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F I V E PAT H S O F S T U D E N T E N G AG E M E N T
for example, but also that such testing doesn’t exist in all school systems and can therefore be changed. Sociological perspectives can reveal how many systems disempower their teachers as well as their students. Yet, they can also highlight how high-performing systems succeed in empowering their teachers and students through proactive government policies. The COVID-19 pandemic also showed that the funding and flexibility that had been withheld from public education for so long (and their capacity to increase student achievement and engagement) could suddenly be granted. We only needed a crisis to release them. Like an engagement in romance, this book makes a promise. It promises to wed psychological and sociological perspectives to create a deep understanding of student engagement. If engagement is a problem in your school or your system, our book asks you to change both the system and yourself. If we want our students to get engaged, we must all get engaged too—with the big questions of system change, as well as with the practical and immediate changes in our classrooms.
Our Evidence Educators first brought the issue of student engagement to our attention when we collaborated on a development project in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. In 2012, we were invited to serve as advisors on what came to be called the Northwest Rural Innovation and Student Engagement (NW RISE) network. The purpose of this federally funded initiative was to build a network of remote rural schools in order to improve student achievement. When we set about designing the network together with state education representatives and leaders from schools and districts in the five participating states, participants decided that they wanted the new network to increase student engagement. Engagement, they felt, was the pathway to achievement. It was also a way to develop students’ sense of belonging in their own schools and communities, as well as increase their attachment to schools and
