Engagement: What does it really mean?

For some reason, there seems to be a commonly-accepted feeling that teachers are supposed to entertain their students. From this feeling has sprouted the idea that an engaging lesson is a lesson during which students are having fun. There should be balls flying across the classroom, and movement, and colors, and pantomime,  and music, and technology, and blogging, and… you get the point.

That’s a stupid idea, and a stupider feeling.
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Engagement could be sitting still, or moving. It can be paper based, or digital.

From a classroom-management perspective, it doesn’t matter at all whether students have fun in school. What matters is that students are actually engaged with an academic task. The task may be fun, or it may be boring. If the students are actually engaged with it, learning will happen, and behavior will be better.

I am in no way saying that teachers should never have balls fly across the classroom. Similarly, colors and music and technology all have their place as well. Like volume, all these tools effect the academic and behavioral landscape of your classroom, and they must be employed to maximal effect and minimal distraction. To do that, a solid, working definition of what engagement is and is not is necessary.
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My college students, engaged with technology and each other (forgive Cameron whose head is in his hand out of frustration over an errant link.)

The farther I get into my teaching career, the more I realize that expecting students to work, and enforcing consequences when they fail to meet those expectations, is the only engagement strategy that matters. In the absence of consequences, and the control of the classroom that consequences yield, Jigsaw doesn’t work. Neither do gallery walks, numbered heads together, cooperative learning, learning stations, data-driven instruction, sage and scribe, or even common core learning standards. If you don’t, or “can’t” expect your students to enter your classroom and grab their own materials, sit in their own seats, and work in unsupported silence to the best of their own abilities, then none of the research-based strategies above will assist you. I’m not suggesting that independent, unsupported work is a good teaching strategy, nor am I saying that the above research-based techniques are useless. I am saying that if, on a random Thursday in February, you can’t show up to school and write ‘silent work day’ on the front board with a book and worksheet on every students desk, and know that your silent request will be followed, you also don’t have the management skills necessary to make any of the above listed strategies work properly.  Start by mastering volume, and work your way forward from silence.

​Engagement, simply defined, means that every student is doing something academic at all times during the school day. What that ‘something’ is depends largely on the classroom, subject, developmental level of the students, and whatever state-mandated curriculum is currently proposed to be the savior of the American Education System.
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My actual classroom, filled with engaged students. Notice none of them are staring at the clock, keeping time.

A not-even-close-to-exhaustive list of academic activities include:

• reading a map
• reading...anything
• taking notes
• paraphrasing
• solving a problem
• building an object
• discussing an important topic
• thinking
• revising
• organizing
• writing
• **Please notice the absence of ‘keeps track of time for the group.’ I still hold that watching a clock is not academic engagement.

One of the best-managed classrooms I’ve ever been in belonged to a friend and teammate: a math teacher who demanded that every student be engaged at all times. Fun was not the purpose of how she designed her classroom. Engagement was the purpose of classroom, and it worked.

My teacher friend with my baby (who is now much older) who taught me most of what I know about engagement.