In the winter of 2021, I was in the process of completing my Master's thesis when I came across a quote by writer and new age critic Howard Rheingold. He said: 'Attention is a limited resource'. Since the focus of my work revolved around the idea of student engagement, it spoke to me and confirmed much of what I was reading and writing.
I have always felt that engagement is one of the most important classroom resources available to a teacher. It is a resource that, as Reingold said, is finite – and yet essential. Engagement is to a classroom what gasoline is to an engine; without it, no matter how clear your destination may be, you’re going absolutely nowhere.
It was with this in mind that I constructed a three-part strategy focused on helping teachers recapture and capitalise on this all-important element of instruction: Surprise, Rehook, Engage.
Identifying Disengagement
Diagnosing the illness is impossible unless you can identify the symptoms, so let’s first think about what it looks like when students are unengaged with a lesson we are teaching. We see:
- Abnormally high classroom volume.
- Levels of socialisation that seem a mismatch for the activity.
- Informal assessments keep coming up as failures (e.g. when you ask a student to summarise the last point you made, you get few responses).
- A lack of participation.
- Abnormal levels of movement, either around the classroom or in requests to leave the classroom