Goals for This Year

My main goal for this year is to get 100% buy in from students.  I realize that 100% is unlikely, but I'm already pretty darned close.  I'd say about 5% of my kids LOVE my class and about 5% HATE it and go so far as to completely disengage.  The other 90% have variable levels of engagement ranging from compliance to true internal motivation.  I'm most worried about the 5% that are disengaged as well as a kiddos who are just going through the motions to avoid a negative consequence.

One of my plans to reach this goal is to incorporate more student reflection.  I want the students to reflect after each station in my hybrid classroom.  I want them to think about the effort that they put into the assignment, their perceived success on the assignment and their actions when they were stuck.  I think this may help some kids who simply do not realize what to do when they are stuck and those that feel like 25%-75% effort is enough.

The other thing that I will do to try to improve engagement is to make as many connections as possible between the curriculum and an application.  This will be doable for some subjects, but honestly, most of algebra 2 is completely inapplicable.  For the topics with no application, I will try to use gamification to make learning at least fun if not applicable.  Things that I have tried include puzzles, board games, card games, and color by number.  I also started creating some activity seeds in Desmos activity builder and want to continue to do more of that.

I'm open to suggestions from anyone that wants to share ideas about student buy-in.