Pillar One
Promoting positive feelings
How does a teacher make a lesson feel personal? This pillar answers with movement, honest feedback from students, and a teacher who shows up as a real person.
Program two
One day on student engagement and motivation
Practical strategies, grounded in research, for classrooms competing with phones, games, and social media.
+22%
Higher math achievement for engaged students
Gallup, 2019
2.5×
More likely to earn excellent grades
Gallup, 2018
74% → 33%
Engagement decline, 5th grade to high school
Gallup, 2018
+20%
Achievement gain from this category of strategies
Marzano, 2003
Why this training
Why engagement, why now
A student who does not connect with the lesson stops trying. Teachers also compete with every app and game on every device. Randomization, storytelling, and attention-grabbers help them win that competition and make participation the norm.
Two more problems follow. Lessons that feel irrelevant are forgotten, so teachers learn to tie content to students' lives. Test pressure makes students anxious, so dynamic tension strategies teach them to perform under real conditions.
Research
"Focusing on students' social-emotional development had the largest contribution to the effectiveness of classroom management strategies."
Korpershoek et al. (2016). Review of Educational Research, Vol. 86, No. 3.
The five pillars
The engagement playbook
Five pillars, taught, modeled, and practiced, ready for the next class period.
1. Positive Feelings
2. Attention & Interest
3. Connectedness
4. Self-Efficacy
5. Sharing Best Practices
Pillar Two
Promoting attention and interest
How do you compete with a phone? With randomization, good questions, and stories. Teachers practice all three.
Pillar Three
Promoting connectedness and relevance
Why do students forget a unit by the next week? Usually because it never connected. Synectics and visual approaches help teachers fix that.
Pillar Four
Promoting self-efficacy
The goal of education is for students to learn how they learn best. Dynamic tension strategies and practice under pressure help them perform in real conditions and become resilient learners.
Pillar Five
Sharing best practices
Teachers work alone too often. The matrix method gives them a simple way to record their most engaging lessons, share them with colleagues, and find where the team has gaps.
Agenda
Sample engagement schedule
Shown here as a full day. A half-day version runs on dates you choose.
From 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM, teachers connect engagement to motivation and learning, learn the pillars of engagement-first instruction, and practice positive feelings, movement and brain-friendly strategies, randomization, and storytelling.
The lunch hour is 12:00 to 1:00 PM. From 1:00 to 3:30 PM, the focus is lessons that feel meaningful and relevant, personal connections, a fresh approach to visual images, self-efficacy, and responding on demand under pressure.
Want this for your staff?
Let Vanessa Conejo know your staff size and preferred dates.