Dan+Meyer+Engagement

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/2013/fake-world-limited-theories-of-engagement/

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/category/fake-world-math/

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/2011/public-relations/

http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/dan-meyer-and-the-gatekeepers/


 * 1) **Perplexity is the goal of engagement. ** We can go ten rounds debating eggs, broccoli, or candy bars. [references a debate, long since settled — **dm**] What matters most is the question, “Is the student perplexed?” Our goal is to induce in the student a perplexed, curious state, a question in her head that math can help answer.
 * 2) **Concise questions are more engaging than lengthy ones **, all other things being equal. Engaging movies perplex and interest you in their first ten minutes. No movie on [|this list]  took more than twenty minutes to set up its context, characters, and conflict. The same is true of engaging math problems, either pure or applied. Use a short sentence or simple visual to “hook” the student into the space of the problem. Use later sentences to expand on it. This order is often inverted in problems that fail to engage students.
 * 3) **Pure math can be engaging. Applied math can be boring. ** The engagement riddle isn’t solved by taking pure math problems and shoehorning them into contexts that don’t want them. It’s hard to argue that two trains traveling in opposite directions from Philadelphia at different speeds is more engaging than “How many ways can you think to turn 20 into 10?”
 * 4) **Use photos and video to establish context, rather than words, whenever possible. ** Rather than describing the world’s largest coffee cup in words, show a photo or [|a video]  of it. Not only because our words fail to capture what’s so engaging about the coffee cup but because we should find ways to lower the language demand of our math problems whenever possible.
 * 5) **Use stock photography and stock illustrations sparingly. ** The world of stock art is glossy, well-lit, and hyper-saturated and looks nothing like the world our students live in. It is hard to feel engaged in or perplexed by a world that looks like a distortion of your own.
 * 6) **Set a low floor for entry, a high ceiling for exit. ** Write problems that require a simple first step but which stretch for miles. Consider asking students to evaluate a model for a simple case before generalizing. Once they’ve generalized, considered reversing the question and answer of the problem.
 * 7) **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Use progressive disclosure to lower the extraneous load of your tasks. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> This is one of the greatest affordances of our digital platform: you don’t have to write everything at once on the same page. While students work on one part of a problem, there’s no need to distract them by including every other part of the problem in the same visual space. Once they answer the first part of the problem, progressively disclose the next. This technique has far-reaching applications.