18 Ways to Engage your Students by Teaching Less and Learning More with Rap Genius

1. Teach Less = No Lectures. Not one. Go through the students’ comments each night and respond, ask questions and encourage their specific contributions to the text.

Learn More = Students hate long lectures. Students digitally annotate the text in class and at home and engage with the material as knowledge creators, not passive receptors.

2. Teach Less = No preparations of daily lessons.

Learn More = Answer students’ questions directly above their passage by “suggesting an improvement.” You could also ask students to bring in one big question for the next day’s class. Then just put them in groups of 4 and have them answer the question themselves and report on it to the entire class.

3. Teach Less = Rap Genius turns assessment into learning and makes learning fun. Yes, I said “fun.” It shows a leader column in which the teacher can see how much a student is contributing to the text (effort and quantity) and quality (by isolating every student’s individual explanations).

Learn More = Every day a teacher can give students specific feedback directly on the site to help them with questions about the text.

4. Teach Less = Get out of the way.

Learn More = The students will learn it themselves. Any knowledge a teacher has, a student can Google. So, let them do that. You may curate some places for them to go for knowledge, but that may not even be necessary.

5. Teach Less = Read and learn along with your students. It’s OK to say, “I don’t know” or to respond to a question with another question.

Learn More = It teaches them to ask big questions rather than just wait for concrete answers, which often don’t exist.

6. Teach Less = Instead of focusing on re-packaging or repeating lectures from previous years, you can focus on what matters more: personalizing each experience to every student in your class.

Learn More = Something magical happens when you personalize learning in this way. The kids start connecting with you every time you post a comment like, “Great insight, David!” or pose a question to one of their questions. And the more you engage with them in this way, the more they write, and the more they write, the higher the quality gets in successive postings.

7. Teach Less = Following up on #6, it will give you some time to get to know each student, their unique perspectives and what they’re passionate about. Just observing two days’ worth of postings, I learned that one secular student makes brilliant connections to his religion, another student who is not particularly strong as a critical thinker makes complex and appropriate connections between the text and sound effects, and yet another student who regularly forgets his textbook can find an out-of-the-box, fascinating YouTube connection to virtually every passage that he explores.

Learn More = Students will learn more when they care about what they’re learning. Before the unit, my students rolled their eyes when I said they would be reading a book about a young boy from another culture going on a spiritual quest in 400 BC. The feedback from the students halfway through though is that they can’t wait to work on the next chapter.

8. Teach Less = If a student is absent, then you don’t need to repeat what they missed or find them that day’s notes.

Learn More = The students work at their own pace, in their own way. Some will move ahead of your timeline, which is great for you because it sets the pace for the other students and is more effective than you telling them to get their act together. They see what other students are doing and stop making excuses.

AT THIS POINT, YOU’RE HALFWAY THROUGH THE LIST. FEEL FREE TO STOP READING. Check out Rap Genius’ “Mr. Cohen’s Guidelines” and use what you need from the structure of my lesson. You can just toss out the rest. MAKE YOUR OWN UNIT. I’LL HELP YOU! Send me a message at @RnV_Ed after looking at my Rap Genius Unit... If you’ve read this far, you’re also serious about doing something crazy creative, so finish skimming these last 8, and I’ll see you at the end of the post.

9. Teach Less = Teaching is draining work if you stand at the front of the room and “teach” every class. Instead, you become a facilitator of learning and you walk into the class, relaxed, smiling and open.

Learn More = In letting go of control, the students will feel this change in energy and shift accordingly. Many will produce more quality work in one class, than they had over the course of weeks of a teacher-centered classroom. No, this is not naive; it’s purely practical.

10. Teach Less = No energy is wasted on reminding students to bring their books (it’s online all the time), to do attendance (once they log in, you’ll see whose not here), or getting everyone’s attention to start the class. Just write on the white board: “Work on Rap Genius. I’m here if you need me.” And the rest takes care of itself. Most of the time my students didn’t need me; they were just excited about a connection or discovery they made and wanted to show me.

Learn More = It’s been proven in studies cited by Daniel Pink in “Drive” that workers, or in this case, learners, have a deep need for autonomy in learning a new skill. Using Rap Genius shows students that you trust them to work independently within the framework given. Amazing results occur when students feel this trust. Trust me.

11. Teach Less = Create a comfortable environment for them to work, with whatever device works for them. In both classes, we went to the library for a few days straight at students’ request. I wandered around helping students who needed it one-on-one, observing, encouraging and nodding my approval. After the fifty minute class, I had spoken to each student in the class at least twice finding out where they were and what they were doing and felt more energized at the end of the class than at the beginning.

One girl, who has handed in work late throughout most of the year, was busy working on Rap Genius on her iPhone while sitting against the wall just outside the computer lab. On some couches in the corner of the library, a group of 4 girls were responding to each other’s postings on one passage and then elaborating on their positions in the form of a conversation.

In the computer lab, two boys saw me and hustled over to show me a cool link they found about the history of a tree found in the region in which the story is set. Another boy, was commenting on a rap singer, Tyler the Creator’s lyrics. I asked him some questions about the song, which led to talking about Rap Genius, which led to him posting his first explanation on Siddhartha moments later. The point is: every student in both classes was engaged while working on this project. Every single one. One of the librarians, not knowing what my students were working on, commented that my classes were more focused on their work than any other class in the school this year, including the older grades.

12. Teach Less = This one is a bit of a contradiction. In some ways, I didn’t teach less; I actually taught more—by choice. It was so rewarding, refreshing and revealing to see how effective using Rap Genius was in this unit that I looked forward to giving daily feedback, posting flipped videos that answered some of the students’ main questions and putting together interview extensions to help all of us engage with a novel in new and exciting ways.

13. Teach Less = No Exam Review for this Unit

Learn More = A trend with today’s students in both high school and university is to share notes on sites such as Scribbles, started by a student at my school.

Instead of each student feeling it necessary to seek out such group notes individually, the whole class is actively seeking and sharing explanations and multi-media connections of 40 students (as I did this with two classes at the same time). The text is not only the ultimate note-sharing collaboration amongst peers, but it includes all of your comments and suggestions made during the chapter. Students can scroll through the entire online book, focusing on passages or chapters that they need clarification on and watch my posted flipped videos, which pop up in each chapter for further clarification. In the old days (2012), it would be like asking every student in both classes to photocopy their notes and their highlights in the book to practice for the exam.

14. Teach Less = No hand-outs to give out. No book to order or to forget in their locker.

Learn More = Students can easily access the guidelines at any time they want. No more, “I couldn’t do it this weekend because I forget the assignment or my book at school.”

15. Teach Less = No chasing kids to hand in an assignment: It’s all right there, integrated into the digital annotation. I broke the assessment into several parts (See my Lesson on the site under Mr.Cohen’s Lesson for Siddhartha), but for the final assessment, it was to do what I termed, a “Multi-Media Quotation Analysis.” Simply put, analyze a passage based on a basic structure and example I posted for them and then attach a relevant, interesting, creative media link that reflects or multi-dimensionalizes the analysis of the quotation. If they haven’t handed it in, I don’t have to worry that I may have misplaced it at Starbucks or whether they are lying about handing it in or not.

16. Teach Less = No brain power wasted trying to figure out who is actually learning each class.

Learn More = Each night, you will see clearly if the student who sits at the back of the class actually has read the chapter and inquired about parts he or she doesn’t understand. If the student is silent or writes surface level responses, then you can take immediate actions to encourage them through feedback on the site or in the next day’s class or, during the follow-up class, pair them with a student who has been contributing in a meaningful way. This is a great opportunity to pair students who usually sit at opposite ends of the room and don’t talk yet may have good collaborative synergy.

17. Teach Less = No more scrambling or ad-libbing on parent-teacher night.

Learn More = The PARENTS will LEARN MORE about how their child learns best in a way they have never experienced before when meeting with a teacher. How? Pull up Rap Genius on a computer screen or your laptop or iPad. Show them how many points their son or daughter has accumulated. Explain what this means. Then show them a few examples of their specific contributions, framing one in a positive light and one that needs improvement.

18. Teach Less = Feel the pride knowing that by teaching a unit in this way, you are applying the most leading-edge style of pedagogy that educational visionaries like Ken Robinson, the most watched TED TALK on YouTube, and Sugata Mitra, the founder of the award-winning and globally renowned concept of Self-Organized-Learning-Environments (SOLE) in his “School in the Cloud” digital classroom. You’re also implementing what the top education systems in the world like Singapore and Finland and top charter schools in the United States have adapted in project-based learning, the flipped classroom model popularized by the Khan Academy and the practical application of the kind of skills essential for the 21st century.

With all the white noise in the world of educational blogs and apps, I’m honored you read the whole post.

Learn More = What do you have to lose? Nothing, but some control--and the limited belief that teaching has to be your whole life because you don’t have a choice. Now you do with Rap Genius.