Welcome (Back) to Engaged Education

Formerly Educational Endeavors

If you are receiving this message it’s because you previously signed up to receive posts from my Educational Endeavors newsletter, which is also this newsletter, Engaged Education.

I’ll explain because that sentence sounds confusing even to me, and I know what’s going on.

For a year or so I had the privilege of writing a series of newsletter posts about issues in education, thanks to the sponsorship of Chicago-based tutoring company, Educational Endeavors.

We had some good fun as I wrote about retaking the SAT thirty-five years later, about how Wordle is good pedagogy, and how something called Campbell’s Law explains a lot of the wrong turns in education.

I also took my shot at answering a question that the New York Times had posed to a number of different education experts, “What Is School For?”

My answer? To be engaged

As I noted in that post:

Surveys show that pre-pandemic we had something of an “engagement crisis” with fewer than 50% of students saying they were engaged in school and nearly one-quarter saying they were actively disengaged. Engagement declines with each successive year of schooling. This problem has been significantly exacerbated by the disruption of the Covid pandemic.

My view is that without student engagement it becomes difficult to impossible to address any issues around learning, agency, discipline, academic integrity, or whatever other challenge you’d like to name.

Educational Endeavors the newsletter came to its natural conclusion as the needs of the Educational Endeavors the company evolved, and also because I had a book to write about the implications of ChatGPT on how we teach writing, a book that will be out in early 2025, and is titled More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.

That manuscript is now all done except for the copy editing, and I once again find myself with the time and desire to continue to write about education and engagement.

Enter Frankenstories, an online writing game for students. I connected with the folks at Frankenstories not long after I wrote about how I thought ChatGPT should not be viewed as a threat, but instead as an opportunity to re-examine what we value when it comes to student writing, and do our best to make student writing experiences engaging and meaningful.

For now, all you need to know is that I sought them out for a partnership in this newsletter because they were clearly a group who shared similar values around the importance of student engagement. You also should know that I own around 3.5% of Frankenstories, so while this newsletter is not going to be focused on writing about the game, it is this partnership that makes it possible for me to spend my time on this writing. and you’ll see the Frankenstories branding around the newsletter, just as Educational Endeavors had a presence previously.

If you liked what I was sharing before, you should enjoy it going forward, as the focus is going to be exactly the same. That said, if you’d like to unsubscribe, there should be several links around the post that allow you to do so.

Very soon I’ll be starting back in with new content - essays, interviews, sharing of resources and links - but for now, I’ll leave you with a link to the archives of previous posts as well as what I hope to be an ever-growing list of other newsletters that I think help shed light on how to get students engaged with school.

I’m excited to get going. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to make sure you get all posts, and also feel free to share this post with anyone you think might be interested in talking about engaged education.

Comments are always welcome, and I’m particularly interested in any recommendations about people or organizations you think are doing their part in getting students engaged with their educations.