The Story of Two Best Friends: Student Engagement and School Belonging

“Student engagement” is a commonly used term and a goal shared across all education levels. With so many variables involved, it can be challenging to prioritize the most important factors of what cultivates students to be engaged as often as possible in our classrooms. In an attempt to prioritize, we might wonder what factors need to be held as “best friends” to student engagement versus other factors that might be viewed as an “acquaintance” that you only think about occasionally in its relevance to this goal. The Ignite Engagement program lives in constant reflection around this question of friendship.  

MDE’s Promising Practice: Improving Early Literacy Achievement with Ignite Engagement

Our educational world is in a state of restoration and renewal, where the potential for renovation exists. What we decide to do with this opportunity will tremendously impact the lives of our students.

Students Need Authentic Engagement

In an article by Andy Hargreaves, titled “The Future of Learning Lies in Engagement,” he encourages educators to focus on engagement as the right path to rectify learning losses and prioritize well-being. Hargreaves notes, “The best paths forward will be those that increase students’ engagement with their learning, with each other, and with their lives.” (Hargreaves, 2021)

Reignite the Joy in Teaching and Student Learning

Kent ISD is proud to welcome Ellin Oliver Keene and Dr. Gholdy Muhammad to our 2021-2022 Professional Development line up!

As this unprecedented school year comes to an end, you may be feeling a sense of relief that it’s over, a sense of pride for all you’ve accomplished under the incredibly difficult circumstances of teaching in a pandemic, and even a sense of nostalgia for the relationships you’ve built with your students in a year like no other.

You might also be feeling an increasing sense of fatigue from the emphasis on teaching isolated skills that students struggle to engage with and remember. Many teachers have said they feel the joy has been sucked out of teaching as a result of the push to march students through a checklist of isolated skills that leave no time for authentic, real-world, sometimes spontaneous, and always engaging learning. 

As we emerge from the pandemic and look with hope to next school year, it is the perfect time to rethink and reimagine how we teach. Kent ISD is pleased to be offering two professional development opportunities next school year to help you and your students reignite the joy in teaching and learning. 

Now is the Time to Recommit to Being Culturally Responsive

Written By Dr. Brandy Lovelady Mitchell, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Human Resources, Kent ISD

I hope each of you had an opportunity over break to enjoy some well-deserved rest, to experience concentrated joy with your loved ones, and to simply be still. One of the elements that I love about this time of the year (even in the middle of several global pandemics) is the deliberate and frequent prompts for reflection, goal-setting and dreaming.

New Year Investments!

Let’s take advantage of this season of reflection and goal-setting by applying it to our journey to be culturally responsive educators and by cultivating  genius in ALL of our students.