This week I am co-presenting a professional development session on increasing student engagement. We are modeling strategies to use both face to face and in a Zoom platform. The strategies are designed to increase student thinking and discourse, decrease teacher talk, and provide a variety of ways for students to respond. We choose to model our engagement strategies through Interactive Read Aloud (IRA), because IRA is one of the strongest equity moves in reading instruction as it models the work of a proficient reader, exposes students to diverse texts, provides opportunities for rich accountable talk, and texts are above what students can read independently thus giving a glimpse of what lies ahead for readers. In this blog I want to share some of the strategies we plan to share.
“Student engagement is the product of motivation and active learning.
It is a product rather than a sum because it will
not occur if either element is missing.”
– Elizabeth Barkley