If student engagement is low, what is missing?

If student engagement is low, what is missing?

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

~ estimated 17-minute read ~

In my recent EdTechEnergy (edtechenergy.org) blog posts, I wrote a lot about what engages our students in our classrooms. If you read these blog posts, you learned that community, technology, instructor presence, and more are real game-changers when it comes to engaging our students from the start of our lessons to the end.

Here is a list of those blog posts for easy access:

·      May 7, 2021 - Provide Meaningful Feedback that Increases Student FUTURE Engagement, Participation, & Achievement

·      June 2, 2021 - What is the #1 Influencer for Student Engagement?

·      June 10, 2021 - How does instructor presence impact student engagement in your classroom?

·      June 16, 2021 - How does technology empower student engagement?

But in today’s article, I’m going to talk about what prevents student engagement from happening if it’s not included in your classroom.

Whenever I’m trying to solve a problem, I always ask the easiest questions: the Who, the Where, the How, the Why, and the When, and not in any specific order. If we look at the disengagement of students in a classroom, let’s begin by finding the answers to these basic questions.

Let’s start with people; the Who. When I think about reasons why engagement isn’t happening in the classroom, the first word that pops in my head is relationships. If students don’t have a relationship with the teacher, that’s a huge deficit in getting students to engage in anything we do in our classroom. We continue to ponder the Who question and think of their classmates, and ask, do they have relationships with the other students in the class? I can tell you from experience, when students have close relationships with their peers in a classroom, participation increases because there’s an intrinsic motivator to participate with their friends in our classroom. When they’re participating in student learning activities and assignments, if their friends are part of the picture, they’re likely motivated to participate. It’s super important for us teachers to find ways to connect our students and nurture the relationships they have in the classroom with their peers. Teambuilding exercises, icebreakers, group projects, pairs and shares, gallery walks, the list goes on and on how we can specifically nurture the relationships students have with their classmates. And teachers can do a variety of things to build individual relationships with each student. I discuss these ways as strategies in prior blog posts such as building our instructor presence, providing personal feedback, integrating technology, and giving each student the opportunity to be seen and heard in every class. Access the posts above.

These people-pleasers tend to get students on our side in the classroom. We build relationships with our students by finding out about each student outside of our classroom, for example, what are their interests and their hobbies? What are they proud of? What do they do in their free time? Who is their family?

If we think about the numbers, students spend six hours with their teachers and their classmates each school day. Multiply that by five, Monday through Friday, and we have a lot of time together. If teachers offer opportunities for students to build relationships in all we do, participation will increase and so does the engagement, because of those relationships in our classrooms.

The second question I ask is the Where. So where are students learning? How would our students describe our classroom? Our learning spaces? And when I think about the place students are learning, we know all that is inside that place creates the way students are feeling in the environment. If we’re teaching in the virtual classroom, how does a live virtual class feel to our students? How would they describe our live virtual classes? If we are teaching in the physical classroom, how welcome does our classroom feel to our students? Does it feel inviting? Is it inclusive? And a lot about the physical space also has to do about the culture we create in our classrooms. Do our students know our values, our goals for the class, what we want most for them? Do our students know the classroom policies and procedures and are they able to recite them easily which creates foundational stability in our environment and in our culture? Is there a vibe that is conducive to strong learning and student sharing? Is there acceptance of diversity and awareness of that diversity in a way that is respectful and honors each and every student? Is there a safe haven to learn in our classroom? And is trial and error learning not only welcomed but encouraged?

Again, the place whether we’re talking physically, virtually, or in a way, atmospherically according to the classroom culture we build is extremely important in allowing the type of student engagement that results in learning. Our classroom environment sets the tone for EVERYTHING that happens in it! The learning environment is powerful in guiding, encouraging, and making students feel comfortable and confident when they learn in our place. Because of this ever-present dynamic, we teachers need to be cognizant of the place our students are learning.

The next question I ask after the Who and Where, is the How? And this one is an easy answer, especially in the 21st-century. If we are not using technology from the start of our lessons to the end in different ways, and different measures, and with a variety of options, we’re not going to engage our students for very long. Our 21st-century students need the media, the interaction, the community, the accessibility, and the fun that technology brings to their learning to lay a foundation for their want to engage. My June 16, 2021, blog post listed above provides the five reasons why technology is such an engager in the classroom. 

The next question I ask is the Why? This answer is very important to know and consider when we want to engage our students in our instruction, their student learning activities, and their assessments. And the answer has to do with relevance. Do students know not only why they are completing activities and assessments and lessons, but do they know how it’s going to benefit them? Do they know how it’s going to prepare them? Do they know how it’s going to inspire them? And how are we connecting the content to the real world? Do they see connections? Can they apply their learning to their outside world? Can students relate their learning in a way that they may personalize the learning and make it their own? Again, relevance when it is alive and thriving in a classroom fuels the highest student engagement in the classroom. Naturally, when we have relevance in our classrooms, we have student buy-in.

And the way we can disintegrate student buy-in pretty fast is by giving work to students that look and feel like busywork. It’s one of the most harmful things we can do as teachers in our classroom. For example, during virtual learning, we learned that the amount of time in a school day students wanted to invest was a lot less than those six hours they used to invest daily, Monday through Friday in the physical schools. While we had their attention in those early months of virtual learning, we had better make sure we planned valuable learning tasks for the time we were in virtual classes. For example, students should no longer search for definitions for vocabulary words. In fact, searching for definitions should be an obsolete task that we do not ask our students to do inside instruction and learning. Simply, all the students are doing is carrying out Google searching skills. We need to go higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy when they are in our classes, and we have their attention and their time.

Additionally, I highly recommend placing a maximum of five vocabulary words in a lesson and including the definitions so students can do higher-level learning activities with those words instead of simply searching for their definitions.

Also, always start assignments and assessments with the purpose, the Why. I liked to talk about the purpose of an assignment when I introduced the assignment to my students. I believed this explanation increased their buy-in to complete the assignment with good effort. Additionally, I tried to word the purpose of assignments so students could relate to the purpose, and I hoped it would increase not only the number of submissions, but also the effort, time, and excitement students invested in the assignment. 

After introducing the purpose, I asked students if they had any questions about the purpose and then asked them to predict past the purpose. One question to students could be, "What will happen if you complete this assignment according to the purpose at hand?" Or "Now that you know the purpose, what do you think you can do with what you’re going to learn inside this assignment or assessment that can make you a game-changer in either something personal or something in your community or something in your future academics?" This type of inquiry caused students to think about their present and future learning and possibly in that exercise, feel a bit of ownership in what they were about to learn.

Also, give students choice in assignments. When students can choose, for example, what form their assignment will take on as the end result they submit, it gives students the opportunity to connect the content with their interests, strengths, and passions, which creates a personalized experience.

Project-based learning is another rich way to add relevance to what students are learning and showcasing in assessments. I remember when I taught high school Sports and Entertainment Marketing in the first high school where I taught. The project I had was an Apprentice project. I split the class up into two teams and each team planned, designed, marketed, managed, and sold admissions to a high school dance. Whichever team made the highest profits, those students in that team earned the A. Super relevant, super realistic, and super real-world! I don't know what better way to add relevance to an assessment than to bring the real world into our assignments.

After a big project, ask students to share how the learning has helped them. Students hearing other students talk about their learning and the benefits of their learning adds the type of relevance that can transition into the next assignment for our students and build on this momentum. Having students express their connections to the content, their trials, and their victories can cause everyone in the classroom to develop a deeper connection to what was learned and showcased in the project. This type of relevance has the DNA to exponentiate students’ relationship to the content, which is a higher level of education and usually results in a transfer of that learning into other courses.

The last question, the When, has a simple answer. When are we going to use technology in the lesson, student learning activity, assignment, or assessment? When are we going to build relationships? When are we going to share the relevance of what students are doing in the classroom? When are students going to feel safe in a trial-and-error learning environment? The answer? From the start of our lessons to the end of our lessons. From the start of your student learning activities till the end. From the beginning of that assessment or assignment throughout the assessment assignment, and when they finish it. Student learning should progress after they submit assignments through your personal feedback and their response and revision if all is necessary for deeper learning.

When we think about what stops student engagement in its tracks, we can think about what is missing in our instruction, student learning, and assessment. What is missing in our classrooms? Our culture? Our community? If we put our intentions and focus on building relationships, connecting relevance, integrating technology, creating the kind of culture where students feel welcome, safe, confident, and comfortable, and continually delivering on what supports student learning and belonging, engagement happens organically. Students show up and engage because we have all the ingredients present that students need to engage in whatever we present to them.

Another way to finetune what we are doing in the classroom in providing opportunities to build relationships, nurture the environment, communicate relevance, integrate the technology, and time and schedule the engagers is to ask students for input. What do they need to engage in the content? What motivates them to engage? What makes them comfortable to engage? How do they need to feel in the classroom to engage? Collecting feedback from our students is valuable intel in creating the type of learning experiences that students naturally want to engage in.

Introduce, intersperse, interject, and include relationships, relevance, environment, technology, and timing to build the type of student engagement that leads to the best student performance!

Want to learn more? One way I aim to support teachers with technology inside activities and assessments is providing many different tried-and-true EdTech strategies, tutorials, templates, action plans, and a whole lot more in a 6-week (or at your own pace) online professional development course for secondary teachers.

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EdTech Secondary Teacher PD Online Course

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6-Week Course Dates!

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Please comment below—What technology integration victories do you have in your classroom?

Share your ideas in the comments below. Or share them on social media and tag @EdTechenergy. I would love to read all your technology integration magic!

Next week’s blog topic: Why does engagement have so much power in our classrooms?