wouldn't that be great?

Emily 4:30

But since we're dealing with children, that's just not gonna happen. Good teaching means you respond to what's happening in your classroom constantly. You're always gonna be monitoring and adjusting. So to keep the students in that engaged learning zone, you're constantly adjusting the balance between boredom and overwhelm.

Heidi 4:49

Let's say it's a Thursday afternoon and there's no school tomorrow, love and no school Friday. There was an assembly in the morning, and to top it off, there's a full moon.

Speaker 1 4:59

So just based on those details, you probably have a good sense of what the vibe in the classroom is like. Not much work is probably getting done. There's little focus. Maybe the volume in the room is getting louder. If you can't just throw in the towel and put on a movie, you have to make adjustments to re engage your class.

Heidi 5:18

Because there are so many unusual things happening at once, that novelty bucket is weighed down. When the novelty bucket gets too heavy, the class has tipped into overwhelm. There's just too much excitement for those little bodies to focus.

Speaker 1 5:33

That means we need to increase the structure to bring our scale back to balanced. And we can do that in six ways. Think of these as predictability coins. We're going to drop these predictability coins into the structure bucket to weigh that side down a little more. So we do that by adding structure to our spaces, to our schedule, to student socializing, to activities, to expectations and mindfulness.

Heidi 5:58

Phew. Hopefully you got all that. Yeah, done.

Emily 6:01

You got it right.

Heidi 6:03

But don't worry, we will walk through it all.

Heidi 6:06

Let's start by discussing what it looks like to add structure to our spaces. I'm a teacher who generally liked a collaborative environment. My class did a lot of partner work. They sat in tables, we gathered in a group several times a day. But sometimes the novelty in our room got so high that being near another person was just an excuse for kids to talk.

Heidi 6:27

And when that happened, I had to increase the structure of our spaces. Instead of working at a center, maybe that day, they had to take their center activity back to their desk to work; instead of choosing their own spots for silent reading time, maybe I got to choose their spots for them that day, or maybe they all had to read in their desks.

Speaker 1 6:47

Sometimes we can use our classroom spaces to increase novelty, like letting kids do the day's math assignment under the desks as a fun way to mix things up. But if it's needed, space is also a good tool to add structure.

Heidi 7:00

And it's important to point out that I wasn't doing any of this to guilt or to threaten students into behaving, it was all very matter of fact. I can see you guys are having a hard time walking quietly in the halls, so today, I get to choose where you stand in line, and we can try again tomorrow.

Speaker 1 7:14

Yeah, we don't want it to feel like a punishment, because it's not a failure on their part or mine. They're just being kids, and I'm being the adult. My job is to increase support when their little nervous systems are going wild, and I can do that with my predictability coins.

Heidi 7:30

You may find that your classroom spaces are working against you most days, instead of every once in a while. In that case, it might be helpful to permanently add structure to your spaces. Maybe you need to make an assigned line order. Make a class rule that work is done at students' desks instead of centers, or arrange those desks in a way that promotes focus and engagement instead of undermining it.

Speaker 1 7:54

We have a handy dandy interactive seating arrangement tool to help you figure all of that out. It includes layouts for rectangular desks, trapezoid desks, triangular desks, tables and carpets. One of the features I really like is that the pros and cons of each arrangement are listed right there on the tool, so you can easily identify which arrangements will limit opportunities for students to talk.

Heidi 8:17

When I taught second grade, ideally, I had my desks arranged in tables, but I rarely could leave them that way all year. By March, or maybe even earlier in the year, we were typically in rows. And one year with one particular group, I had to do that college classroom arrangement where all of the desks are separated.

Heidi 8:38

That was what it took to keep my class engaged. So that was the structure that was needed. It wasn't what I wanted. It's not how I envisioned my class looking, but I had to meet my students where they were and where they were was talking non stop to anyone and everyone who happened to be near them.

Speaker 1 8:56

Our desk arrangement tool also includes instructions for our patented teacher approved system for strategically assigning seats. Talk about maximizing the structure of your space. You definitely do not want to miss out on that. You can find it in our store or check the link in the show notes.

Heidi 9:14

Besides offering structure with our spaces, we can offer structure with our schedules. The more likely kids are to be squirrely, the more important it is that you stick to your regular schedule.

Speaker 1 9:26

Obviously, this isn't always possible. Sometimes the reason kids are squirrely in the first place is because your schedule is disrupted. But doing what you can to maintain at least your core four routines, of a predictable arrival routine, a call morning routine, an orderly hallway routine, and an efficient end of day routine will help keep everyone grounded.

Heidi 9:48

Those core four routines are like tent poles holding up the rest of the day. If those poles aren't posted, pitch. I don't know. How do you put up a temple staked? Do you stake a tent? Maybe?

Emily 9:59

I don't know. No, I don't know that sounds good, like, grounded?

Yeah, there we go. Those temples aren't put up right? The rest of the day is out of whack.

And in the case of your end of day routine, if that is rushed, it can impact how well tomorrow morning gets started. So we really want to do what we can to protect those routines.

If you have to skip your writing time for that day, that probably won't throw too many kids for a loop, but if you aren't watching the clock and now, you have to hurry everyone fast to PE without making sure that everyone is calm and ready for the hall, you might have lost your class's attention for the whole day.

So when novelty is high, make sure to lean even harder into the structure of your day to help balance the chaos that comes with anything unusual happening in the day.

Besides the structure of our spaces and the structure of our schedule, we can add predictability coins to our balance scale by structuring in class socializing.

Typically, kids are more engaged if they're working with a partner or a group, and who can blame them? It's much more fun to work with friends. But if there's a lot of novelty going on in the day, letting kids work together is likely to move your class closer to overwhelm.

Yeah, you don't want to be doing a jigsaw activity in the afternoon. If you had a field trip that morning. Like I can't even imagine that chaos, you will just wear yourself out trying to keep everyone on task.

That doesn't mean you have to go straight to nobody working together at all. If the kids are very overwhelmed, you might want to go from groups of four doing a task to kids doing it on their own. But if your class is only slightly squirrelly and not full on bananas, you could add a little structure by going from small groups to partners.

Right. We only need as much structure as it takes to keep kids engaged. It's not a choice between completely loose and free flowing or rigid and tightly locked down. There's a huge range of tweaks that we can make in the middle.

And one of those tweaks is to add structure with our activities. Sometimes we have to scale back, limit or remove choices altogether. Instead of a group project, maybe you need to do it as a whole class. Maybe you need to turn a small group activity into a small group discussion, because managing the materials for a science experiment is more than they can handle right now. Maybe instead of centers, the kids are doing worksheets at their desks today.

There are lots of ways we can adjust what we're doing to increase the structure of our spaces, our schedule, student socializing and the activities we assign.

Now, if we want to increase the novelty to keep kids from getting bored, we can do that by adjusting those same four areas. Decrease the structure of your space, let kids choose where to work, teach a lesson in an unusual part of the classroom, move to a different part of the school, or go outside.

You can increase the novelty of your schedule by mixing up the day's routine and doing things in a different order. Although a word of warning on this one, I wouldn't play with your schedule too much, because it is really easy for novelty to drop into overwhelm if your schedule is too crazy, and then if you've mixed up your schedule for the day, it's really hard to get back on track.

But there are a lot of easy ways to add novelty through in class socializing and activities. Let's do a worksheet with a partner or adjust the activity by adding choice. Let students choose three problems to skip on the page, or choose if they want to write a puppet show or a story to teach about state history.

We have a couple episodes that give lots of fun ideas for how to add novelty. So check out episodes 35 and 156, if you want some fun, simple, fantastic ideas.

But back to increasing structure. If adjusting your spaces schedule, socializing and activities aren't enough, you might need the structure of boosting your management plan with a reward system.

We're not huge fans of long term reward systems, because reward systems just don't work in the long term. But if classroom novelty is high and the other ways of adding structure aren't cutting it, a temporary reward system might be just what you need.

On a rough day, you could do a spur of the moment reward system, like giving tally points if kids are on task, and if they can get 15 tally points by the end of the day, they can have free drawing time. Or you could preemptively prepare a new reward system with goals and charts and prizes if you're headed into a season where you know novelty is going to be high for a while. So you know, looking at you, December.

December's such a problem child. We have talked a lot about reward systems, so check out episodes. 103, 104 and 158 if you want all of our deep thoughts and helpful tips on making reward systems an effective part of your classroom structure.

And that brings us to our sixth way to add structure to our classrooms, and that's to use mindfulness based emotion regulation strategies. Sometimes we just need to call a timeout and settle everyone down. The easiest way to do this is to have everyone pause, get still in their bodies, close their eyes or look down at the ground and slowly breathe for 30 seconds or so.

Focusing on breathing helps the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that's responsible for decision making, to catch up with what's going on. You can stop and have a breathing break several times a day if it's needed. It's really a nice way to regroup after a lesson and before dismissing students to go work on something.

Sometimes just breathing isn't enough, though. You might need a guided meditation or a mindful movement activity. You can check out YouTube videos for guided meditations, just preview them first, and we like the relaxed kids guided meditation books.

We also have several sets of monthly themed brain breaks. We broke each set down into three areas, recharge, refresh and refocus.

So you can use the recharge brain breaks, if structure is too high and your kids have gotten bored. You can use the refresh brain breaks if you and your class need to share laugh. But the refocus Brain Breaks are great for helping overstimulated kids come back down to Earth. Each set of refocus cards has breathing exercises, gentle movement activities, yoga poses and mindfulness games.

The nice thing about these is that they're printable, so that means they're easy to deploy at any point in the day. If the kids are hyper after a specialty class, you can just grab the stack of cards, flip to a refocus activity and get them back on track. You can deal with the problem right in the moment.

There's a link to our brain breaks in the show notes. And the nice thing about brain breaks is that you can use one to add structure in a moment when things are crazy, but you can also use them to add some delight to moments when kids are bored and checked out.

It always comes back to maintaining that balance between structure and novelty. All day long, teachers are constantly assessing their classes mood and adding surprise if the class needs more novelty or adding predictability, if their class needs more structure.

Adding surprise is definitely more fun than adding predictability, but maintaining a strong structure is fundamental to maintaining student engagement, especially in moments when novelty is high.

As you're going through your day to day, consider these six easy ways to increase the structure in your classroom. Structure your spaces by limiting where kids can be or assigning spots. Add structure to your schedule by maintaining routines as much as possible. Structure in class socializing by changing group work to partner work, or changing partner work to individual work.

You can add structure to activities by making them more straightforward and less creative. Assigning a worksheet instead of a project can make a big change when kids are hyper. You can add structure by using a reward system.

Also remember, you can add structure through mindfulness activities. Not only do these types of activities help students regulate their emotions, but they're a fun way to do it too.

Do you have any tips for adding structure to your classroom when novelty is high? Come join the conversation in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Now let's talk about this week's teacher approved tip. Each week, we leave you with a small, actionable tip that you can apply in your classroom today. This week's teacher approved tip is try implementing quiet time. Ooh, I like the sound of that.

Yeah, quiet time can be a real life saver. If you have a time of day that is consistently challenging, like when the kids come in after recess, or they come back to class after specialty classes, quiet time might be your answer.

Quiet time is just a few minutes of structured downtime during the day. The purpose is to help kids regroup so that they can settle into focused learning. The length of your quiet time depends on your students needs, but something like five to 15 minutes is usually a good time frame.

Now, I know what you're thinking. It might seem like it is impossible to find an extra 15 minutes in the day. But if you consider all of the time that you spend in an afternoon trying to get your kids to focus after they've come in crazy from recess or specialty glasses or whatever else as them riled up, you will probably end up saving time with quiet time.

So to keep quiet time from feeling like a punishment, we want to offer students some choices of activities. The choices could be academic, like reading, writing, doing unfinished work or starting on the night's homework. The choices could be creative, like drawing, creating with art supplies, playing an individual game. Or maybe you let kids just rest on their desks for a few minutes, but whatever students choose to do must be silent.

You probably don't want to offer all of those choices all at once. I'd recommend picking one activity to start with, and then you can add to the options over time.

So quiet time isn't a center, but the same principles for launching independent center time also apply to launching quiet time. So go back and check out Episode 159 if you want some suggestions for how to launch something like this in a step by step way.

Tell, try, tally, talk can also help you introduce quiet time to your class. Tell the class what will be happening and model it for them. Have them try in a structured setting, gather to tally how it went and offer feedback, and then talk about your experiences going forward. You may want to create a chart of expectations and choices you can refer to it as needed.

Quiet time may become your favorite few minutes of the day, but it also has a really positive impact on students. A 2015 study showed that just 15 minutes of quiet time improved high school students mental health Compared to their classmates, students that participated in quiet time had decreased anxiety and increased resilience. These students also reported that they slept better, had more confidence and felt happier overall.

If there's a time in your day that is consistently tricky to manage, consider if adding quiet time could be the structure you need to balance excess novelty. And you can find a link to more information about quiet time in the show notes.

To wrap up the show, we are sharing what we're giving extra credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

I'm giving extra credit to my new pizza cutter.

A pizza cutter?

Yes, my previous pizza cutter is just like a typical pizza cutter, but it was kind of falling apart and getting these, like, weird, not rust spots all over. I don't even know how to describe it, but it needed to go. So I was just gonna buy another one, just like that one, because it lasted me for like, 10 years.

But then I saw this Kitchy pizza cutter, and it's just a wheel and a really good review. So I had, I just had to try it. So instead of the style before, where you hold the handle, there's the wheel and it has a cover over it. Okay, hold on to and then when you're not using it, you like, slide a little, like door over the blade part.

And it really does work super well. And my favorite part is it comes apart. Oh, you can put the whole thing in the dishwasher and it will all the nooks and crannies will get cleaned.

Yeah I feel like parts of my pizza cutter always get, like, cheese stuck on them, and the dishwasher just doesn't get to it.

That problem solved. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's good.

Alright, I'll have to get me one.

Okay, what are you giving extra credit to Heidi?

So my extra credit goes to Snow Patrol's new album. It's good.

I heard there was a new one, but I haven't heard it yet.

Yeah it just came out. So I have been a Snow Patrol fan since Chasing Cars days and it this really is a good album. I think it's probably my favorite of theirs since 100 Million Sons, which I just looked up, and that was 2008 so it's been a while. And I was really excited. I just saw today that they are having a concert here in March. I had to go look at the venue is standing room only. I think I'm gonna have to pass.

Yeah, I think we passed the age for standing room concerts whenever we saw Joshua Raiden, which may have been 2008.

And I think the band should know, like, if you have people that are old enough to have been fans for 20 years, you need a venue with some seats. Yeah, we do not want to stand for four hours. And it would because the doors open at six the concert goes until 10:30.

Oh, no. I would perish.

So Snow Patrol, I would be there in my heart.

Well enjoy the album streaming instead, I guess.

That's it for today's episode. Student engagement depends on the balance between structure and novelty, so look for easy ways to increase the structure in your room if novelty has gotten your students a little too rambunctious. And don't forget our teacher approved tip for adding quiet time to a tricky time of day.