Zak's Weekly Musings (January 23, 2022)

Across the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional dimensions, study after study has found that student engagement is the key ingredient in fulfilling our stated mission of “cultivating a joyful, intellectual, and compassionate community” of learners. Students who self-report as being engaged are 2.5 times more likely to also report that they earn “excellent” grades and are 4.5 times more likely to be “hopeful about the future” than their peers who report that they are disengaged. Student engagement is truly the bedrock on which future learning can occur. And yet, for many of us, we are really only talking about student engagement at most 1x per month. 

1x per month, students take somewhere between 90 seconds and five minutes to reflect on a month’s worth of learning and assign value to their level of engagement. Over the next 30 days, students might not think about or even hear the word “engagement” again. Knowing how important student engagement is, what if engagement became a part of our daily work with students? What if students had the chance to monitor, evaluate, and set goals around their engagement every class? What if student engagement wasn’t relegated to the WEI, but became part of the very fabric of our learning culture? 

When it comes to student engagement, it’s important to remember that the research tells us that there’s little we can do to engage students; rather, our goal should be to create the conditions wherein students can take ownership for monitoring and evaluating their own engagement and identify resources and strategies that will enable them to be more engaged the next class. When built into our daily learning routines, the Continuum of Engagement is a tool that will allow us to do just that. 

As part of an exit ticket, students could mark where they are along the continuum of engagement, provide a brief evidence-backed justification for their claim, and identify resources that can bring them closer to “active engagement.” 

As opposed to asking students 1x per month to assign value to their levels of engagement, it’d be really powerful for us to communicate to students the importance of engagement by having students continually reflect on ways to take ownership for and increase their level of engagement. It’d be interesting to see how these daily engagement tickets would align to the WEI. It’d be fascinating to see how the dots would change when students took ownership for their engagement. 

If you’d like to see how the Continuum of Engagement can be operationalized in a classroom, check out the article and video (about halfway down on the page) found in the “Student Engagement” tab in the Resources Archive.