Our Evidence

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

communities like their own, elsewhere. As we introduced participating schools to other networks with which we had worked so they could design a network of their own, their chosen focus on engagement meant we needed to get acquainted with the relevant research and to familiarize ourselves with participants’ efforts to improve student engagement in their own schools.

Between 2012 and 2019, we met with our NW RISE colleagues in two face-to-face convenings per year, with an expanding number of schools, teachers, and leaders. They worked with us to develop the network through its different phases of growth and collaborated in what they called “job-alike” groups to create engaging units of learning together. These job-alike groups were sometimes defined in terms of their subject areas, such as mathematics or social studies teachers. Sometimes they organized themselves by age level, as in an early childhood education group. In other cases, they came together on the basis of their roles, as counselors, school principals, or special education support teachers, for example. Between convenings, participants interacted on virtual platforms to plan curricula, share examples of what they had tried in their own schools, and begin to connect their students with each other, too.

We observed, helped facilitate, and participated in these face-toface and virtual meetings, and we engaged in monthly meetings with a project steering group consisting of representatives from the five states. Our observations, interviews, and online interactions in the NW RISE project provide the basis for many of the examples of student engagement we set out in this book.

Our book also draws on a project we have conducted together in ten of the seventy-two school districts in Ontario, Canada, over many years. On large-scale international assessments, Canada consistently ranks in the top dozen countries. Ontario scored sixth in the world in reading in the 2019 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Ontario and three other Canadian provinces

are among the highest performers of all English- and French-speaking systems in the world.3

Ontario is a sizeable system. It may be only one of ten Canadian provinces and three territories, but its population of over 14.5 million exceeds that of many countries, and it has almost five thousand schools. Its internationally recognized high performance has attracted educational visitors from all over the world.

We have strong connections with Ontario. Andy worked and researched there for fifteen years until 2002 and relocated there again in 2018. From 2014 to 2018, he also served as one of six advisors to Premier Kathleen Wynne and her education ministers. Even when he shifted his residence to the United States and began working with Dennis and other colleagues at Boston College, senior educators in the province sought his advice and engagement. Together, we took up one of these invitations, from the Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE; directors being equivalent to superintendents in the United States) to help them form and then collaborate with a Consortium of ten school districts.

Many educators in the Consortium participated in the project that provided data for this book. They opened up their schools, volunteered their insights, and gave us vital feedback that, in the best spirit of collaborative professionalism, was also critical when it needed to be. We visited all ten districts and interviewed over two hundred educators to determine how they were implementing the four pillars of the government’s reform agenda. 1. Broadly defined excellence that included the arts 2. Increased equity, understood as inclusion of students and their identities

3. Student well-being 4. Public confidence

The emphases on inclusion, identity, and well-being, especially, meant that much of what we witnessed cast considerable light on the nature of student engagement. We include examples of this at