To Enhance Engagement, First Redefine "Fun"

D'you know what's fun? Success.

Teachers, it’s time we faced the music. We cannot make Biology more fun than movies, social media, hanging out with friends, skipping school to go to the beach, parties, smart phones, video games, girls, boys, football, dances, driving cars fast on country roads, amusement parks, etcetera. School and academic challenges are realistically not fun for most of us. I probably read about 20 books each year. Most of them are fun science fiction and fantasy, some of them are rereads that I’ve read 100 times already. Maybe 2-3 of the books are actually at my reading level, and actually teach me a new skill or new information.
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School and learning is kinda like eating vegetables. There is a small percentage of the population that naturally LOVES it. Most of us do it because we know it’s good for us. For students to be engaged in class, they do not need to have the kind of fun that a Panama City spring break offers to college coeds. Imagine the lawsuits! So, for students to think our classes are fun, we need to redefine what fun means, and we need to take a close look at what we can manipulate to make kids think our lessons are fun.
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Names have huge power over reactions. I’ll give you two examples of agendas that might be posted in a classroom:

Agenda:
1) Warm up vocabulary practice
2) Review of guided notes
3) Close reading practice
​4) Ticket out the  door.

Agenda:
​1) How learning new words can help you get away with threatening your little sister.
2) Note taking treasure hunt. Spoiler alert: I'm giving away the answers for Thursday's quiz. Shhh… don't tell the principal.
3) Deciduous Trees: Friend or Foe? Launch a literary investigation to find out.
​4) Impossible riddle of DOOM! None shall pass.

Guess whose class students look forward to attending. Every minute of the actual lesson might be exactly the same, but by using the second agenda, I can promise that both you, and your students will have more fun with the same activities.
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Making your class the one students look forward to doesn’t have to mean changing how you teach. One day, simply post a sign that reads “Top Secret” over the board that hangs outside your classroom that usually contains the materials students need to bring. (This works best when students don’t need any materials for today’s lesson, otherwise they might be unprepared.) As soon as students walk past a “Top Secret” sign, they’ll be engrossed in conversation about what your class will hold today! Then, ensure that each period of students says nothing about what they learned, or make up a fun story to tell all the other kids in the school.
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Have a silent lesson day. Kids are always talked to, talked about, and talked at. A silent lesson will really pique their attention. Try teaching a lesson by sitting at your computer and typing messages into a word document. Students could communicate by passing notes instead of talking. Added bonus, you don’t end up with a splitting headache. Heck, one day, buy four $10 costumes from the dollar store after Halloween. If, at the end of each class period you send one student out into the school dressed in costume, kids will start talking, and they’ll start wondering about what your class is about today.
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The point is, most of us can’t change the skills or the content that we teach our students. We largely can’t change the students we teach. We just need to make little tweaks to how we pitch the topics we teach to redefine fun.

​As a matter of fact, stop thinking about fun being part of a classroom. Think of it instead as novelty.

I've found that half of a single lesson per week is enough novelty to be the teacher who gets noticed for novelty. About 20 minutes weekly input is all it takes. Novelty gets noticed. Getting noticed increases engagement. Be creative. Have fun. You became a teacher for a reason, and I promise that it wasn’t to sit in the faculty room complaining about how your students aren’t good enough to bother teaching. You’ll notice, the more fun you have in your classroom, the more fun the students will have -- even if you’re still elbow deep into the same essay writing or the periodic table of elements as always.

It's important to note, this response-card activity was strictly for formatting paragraphs: noticing indentation, matching fonts, sizes, spacing, etc. As such, I used two paragraphs from a Christmas story I wrote, and changed the formatting to match common student mistakes. I would never have students identify each other's actual work exemplars as "poop." Neither should you. But, by having two options, one of which being "poop," even though it was an exemplar evaluation activity we had done countless times using the NYS 2- and 4-point rubric, novelty was built in, and students were engaged.