Engagement Strategy Toolkits

Learning through internships (LTI) is a unique educational strategy aimed at making education more relevant and engaging. Unlike the job-training placements of prior reform generations, the Big Picture Learning approach to LTI experiences is not intended to consign students to a vocational track that steers them away from college. Part of the growing movement to prepare all students for college, careers, and civic participation, LTIs seek to engage youth in rigorous project-based learning within a “real-world” 21st century learning context. To learn more about launching an internship program at your school, check out ImBlaze.

Citizen science is a process through which everyday people—students, teachers, neighbors, and others—take an active role in scientific discovery. By working together to gather data, interpret results and solve problems, citizen scientists participate in a grassroots approach to the scientific process by leveraging their combined talents to contribute answers to real questions. In the classroom, citizen science projects are an effective way to include students in cooperative projects, as well as give them a tangible way to put new concepts and methodologies into practice.

More than just learning how to work with their hands, Tinkering & Making helps learners explore ideas and how they impact the world. Tinkering & Making often combines art and science so learners may express their own creativity and aesthetic.

In the classroom, tinkering and making projects are a platform for teachers to develop environments where learning by doing is the norm. With the appropriate activity and project structures to help support the experience, tinkering and making provide an explicit way for the classroom to embrace a variety of skills and mindsets that not only engage students but also prepare them for life and work in the real world.

Engagement games can be catalysts for the power and productivity of playful learning. They harness play to help students learn difficult concepts and—more importantly—to engage players and apply their learning in live, real world scenarios.

Engagement games use game mechanics to bring play and serious real world processes together, so that real action occurs while playing the game. Fusing a sense of play onto serious processes—from community deliberations to disaster preparedness—can result in increased participation and diversity, increased trust in the system and each other, and most importantly, increased ability to understand and affect change.