The Quest for Engagement

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

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

important. This is a big part of our problem in education today. We need to consider not just how we can get students engaged with predetermined curriculum content, but also how that content itself might be selected in relation to its inherent potential for engagement. If we don’t consider what material or topics might be engaging, as well as how to make any content engaging, getting students engaged in our lesson plans and assessments can quickly turn into an uphill task.

To some people, engagement seems obvious. Students are absent or present, smiling or frowning, awake or asleep, looking at the teacher or letting their eyes wander elsewhere. But in truth, engagement is an enigma. An apparent smile may actually be a grimace. A frown can signify that a student is fully absorbed in intense problem solving. Engagement has many faces. It can be evident in the raised eyebrows of delight and surprise or the furrowed brows of intense concentration. It can express the joy of excitement about learning something new, and also the sorrow and compassion involved in understanding something important but troubling, such as the history of genocide. It might appear as an outpouring of creativity when students’ minds are allowed to wander. Charismatic teachers can hold students in the palms of their hands. Quiet coaches and facilitators can use a different kind of hand-holding with their students as they guide them toward new levels of understanding. Engagement can occur with the assistance of digital technology, but it can happen without digital technology, too.

Recognizing engagement when we see or hear it and actually getting students engaged are far from obvious processes. The point of our book is to get beyond superficial signs of engagement, like not gazing out of the Engagement has window, appearing to be attentive, or sim- many faces. It can ply showing up. We also want to avoid be evident in the any rush toward simplistic and seduc- raised eyebrows of tive solutions that work for some students delight and surprise but not for all of them, like following stu- or the furrowed dents’ transient interests, tinkering around brows of intense concentration.