An Attempt to Boost Student Engagement Through Guided Interaction
Lauren Larsen
This year, T.C. has instituted new classroom teaching structures that aim to increase student interaction. You may have heard the phrases “Rally Robin” and “Round Robin” in your class; well, congratulations, you have been “Kaganized.”
The purpose of Kagan may be to boost student interaction, but it has a definite profit motive. Kagan is not merely a set of classroom activities, but is rather a business.
The Kagan website looks like an online shopping store. In just the headers alone, tabs titled “On Sale,” “Free Catalogs,” and even “View Cart” are displayed. A whole page solicits teachers to attend “magical summer workshops and week-long institutes at the Hilton at Walt Disney World.”
Seemingly, a Kagan primary money-maker is its annual Summer Academy and Winter Academy in Las Vegas or Dallas. For two to 12 days, workshops like “Brain-Friendly Teaching” take place.
On the Kagan website, there is an entire page that features every Kingdom at Walt Disney World. To facilitate visits, the site has “Get Park Hopper® tickets” displayed.
Molly Freitag, a social studies teacher and Kagan Coach who, overall, supports Kagan, said, “It is a money-maker. They are somehow connected to Disney. I do not know what the connection is… if they are sponsored by Disney or have some kind of relationship, [but] there is definitely an economic benefit.”
Freitag attended the Winter Academy last February. “There were probably five [or] six teachers [and] people from Central Office. This was the first time in all my years of teaching that I actually feel like I got something out of my professional development.”
Administrators like Jessica Hillery attended both academies. “I have been to the Summer Academy for the past two summers,” she said. “I did Kagan cooperative learning structures for the first five days and I wish I had learned about this instructional strategy when I was a teacher. Last year, I did the Winter Academy and learned about Kagan coaching and cooperative meetings.”
If a school wants to certify staff members as trainers, teachers must attend three school trainer workshops for three years for $999. The cost of individual workshops for a single teacher to learn Kagan structures is anywhere from $219 to $369.
Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS), however, has not only spent money on training, but has signed checks to cover other expenses and allocated substantial staff time to Kagan. This year, T.C. teachers are attending five full days of Kagan training irrespective of the courses they teach.
Kagan sells “Bonus Materials” including Question Spinners, MindMats, SmartCards, and more, including “Kagan Books” like Emotion Friendly Teaching Book, Science Buddies, Win-Win Discipline, and All Kinds of Ways to be Smart!, which cost anywhere from $9 to $79. Materials and books have been distributed to T.C. teachers at these training days.
“We primarily support Kagan trainings across the divisions through our Title III funding stream and spend approximately $150,000 per year,” said Bethany Nickerson, Executive Director of the Office of English Learner Services. Title III funding is specifically designed to support the education of English Learner (EL) students.
Nickerson has been working for ACPS for the past 10 years, and recalls the use of Title III funding to support cooperative learning–Kagan being one–since the beginning of her career.
“I [would] rather sit and hear a teacher lecture than do Kagan. I feel like Kagan disrupts the class because [students] will use it to get off topic,” junior Stephanie Curtis said. “No one even cares or really is participating in it [because teachers] kind of do it forcefully.”
“I think the problem is not with the structure itself or even how teachers have been trained to do it, but the actual implementation by teachers. Every teacher has their own style and now [ACPS] is telling them that they have to teach [with Kagan], which creates a lot of riffs,” said junior Tiara Madric.
“Just because I am talking to you in that Kagan setting, telling you an answer, does not mean we have [an automatic] connection because of that Kagan strategy,” said Junior Aliyona Tekleberhan.
The student perspective about Kagan generally differs with that of some teachers and administrators. Hillery said, “To prove that you really understand something, you should be able to teach someone else [and] expand on your learning and feed off of what other people know.”
While this this very true, Kagan does not do that for students. Junior Maddy Anderson said, “I think the way that they are doing it is not working. [Kagan structures] are 30 second exercises; it is not working together, it is…reading a paper to someone. I agree that those exercises [could] help with social skills, but I think that the exercises we do now aren’t the effective means.”
Even though Kagan is being used at T.C., the organization itself also takes precedence on a national level, and fuels an alarming trend.
Kagan is part of a larger issue within the national education system, or industry. There is an array of enterprises that make money from school districts.
Organizations like College Board, Princeton Review, Pearson, McGraw Hill, and more see education as a business. The College Board, a not-for-profit organization, made over one billion dollars in revenue in 2017 and will likely reach that same mark in 2019.
The editor of Kagan Online Magazine, Miguel Kagan, argued that the rise of the digital age has facilitated psychological isolation in the younger generation, especially in the classroom.
Although his point is valid, to a degree, generalizing that all students are “obsessed with their phones” is an unfair characterization of high school students as three-quarters of 25-29 year olds actually sleep with their phones, according to a Time article.
Kagan argued that students “turn to their phones for happiness and get an artificial dose of it, but it is not deep.”
How are Kagan structures any different? Turning to your “shoulder partner” and being forced to have a “Round Robin discussion” about our carbon footprint or Frankenstein is not a genuine and meaningful interaction, but is rather a synthetic form of communication.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the idea behind Kagan. I support student engagement, I just find “Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up,” of limited use for high school students.
In college, “Numbered Heads Together” are not going to be carried out in formal lecture settings. In the workplace, there will not be a Kagan teacher to facilitate group discussion. We are going to have to be socially competent enough to do this on our own. Of course, school is the place where students learn these skills, but Kagan structures should not be the way schools teach it.
Spencer Kagan, the founder of the Kagan organization, wrote, “It is the skills of the teacher that determine success or failure for many students.”
Kagan seems to imply that student personal responsibility is virtually nonexistent. It blames teachers for many problems that occur because of student circumstances or decisions.
It is the students’ own determination and motivation that contributes to their academic achievement. Teachers are mentors that instruct, assist, and support. They record grades; students generate them.
The purpose of Kagan structures may be to facilitate greater discussion among students, but as a student in Kagan classrooms who actually has to use these structures daily, they can feel synthetic and forced. They are not the Holy Grail of modern day education, and time will tell whether they are worth the price tag.
