Compliant, Engaged, or Mind-full.

No one would doubt that this young man is thinking. He is "engage" in creating a "meaning-full" representation of his thinking.

Recently I spoke with the principal of a local elementary school who had just returned from the Model Schools Conference 2012 in Orlando. As we chatted it became clear that the central message of the conference was discerning the difference between an education of compliance and an education of engagement. Since I'd been thinking about these ideas, I began poking around the Internet and with a bit of sleuthing I found dozens of sites and opinions on what differentiates students who do as they are told, AKA-compliant, and students who are engaged.

There is little controversy over what constitutes an engaged student and yet, I wonder if current wisdom or best-practice is at odds with what we desire, cognitively engaged students ready to think.  Edutopia, for example, published an article on compliance and engagement that offered the reader several ideas on how to engage a classroom full of students who are "sleepwalking," as it were, through the day. In the article, the author offers "ten smart ways to increase classroom participation."  Of these ten I want to target the first two: 1) start class with a mind warm-up and 2) use movement to get kids focused.

As you know, the brain develops from the brainstem to the cortex. What we consider a "mind warm-up" is focused on activating the cortex rather than focusing on activating the "whole enchilada" of the brain. Recall that a significant portion of children's lives was spent learning via non-verbal gross motor modalities. It seems logical that to engage children we should begin with their most practiced mode of learning and thinking, non-verbal movement. Additionally, it bares repeating, the higher order thinking (active cognitive engagement of the cortex) is the result of all the experiences and information the body (sight, sound, tactile, smell, visceral, taste) has collected and stored in the cortex. Therefore, above all, movement should be the thing we begin with, not mental gymnastics.

Okay, so if you're on board with this idea of movement, then the next question is what types of movement engage the mind? Here I argue that in the world of movement there are those that are mind-less and those that are mind-full. My guess is that most children are engaged in mind-less movement activities that do not promote intellectual engagement or contribute to meaningful conversations which support the development of higher order thinking.

In the article the author offers several suggestions as to how teachers might incorporate movement throughout the day "because most kids find it invigorating and it's easy to monitor full participation, it may become one of your favorite ways to get kids focused and kill dead time." Here are a few selected activities: Younger children: hand-clapping to accompany a set of math facts; Older children: rhythmic finger snapping in a leader/class echo format. These are time-honored and child-tested activities that work.

I ask you to consider the point of the movement activities. Was to stimulate the children's higher order thinking or was it used to wake them up? Simply because snapping and clapping are preferable to listening to someone drone on and one, is it mind-full or an aural "spoonful of sugar" to help bring their minds back to the business at hand?

I do not think that most of the movement activities that are considered best-practice contribute to children's intellectual development in an meaningful way. Certainly they provide entertainment, they make it easier to memorize facts and figures, they help us transition from here to there, and yet, when all is said and done, they are simply used as an artificial sweetener, a Spoonful of Sugar, for the knowledge and skills their compliant bodies must master. You see, in the end, children can engage physically with movement and be cognitively compliant. The trick is to provide movement opportunities that not only exercise their bodies but also excite and stimulate their thinking.

Just something to think about.