How much each child is engaged with their learning? Are they compliant? Are your students asking questions because they don’t understand or because they are truly interested in the topic matter? Well, not all students raise their hands to eagerly answer questions and several students struggle with engagement; whether it be cognitive-based, behavioral or emotional reasons getting to know your students personally can help teachers support their students and their needs.

Students Struggling with Connectedness 

Many students face difficulties in processing learning content especially our young students on the Autism Spectrum or with other intellectual disabilities while others struggle to engage due to behavioral and emotional factors. We know that a student’s home life can have a major impact on their ability to engage with learning and with others. According to Don Deshler's case study, he observed that there are several students who display loneliness within a school even if they seem to know many other students (Knight, 2019, np.) Teachers have to secure time and space to have deep conversations with each student in their class to identify needs and address concerns early to ensure student success.

As Jim Knight (2019) notes, ‘engagement is an essential part of a meaningful life, no less so for students than for adults’ (Knight, 2019, np) and students who have healthy relationships with others including family and friends tend to be more engaged in interpersonal effectiveness. When our young scholars engage more with unique learning material and activities’ they are likely to remain in school and attain a high school diploma.

 How Do We Keep Students Engaged?

When students struggle with connectedness they require additional attention from the school, teachers, and parents or caregivers. Sometimes a school’s Instructional Coach can provide support for teachers to identify student needs, scaffolds to learning and ways to purposefully group students to have conversations in the classroom. Such coaching involves firstly identifying the level of student engagement within the classroom then setting goals and determining best practices and then implementing effective strategies to drive student engagement.

Coaching for engagement includes the behavioral, cognitive and social-emotional levels and ultimately the goal is to improve learning and development within students through active engagement and participation. There are various measurements for assessing the levels of engagement such as instructional skills of instructional time and responding to learners as well as time on task and classroom disruptions which fall into the behavioral category. For cognitive engagement measurements, Knight (2019) identified teacher expectations, quality of questions and level of student responses to their questions (Knight, 2019, np).

 What About Social-Emotional Engagement?

Social-emotional engagement measurements are more effective to obtain information. Students interviewing other students can help with Social-Emotional Engagement. Also projects such as “Interview your family members, teachers, and staff that work in the school setting” are all ways students can engage on a deeper level and get to know the people within their school community. Not every student is going to wish to express themselves but it provides them with the tools to engage with others.

Positive Reinforcement and “Calling the Positive Behavior when you see it”

Teachers do this by stating when a student is exemplifying behavior they want others to emulate, they say, “Oh, I love how Jonny is sitting up straight tracking the teacher so good information can go to his brain.” Yes, it’s funny but take a second and look around. Everyone at that moment wants to be Jonny and they too will mimic his behavior. We sometimes call this “Marking; When a student says something profound in the classroom or a truly thought-provoking statement, we repeat it out loud, celebrate the person, and write it down to show how important it is to the conversation. This not only highlights a diverse thought but It challenges others to make connections to experiences.

Knight (2019) identified positive reinforcements and corrections as methods of driving positive behavioral engagement (Knight, 2019, np.) In terms of increasing cognitive engagement, Teachers should write in their Teachers Edition textbook effective lines of questioning and strive for authentic learning activities while jotting down notes for formative assessments (Knight, 2019, np.); formative assessments enable Teachers to gain insight into a student’s progress.  

These are some key instructional strategies, skills, and tactics that are highly-important in driving student engagement and at times teachers should have an instructional coach to help them along the way particularly with students who need a little support in engagement.

 Source:

Knight, J. (2019). ‘Students on the margins’. The Learning Professional: The Learning Forward Journal. Vol. 40. No. 6. Learning Forward. https://learningforward.org/journal/coaching/students-on-the-margins/?fbclid=IwAR1AiDJ4Jnz1sWT5KIo1aoOOJBaKM_eTVOkp2UzCOEiLJXsuGYVsv6b1DJw. Accessed 05/02/2020.