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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
The key point is that engagement and disengagement are not just inner psychological states. They are results of what our schools are like and what they do to children’s inherent interests in and curiosity about learning. Given that babies and toddlers are naturally engaged with just about everything, we have to think hard about what our schools do to children and teenagers that actively creates disengagement.66 We will see that disengagement is not the product of thoughtless and uncaring teachers who trudge through tedious material in dull monotones from the front of the class. Rather, it’s a consequence of how we design learning and teaching in a diverse and rapidly changing world. These were big enough challenges in the early months of 2020. Then along came the most disruptive change in schools for at least a century: the global COVID-19 crisis. This unprecedented pandemic led us to question practically everything we knew about teaching, learning, and student engagement.
The Coronavirus Pandemic Once the pandemic hit, all across the world, children stopped going to school—90 percent of all children, 1.6 billion of them, in 195 countries.67 Nothing like it had happened since the long-forgotten H1N1 influenza virus had raced across the globe more than a century
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with technology, or just having lots of fun. Students can be deeply engaged with ideas they’ve never heard of and that are presented to them in ways that make no use of technology at all. Students can eagerly engage with all kinds of material, including esoteric topics and darker aspects of life that can hardly be called “fun.” Take a closer look at engagement, and its nature and appearance can be surprising, unexpected, counterintuitive, and anything but selfevident. It’s not enough to tick a few boxes for engagement on a checklist, or move descriptors of engagement from level to level on a rubric. If we want to do something useful and powerful with engagement, we can’t gloss over it or whiz past it. We need to get fully engaged with what engagement actually is ourselves.
