5 Student Engagement Tips from Educators
Every teacher has their own unique approach to getting students engaged with learning. This school year, when many students have felt disconnected from their schools and friends after remote learning, or they feel discouraged by interruptions to their learning last year, student engagement may be more important than ever — but it’s also more challenging. Even many adults are reporting feelings of disengagement, or languishing. To ask young people to bring attention, motivation, and excitement to learning every day is a tall order. To all educators this year: your job is not easy, and you’re amazing!
To help you re-energize and collect some inspiration of your own, we asked five educators and guest bloggers from the Art of Teaching Project for their best student engagement tips. Here’s what they shared:
Jason Blair, Art Teacher
A learning experience can be most powerful when it is from a more humanistic approach. Students learn about content, and they need to learn with and through others as well. A humanistic approach to teaching and learning means that learning experiences are about weaving together content, human connection, and purpose. While these can be explored in isolation, weaving them together provides a more joyful and engaging experience for both teachers and students.
Imagine if…. What if at the end of a unit of study in any grade level or content area, you challenged your students to design a joyful experience for another class to showcase what they learned. They could weave together some of the content into a more meaningful way to teach another class. This allows the students to be make their thinking visible through the experience they design for others.
Example: After exploring ocean currents in science, ask the students to design a sailing course for another class. The class could partner with the PE teacher for some carts on wheels, some mats and cones to provide currents, maybe some simple spray bottles filled with water and fans to simulate the weather, and much more. The students would need to find a space for this adventure as well. The science class could be split into groups to design the experience. Some students might work on simulating the currents, some work on adding weather elements, some work on contacting the other classes and teachers, some prepare reflections questions for the final discussion and so on. This experience then becomes both a formative and summative assessment of the unit of study, and has the potential to grow into something much bigger and more meaningful. It helps students learn content, while embracing human connection and finding a deeper purpose for the learning beyond an end of unit test. Maybe, these joyful experiences begin to spread and excitement builds anticipating new opportunities the next unit of study might hold.
For more information on how this might look in your space, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Schoolteachers@mac.com @_jasonblair Twitter.
Read more from Jason:
Pearl Dean Garden, Literacy Coach and Adjunct Professor
If we want our students to have a higher quality of academic achievement, we must intentionally incorporate ways to get and keep students engaged in learning. We must make the content we share meaningful and relevant. Educational neuroscience expert Dr. David Sousa defines student engagement as the amount of attention, interest, curiosity, and positive emotional connections that students have when they are learning, both in the classroom and on their own. As educators, we can cultivate student engagement by informing them of what they are learning and why it is important, which is also a way to increase student motivation. We can also create a safe space for students to think, talk, write, and share ideas about what they are learning. Moreover, it is important for us as educators to give students purposeful, corrective and affirming feedback on their progress in learning. We can plan lessons that consider students’ interests, backgrounds, and strengths, as well their learning styles. We can also consider ways to embed technology and multimedia for use by our students and ourselves to keep them engaged and give them meaningful exposures to content in new and different ways. If we are intentional about engaging students in the content we are teaching, we will find ways to involve students in learning so that they will have a love of learning that will stay with them.
More from Pearl:
Karla Banks, Special Education Teacher
This year is hard, so how do you make sure students are actively engaged in learning? The answer is relationships. Teachers who take the time and effort to create meaningful relationships with their students are the teachers who are able to keep kids engaged in learning. Relationships take a lot of time and hard work, especially for our more difficult students, but relationships make all the difference in the world. A student is more likely to trust an adult who takes the time to get to know them and who finds positive qualities in them. When students have a relationship with a trusting adult, they are more likely to keep trying even when they are frustrated. They are better able to accept consequences and calm down when upset or angry. For many of our students, they have few, if any, positive relationships with adults.
How do you create a meaningful relationship with your students?
Get to know them. I know we are busy, and we have to cover the curriculum, so when do we get to know our students? It really only takes a minute or two each day. Every day choose 1 or 2 students to spend 2 minutes with them. You need to ask them questions about themselves and share information about yourself. You can also sit with them at lunch. Kids love to have extra attention at lunch. This is also a very low threat time for students because it is a social situation instead of an academic setting.
Be silly. Students like to tell jokes and trick the teacher. Be willing to walk right into a student’s joke. This shows the students that you are human, and you are not perfect. Students love to laugh. Find a way to laugh with them. It’s ok to laugh at yourself. Your students will love to see you as a real person.
Be willing to apologize. When you mess up, apologize. If you make a mistake, apologize. I know it sounds simple, but students rarely get the opportunity to see you as a person. If you are willing to apologize to a student when you mess up, they are more likely to apologize when they mess up.
Talk to them. Make an effort to talk to each of your students every single day. It only takes a few seconds to say good morning and ask them how their night was. Compliment them and notice when they come to school with a new haircut or new shoes.
Say what you mean and mean what you say. If you tell a student you are going to do something, do it. If life happens and you can’t follow through, tell the student and apologize. When you treat a student with kindness and respect, they are more likely to return kindness and respect to you. If you dish out a consequence when you are angry and you later realize it’s unfair or unnecessary, talk to the student and apologize for reacting out of anger. Tell them you overreacted, and that xyz is a fairer consequence.
The bottom line, talk to your students and get to know them for who they are. Celebrate what makes them amazing. Students who feel loved will be more able to learn and take on the world.
Read more from Karla:
Dean Deaver, Assistant Principal
There are three guidelines to effective engagement strategies I follow. The first guideline is, “Meet Them Where They Are At.” Get to know what your students like and dislike. Learning about topics that are of high interest lends itself to high engagement. Remember it is more about meeting the standards than covering specific content. The second guideline is “Stop Talking”! Teachers talk too much. Get the students talking to each other in partners, small groups, and to the whole class. Let them do more leading and sharing. The third guideline is “Get Them Moving.” Students sit too much and need to get up, move around, and if possible, do hands-on activities. One example that ties all this together is our once a week science lesson/activity. My classroom was set up with several monitors around the room. The class was put into small groups of four or five at each monitor. Using Mystery Science, the group watched the videos, answered the questions, discussed the topics, and completed the activities at their own pace. After some initial directions from me, the groups ran themselves and it was nearly 100% engagement each time and it included some reading and writing using informational texts and content.
More from Dean:
Karen Achtman, Special Education Teacher and Kids’ Yoga Teacher
In classrooms right now, there are lots of demands on students-skills to be learned, social-emotional needs, and the added stress of following COVID protocols. As a result, students are sitting for extended periods of time, and teachers need to be creative in finding ways for collaboration and movement to occur. To keep students engaged, movement breaks should happen throughout the day to give students a chance to stretch their bodies and minds. During lessons, students can be given the options to stand by their desks or use fidgets to help them move and stay focused while still listening. During activities, teachers can find ways for students to be active, such as turn and talks, using post-it notes, maybe even a museum walk, so that students can learn from their classmates and everyone can participate. There are high expectations and demands on students, especially when many learned virtually all last year, so it’s important for teachers to adapt and find ways to involve them in their learning to make it fun and meaningful!
More from Karen:
Have your own teaching tips to share? Join the Art of Teaching Project! Learn more here, or submit your blog at the link below:
