Five Paths of Student Engagement

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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

fulfilled and productive human beings? Can we find new ways to improve student learning and success by increasing students’ experience of engagement? How do we create more of it? It is against the backdrop of these questions and the transition from one age to the next that we set out on our quest for engagement.

The Quest for Engagement It shouldn’t be so hard to get students engaged with being at school. Most people pick teaching as a career because they have a passion for what they want to do. They hope to get children excited about learning in general or fascinated with the particular subject they teach. People become teachers because they want to make a difference in the lives of their students. You’d be hard-pressed to find a teacher anywhere who comes to school every day just waiting to bore students rigid! Teachers no more want to have disengaged students than architects want to design ugly buildings or health professionals want to make their patients sick. Engagement is almost the natural order of childhood. Leave children alone to play in the yard, on the beach, or just in their own rooms, and they don’t appear to have any problem getting engaged at all. But ask them to mow the lawn, rake the leaves, or tidy up, and engagement is the last thing on their minds. In between these extremes of indulgent pleasures and unwanted chores are the thousand or so hours a year that young people spend in school. In school, you don’t always get to do what you want. You have to sit in a circle, line up, take your turn, and learn things that aren’t always immediately appealing—from basic number sense to irregular verbs. There’s a curriculum to study and skills to be learned, and students aren’t always sure they want them. When we look at school in this way, engagement starts to seem like only a means to an end. It becomes a way to secure achievement in material that schools and school systems have decided in advance is

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What role can our schools play in helping them become more fulfilled and productive human beings?


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