A slightly longer Home Truth for a slightly stickier topic. I’d like to contend that we’ve made a mess of student engagement. Again.
Somewhere along the way, the word engagement got tied up in so much edu-jargon and data-speak that we’ve forgotten what it actually is. We’ve turned it into a book. A thesis. A 12-point diagnostic. And in doing so, we’ve buried the truth under a pile of rubrics and buzzwords.
So, let’s dig it up.
Real engagement – the kind that changes the student experience – is about activation. It’s not a vibe, or a colour-coded chart. It’s whether students are:
- Listening
- Speaking
- Thinking, or
- Doing
That’s it. LSTD. If students aren’t doing one or more of those four things regularly, they’re not engaged. No matter how pretty the anchor chart is or how many ‘active learning’ strategies you think you’re using.
But if they are? If they’re leaning in, chewing over ideas, speaking up, wrestling with the task? You’ve got engagement. Because they’re in it.
So how do we get there? Two words: Relevance and Progress.
Let’s start with Relevance
Relevance isn’t about making everything ‘fun’ or trendy. It’s not putting Drake lyrics in your fractions lesson or referencing Minecraft in your persuasive writing topic.
There are two kinds of relevance that actually matter:
- Tool Relevance: Where students learn something they can use quickly. Think measuring ingredients for a cake they’re actually going to bake, or calculating change for their first real-world job.
- Skill Relevance: Where students learn something they’ll need to succeed later. Like understanding compound interest. Or knowing how to communicate a complex idea to a room of adults.
This is where the internet crowd sometimes gets it dead wrong. You’ve seen the memes:
“Why didn’t they teach me how to do my taxes in school?”
Well… they did. You just weren’t paying attention when the teacher was explaining percentages, ordinal numbers, or data organisation.
Those lessons didn’t come with a ‘How to lodge your return with the ATO’ worksheet. But the skills were there – and they mattered. The Skill Relevance was real. And it still is. We need to stop bagging teachers for not running a full Year 9 unit on negative gearing.
And then there’s Progress
The real game-changer for engagement isn’t entertainment. It’s momentum. Students light up when they can see that they’re getting better. When they see that the work they did on Monday makes the work on Friday easier. When they can look at a rough draft and go, “Whoa, this is better than the last one.”
That’s where the addiction starts — the good kind. The kind that fuels intrinsic motivation and pride. The kind that makes a kid sit up straighter and think, “Maybe I’m actually pretty good at this.”
When we get that happening, we stop obsessing about our own performance as the key to student motivation. Because here’s the kicker: engagement isn’t about the teacher performing better. It’s about the student doing more.
Perhaps we can re-imagine engagement like going to the gym.
Relevance is choosing a workout that makes sense for your goals. Progress is seeing your strength go up week to week. If the trainer just yells louder or wears brighter activewear, it doesn’t change anything. But if you start to feel stronger and you know why you’re doing that set of squats — that’s when you start coming back for more.
Same with kids in classrooms.
So maybe it’s time we unstuff student engagement. Strip it back to LSTD. Build lessons on relevance. And feed that beautiful addiction to progress.
Engaged students are happier, more self-regulated and much easier for their teachers to survive. And that’ll do.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. Speaking of student engagement! School leaders, it’s not too late to enrol in my Student Engagement Overhaul Online Workshop.
We’ll walk through a proven, real-world playbook for turning disengaged learners into switched-on students.
I’m not talking theory. I’m talking practical strategies you can use the very next day – without adding anything extra to your staff’s plates.
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