Episode 56: Agentic Engagement!

HUGE shout out to Dr. Liam Printer for joining La Familia Loca PLC this weekend and sharing his incredible research and knowledge in such REAL ways!To listen to his podcast click here or visit his website to read about the many ways you can learn from him!

The various forms of engagement he shared he noted he learned a lot from John Marshall Rieve.

Episode 54: Being intentional about your feedback

To register for the workshop that Express Fluency is hosting for FREE on October 3rd click here.

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Are you looking for some ideas, inspiration and motivation this back to school season!? Bertha Delgadillo, Kia London, and I will be sharing what we've been doing to build community and engagement this month! You can register to join us for free by clicking the link below! Shout out to  Express Fluency for hosting this free event!
Register here!

Transcript

Welcome! 

Welcome to Teaching la vida loca, a podcast for World Language Teachers seeking inspiration, unapologetic authenticity and guidance in centering joy, and facilitating language acquisition for the people who matter most our students. I'm your host, Annabelle. Most people call me la maestra loca. And I'm an educator just like you and inspiring teachers is what I do. Hello, hi there. I'm so excited. You're here for episode 56 of teaching la vida loca. I was so fortunate this weekend. La Familia Loca PLLC welcomed Dr. Liam Printer as our guest of the month, which still feels really weird coming out of my mouth.

Dr. Printer

It was such a tremendous honor and one that I wasn't, I wasn't even ready for. I finally took a leap of faith and invited him. He's one of the guests that my members have been requesting for a couple of years now. If you don't know Dr. Liam Printer. He has an incredible podcast called The Motivated classroom. And our theme of the month in La Familia loca PLC has been simulating synergy and stimulating motivation, like how do we how do we spark that motivation in our students? How do we light that fire early in the year that gets them excited, every day to come to class, not knowing exactly what's going to happen, but really sparking their eagerness and drive to be there and motivation to participate to take the risks to be involved in the classroom community? And one of the things that I was I was so grateful that he went over was, you know, I? If you haven't already guessed this about me, I'm sure you already know this about me. I am not a research gal. I'm one of the gals who like, if my friend is really into research, I'm like, okay, cool. Tell me about it. Like I will learn from my friends a billion times sooner than reading about it, because I find it dry and boring. Like, I cannot, I can't. But Dr. Printer is so easy to listen to. It could be his accent, I don't know, I think it's that he like doesn't make it dry. He talks about it with real life examples because he is in the classroom, right.

Motivation & Engagement 

And one of the things he talks about was the correlation between motivation and engagement. And he talks about how in order to have motivation, you need achievement, you need to feel a sense of achievement. So, if you listen to my podcast a few episodes ago, about like, the intentionality around your praise and your feedback, and being very intentional about praising action over character, all of that leads to more motivation, which leads to positive emotions like joy. He specifically mentioned joy like 17 times on Saturday, I was so excited. And then that leads to more engagement. And he talked about four different modes of engagement. And the last one was fascinating to me. And I was so excited to learn about it. And it was agentic motivation. And I did an activity the other day that had so much agentic motivation it was the whole class was buzzing. It was why it was so exciting. And I've done this activity before. But all of my classes were so hype the other day to do this, and so involved and it was like this energy, this synergy that we had, where everybody was so eager and joyful and motivated and engaged. They were all eager to share all eager to offer up advice for this classroom story that we were creating together. I'm going to talk about this on October 3, there's a free event happening hosted by Express Fluency Elissa have explicit of, of Express fluency is hosting a panel with Bertha Degadillo, Kia London, and myself. So, each of us represent high school, middle school and elementary school just share some successes at the beginning of the year, how we're building community, how we're creating a place where students feel a sense of belonging early in the year, I would love to have you there and I'm going to put the link in my bio so that you can register for free. If you are listening to this after that date. Don't worry, I'm sure I'll blog about this activity eventually.

Agentic Motivation

But this idea of agentic motivation that late Dr. Liam Printer talks about is so important. And I think that it's easier to recognize than we think what it is, is it when students are so motivated and so engaged, that they start driving the lesson with their own ideas and with their own input, and they start steering it. Right. So, this is something that when I was new to acquisition driven instruction, blew my freakin mind. I used to watch my mentor teachers and go, this is so unfair, this is literally so unfair, that you just took a student's raise hand that mentioned something about hot chocolate. And you are now going in a completely different direction with the lesson. And you have 98% of your students hanging on your every single word. And you somehow masterfully are not even using that many out of bound words; out of bounds words is what I've always used to explain terms that are not necessarily high frequency, but they are needed for the subject that you're talking about whatever the the lesson is that you're focusing on that day, whatever your high frequency languages. For example, there's a Spanish so has, wants, lives. Out of bounds might be apartment house, because you need them to talk about whatever you're to use the word lives a lot. But you're also really that's not your target language if that makes sense. So, it was maddening to me to watch my, my mentor teachers, so masterfully, skillfully, and easily take what students were giving them and allow them to drive the lesson in a totally different way.

Doesn’t Come Easy, but…

And that is the agentic motivation. And it's something that I don't think comes very easily. And it's okay that it takes a little time to build this. But for my teachers who have been doing teaching with acquisition driven instruction for a while, you're starting to get comfortable, you understand the purpose of focusing on high frequency words, you understand how to get lots of organic repetition, with lots of input that is really compelling and contextualized for kids, right? They can relate to it. Dr. Printer talked a lot about relatedness, not just students’ relatedness to you, but their relatedness to the class and the content that you're actually teaching. So, if you're getting to that comfort level, where yes, you are getting more and more comfortable with creating compelling, contextualized, juicy input for your students. And they're being more engaged. There's this moment that a lot of teachers that I've coached before freeze, when a student is showing agentic motivation, and wanting to steer it in another direction because of their fear of falling flat or failing or not keeping it in bounds. The next time that happens, I want you to trust it. The next time somebody says something during a do now, that leads you to think, oh, it wouldn't be so fun to talk to them about this right now. Talk to them about that. Talk to them about that thing that made you go oh my gosh, that is so interesting. It happened to me last week. Here's another example of agentic motivation. Last week, one of my kids said. But wait, we were having a question of the day, I found a chart that Benton shared that I was like, oh my God, thank you. It's providing me question of the day for like two months straight. And we were comparing to Disney movies. It was like Tarzan and Beauty and the Beast, and they had to vote on their favorite. And sometimes this question takes two minutes. Sometimes it takes longer. Like in one class. This student said I've never seen Tarzan. But somebody told me that it's related to another Disney movie. And I knew immediately what they were talking about. And they were trying to do it in the target language. They were trying to stay in the target language. And did I know that it would take us completely off track and maybe take 10 to 15 minutes, and I wouldn't do what the other classes were doing. Yeah. Was it worth it? Totally. Because how powerful is it? If a student says something and then drives us completely off track? How powerful is that? Showing that okay, yeah, you can steer the lesson. And we can still do it in Spanish. So, I said, Oh, class A. Yo tengo la secretos de Disney. I have Disney secrets. And they leaned in they were so excited. They could feel that this was the moment that oh my gosh, we were about to drive everything off track. I shut off the projector. I grabbed a marker. And I told them what I knew about like the connection Between Tarzan and Frozen, Elsa and Ana, and Rapunzel. And I talked about, like this interconnectedness and talked about like, Elsa's parents traveling from here, I drew maps, and I drew their boat. And they were so wildly wrapped up and engaged. But part of that engagement came from the fact that a student using agentic engagement, they were so motivated in the classroom, that they were trying to steer the lesson in their own way, with their engagement, that I followed that.

Powerful Lessons

And those are the most powerful lessons when it just turns into conversation. So, this episode, I don't know how helpful it was. Other than me, giving you a little push to say, the next time a student wants to take things off the tracks, off the rails, go with it, see if you can stay in bounds stay with your target vocabulary with the language that they have been hearing, right with your high frequency language, see if you can do that for five minutes. Because I promise you, it will feel organic, more organic than ever, it will feel natural to the kids. And it'll feel like a beautiful moment where your kids will be highly engaged and motivated because you're taking what they want to do. And making it part of the class, which is really, really powerful. Um, yay, if you want, again, if you want to hear about some of the things that are going really well for me this year at the start of the year. And something that I haven't shared on social or anywhere else yet, I highly encourage you to register for this event hosted by Express Fluency. It's going to be a really powerful panel discussion. I'm really excited about it. It's going to be on October 3 at 7pm Central. And again, the link is in the show notes to register, or you can just reach out to me on email or in my DMs and I'll send it to you. it's already posted on Instagram. I think it'll be a powerful place and time of learning from me and my friends and so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for Dr. Liam Printer for giving me a word that I didn't know existed for this sort of student engagement that is the most, is the most motivational for me and brings me the most joy and certainly gives my kids the most joy when we're able to go with it. I encourage you to lean into those moments as well. I love you teacher. And until next time, I'll be teaching la vida loca and I am sure you will be too. Take care!