PDSA and Increasing student engagement

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for PDSA and increasing student engagement. By the end of today's tutorial, we will be able to answer the following essential questions. What is the PDSA cycle of continuous improvement? And how can I use this to increase student engagement and performance in the classroom?

Let's start with a PDSA overview. So what exactly is it? Well, it's an acronym for continuous improvement to increase student engagement in the classroom.

P stands for Plan. What is the current problem? D stands for Do. What improvement strategies will we use? S is Study. What information or data will we use to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy A is Act. What is the data telling us?

So essentially, we need to determine an area that needs to be improved, implement a plan, analyze whether or not the improvement strategy is working, and use the data to make a decision moving forward. So let's look at an example of PDSA and technology.

So the problem-- students lack engagement in science class. So the improvement strategy is that we will incorporate a one-to-one classroom that uses flipped learning model where the student is getting most of their content at home and in the classroom participating in enrichment activities, such as PBL or Problem-Based Learning. We study this and gather information by looking at teacher reflection and observation. We also have performance-based data collection, and we've gathered student feedback.

Now we're looking at what our data shows us. In this scenario, our data shows improvement, but there are equity issues. With a one-to-one classroom, not all of the students have their own devices, or the devices vary depending on what is available. One student might be limited to just his phone while another has a laptop. Additionally, with flipped learning, this is not an always learning classroom. So when the students go home to get the content, some students don't have access to it. So we have to make arrangements to address that equity issue.

The Montgomery schools of Maryland at MontgomerySchoolsMD.org actually has some really great resources that you can look at that show PDSA in action in the class or with an individual student. So feel free to navigate to that website and have a look around.

So PDSA is a way to help us measure student engagement, and the University of Minnesota created a Check and Connect student engagement inventory. This inventory is research-based, and it includes six subscales that we can look at. The subscales are divided into two different groups.

The first group is the cognitive engagement, and this includes things such as control and relevance of schoolwork, future goals and aspirations, and extrinsic motivation. What we're talking about here is how the student is engaged in terms of thinking about the learning. Do they believe that they have control over their schoolwork? Do they see the relevance of it? If school work has relevance, if students have a little bit of choice they're going to be more engaged.

Additionally, what are the students' future goals and aspirations? If we can have authentic learning experiences for our students, they're going to be more engaged, and this is going to lead to extrinsic motivation. What is going on extrinsically? Are these students motivated by grades? Are they motivated by the prospect of moving on to college? What is motivating their thinking?

We also have effective engagement, and this has a lot to do with relationships. So we look at the teacher-student relationship, we look at the peer support for learning, and we look for family support. These are pretty self-explanatory.

We're looking at, does the teacher have a rapport with the students? If so, the students are going to be willing to do more of the learning activities in the classroom. Are we in a culture where learning is valued and appreciated? This is where peer support comes in. And what happens when the students leave our school building and have to get the learning done at home? Is there family support?

So this tool can be really useful in developing and measuring student engagement on the PDSA scale. And this is a resource that you can look at to further research Check and Connect from the University of Minnesota.

Let's reflect for a moment. Are you using PDSA in any form in your current classroom? Do you think PDSA would be helpful for you? Why or why not?

Today, we answered, what is the PDSA cycle of continuous improvement? And how can I use this to increase student engagement and performance in the classroom? For more information on how to apply what you learned in this video, please view the Additional Resources section that accompanies this video presentation. The Additional Resources section includes hyperlinks useful for applications of the course material, including a brief description of each resource. Thank you for joining me, and happy teaching.