Student engagement is a crucial part of learning, but ensuring students are actively engaged is more complex than whether a student is paying attention or not.
Too often educators look at engagement as a “yes or no” question: students are either engaged or they’re not.
On-task behavior is not a strong measure of learning or wellbeing. More than that, a student might behave or comply, but be miserable. Everything we know about the neuroscience of learning is that emotion drives cognition. Even if a student is behaving and feels good about it, if he or she isn’t actively making meaning out of the information, then active engagement still hasn’t been reached.
2 Primary Ways To Enhance Student ENGAGEMENT
1. Strengths Approach To Enhance Student Engagement
When students identify their own personal strengths, they can participate and perform in activities that make them feel confident and valuable. Through inquiry learning, engaging and relevant learning experiences, and an emphasis on growth mindsets, our students have countless opportunities to identify and cultivate their personal strengths and interests in both curricula and co-curricula activities.
The key to increasing engagement is to identify your strengths and develop a plan for implementing them into your life. Character strengths form a large part of engagement. Finding and applying our character strengths enables us to feel great satisfaction and appreciation of ourselves, others and the world. It helps us to think more clearly, openly and increases our motivation and passion for life.
The strength-based approach represents a paradigm shift—a movement away from a deficit-based approach which can lead to a long list of things considered to be ‘wrong’ with a child’s learning and development or things a child cannot do. The deficit-based model fails to provide sufficient information about strengths and strategies to support a child’s learning and development.
In response to the limitations associated with the deficit-based approach, a growing body of research and evidence has shown support for the strength-based approach
that encourages educators to:
understand that children’s learning is dynamic, complex and holistic
understand that children demonstrate their learning in different ways
start with what’s present—not what’s absent—and write about what works for the child.
The strength-based approach consists of questioning strategies to identify what works for the child and how it works so that those strategies can be continued and developed to match the child’s abilities. In other words, the strength-based approach is about assisting people (educators, children, families) to build a picture of what a child’s learning and development could look like in the future.
The underlying principles of the strength-based approach include:
- all children have strengths and abilities
- children grow and develop from their strengths and abilities
- the problem is the problem—the child is not the problem
- when children and those around them (including educators) appreciate and understand the child’s strengths,
- then the child is better able to learn and develop.
Strengths can be defined as a child’s intellectual, physical and interpersonal skills, capacities, dispositions, interests and motivations.
3 Simple ways to help students identify and focus on their strengths:
- Have students complete a personal inventory.This inventory should ask students to reflect on the things they like to do, the ones that they do well, and others that might be hard and/or boring for them. It should include different aspects of students’ lives, such as school subjects, sports and hobbies, relationships and family.
- Help students set up goals based on their strengths.We sometimes tend to set up goals for improvement without reflecting on how our strengths can help us achieve these goals (which might lead to frustration if they aren’t met). When working with students, focus on their strengths as the catalysts for improvement!
- Refer back to students’ strengths when providing feedback, and check regularly on progress for meeting goals.Students will be more open to hear feedback, if you start a conversation discussing their latest accomplishments or complimenting something they’ve done. Even when you are working with a challenging student, try to start the conversation by saying something positive! Check back with your students on their goals, so you can help them rephrase or adapt depending on the progress.
2. Engaging In ‘Flow’ In the Classroom To Enhance Engagement
We create engagement when we are fully present, mindful and creating opportunities for flow that lead us, and our students, to achieve greater levels of well-being.
Flow happens when the entire body is involved in the activity at hand and we “become one” with it.
To help students engage in a state of flow help them to develop their self awareness of how they respond to each activity, which activities make it easier to be in the now?
Which activities leave them feeling energised?
Since psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (who first coined the term) started studying flow, it has been linked to feelings of happiness and euphoria, and to peak performance among workers, scientists, athletes, musicians, and many others.
Flow is valuable in school classrooms as well. Research by Csikszentmihalyi and others has found that flow deepens learning and encourages long-term interest in a subject.
How to foster flow in the classroom
1. Challenge your students —but not too much. One of the central conditions for flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is that an activity be challenging at a level just above one’s current abilities. If a challenge is too hard, students will become anxious and give up; if it’s too easy, they’ll become bored. It’s important to find the sweet spot, where the activity is difficult enough to challenge students without overwhelming them. Students may require a lesson to be scaffolded—breaking it down into manageable pieces—in order to find the right balance.
2. Make assignments feel relevant to students’ lives. Research has shown that when students understand the relevance of a classroom activity, they are more likely to engage in it. Whenever possible, it can help for teachers to point out how an activity connects to students’ own lives, or encourage students to discover the relevance for themselves.
3. Encourage choice. When students are given an opportunity to choose their own activities and work with autonomy, they will engage more with the task. In a 2000 study led by Aaron Black of the University of Rochester, students who sensed more teacher support for autonomy felt more competent and less anxious, reported more interest and enjoyment in their work, and produced higher-quality work in their class than students who didn’t believe they had as much autonomy.
4. Set clear goals (and give feedback along the way). Csikszentmihalyi has found that a fundamental condition for flow is that an activity should have clear goals, which provides structure and direction. This has also proven to be true in the classroom, especially when students help define their goals. And as students progress toward these goals, research suggests it’s also important for them to receive ongoing feedback along the way.
5. Build positive relationships. Education researcher David Shernoff, of Northern Illinois University, has shown that positive peer and teacher-student relationships increase flow. It can sometimes take more time to build these relationships, but some subtle strategies can go a long way, such as by communicating respectfully toward students and making clear that their input is valued.
6. Foster deep concentration. A bedrock of flow is feeling completely absorbed by an activity, and that often requires a state of deep concentration. This may be hard to facilitate in a classroom, particularly in high school, where periods can be relatively short. But if it’s possible to allow, students will reap real rewards from working without interruption.
7. Offer hands-on exercises. Flow research, like other education research, has shown that hands-on activities often get kids more engaged in their learning than more passive activities. Making things, solving problems, and creating artwork tend to induce more flow than lectures or videos, as long as the materials students need to complete the assignment are readily available.
8. Make them laugh. Humour is a great way to engage kids in any setting, especially the classroom. It helps encourage flow not just by getting kids’ attention and keeping them engaged but by modeling enthusiasm for a subject. A teacher doesn’t have to be an actor or comedian to engage kids, but it helps to speak their language.
In the next article I will look at RELATIONSHIP and social and family networks play a significant role in student wellbeing.
