Keeping Kids Engaged in Class

I recently read that if you aren't keeping your students engaged you might as well be talking to a brick wall. As an educator who has been around for a while I find there's a lot of truth in that statement. There are many definitions of what it means to be a 21st century school, but really what it all comes down to is keeping students engaged in authentic, real world learning tasks. The timeliness of this Edutopia article entitled How to Keep Kids Engaged in Class was too relevant to many of the collegial discussions we've been having at Kimmel Farm Elementary. I had to blog about it. I think it applies to every educator at every level, and while there are some tried and true methods outlined here, there are some new ones that I'm going to try. (Photo courtesy wooleywonderworks via Flickr under a Creative Commons 2.0 license)