You are here because you are looking for ways to increase student engagement either in synchronous video lessons or in the classroom. Either way, you have come to the right place!
Here you will find that I have followed Jennifer Fredricks et al. (2004) in dividing engagement into three categories: Behavioural, Emotional, and Cognitive. It is through that lens that I have further separated how those three aspects can be addressed both in the synchronous video and classroom settings. Being a high school teacher, my perspective comes from dealing with teens, but you may find ways to adapt the suggestions for both younger and older students.
Engaging students’ thinking through relevance and challenge. Cognitive engagement distinguishes itself from behavioural and emotional engagement in that cognitive engagement focuses on the intellectual stimulation that challenges students to solve problems, seek answers, explain, synthesize, and extrapolate, among other strategies.
Every teacher designs lesson plans around challenging students to think. Possibly one of the most difficult aspects of that, however, is balancing the right amount of ease and difficulty in doing the activity. And since every student’s ability is different, for some it will be easy, and others difficult. Even if the activity is something none of the students have done before, some will understand more quickly than others. How then, to give the right amount of challenge to all? Give those who understand easily more work? Give them more challenging work? Getting more work is hardly a reinforcement for doing well. Let us back up for a second to focus on ease and difficulty.
If we assume that humans respond to operant conditioning even in the realm of cognition – that is, that they are more likely to repeat a behaviour if they are positively reinforced for it – then this may help to explain why students stop or continue to do an activity. A student who finds an activity very difficult to do, may not feel rewarded for the effort being put into doing the activity. As an example, a student who cannot solve the math equation may just “give up” and stop trying. At the same time, a student who easily solves the problem will likely move on to the next one. Connell and Wellborn (1991) looked at different factors that increase or decrease cognitive engagement, such as flexible vs. rigid problem solving, active vs. passive coping with failure, and preference for hard work vs. preference for easy work, among others. This indicates that teachers and students must try to find the “sweet spot” that makes an activity challenging enough not to be boring, and not so challenging that the reward of success is not enough to compensate for the effort to get there.
In my English class, I have given pairs of students a sheet with word puzzles on it. Their task as a pair is to solve as many of the puzzles as possible. This activity taps into students using collaborative strategies to problem-solve by using logic, analysis, synthesis, and other techniques to work out the solutions. The handout gives students five different word puzzles, and they can read in any order they choose, so not all pairs are necessarily reading the same puzzle. As each pair comes up with a solution, they raise their hand and I confirm or deny their solution. Often, they must “go back to the drawing board” to work out another method of solving the problem. The cognitive engagement is high, as they discuss with each other the reasons why some of their hypotheses are valid or not.
As with emotional engagement, cognitive engagement is high in inquiry projects. Since inquiry project topics are generally chosen by the student, the amount of challenge is also determined by the students. In an ideal scenario, the students take on a topic that presents them with the right amount of challenge.
Emotional engagement differs from behavioural engagement in that students may participate in an activity (behavioural engagement), but may do so without trying their best (emotional engagement). Students’ participation is ideally paired with them caring about what they are doing. This is often referred to as “effort.” Sure, they are doing what you ask, but are they doing the bare minimum? Do you ever get asked, “Is this for marks?” or “How many words does it have to be?” Those questions translate to, “How much effort do I need to put into this?”
Of course, teachers want them to care and do their best effort, but many things can affect how much they care. First, is the topic of personal interest? If it is a general topic for everyone, you can be guaranteed that some will not care. If, however, the topic can be chosen individually by them, it is more difficult not to care. That does not factor in apathy; a response such as, “I can’t think of anything,” may belie an unwillingness to engage. This in itself may be because it would reveal a lack of ability, or that showing enthusiasm for school work is not “cool.” Sometimes students need to be led through the brainstorming process, and once they are on track, they are fine to continue on their own.
Second, students often want to know the relevance of what they are doing: we have all heard students declare, “When am I ever going to have to know Shakespeare again?” or, “I will never need to calculate the surface area of an isosceles triangle when I become a pro wrestler.” If what they are doing seems to connect with their future, they are more willing to put in the effort. Often, what works best is an activity that students don’t see as “work.” Playing a game, or being involved in an activity that allows them to be immersed in it creates high emotional engagement. Having said that, students still want to feel that what they are doing is constructive and helpful for their future (or at least for a higher grade).
This section addresses ways to encourage students’ best efforts. This can be elusive and temporary, at best. What teachers are wanting to tap into is the personal connection that students feel towards the activity. Many experienced educators will have tried one, if not all, of these suggestions. What is key to all of the suggestions and activities is how much students are absorbed in it.
Every elementary teacher knows that getting high emotional engagement is easier when it comes to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
How many objects like these are proudly displayed on a shelf from Mother’s Days or Father’s Days past? Students at this level put in effort because they have pride in presenting the objects to their parents, and thus emotional engagement is very high.
Photo by: Dale Sakiyama
In my English 10 class, we read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. As a way to have students really understand the course of events in the novel, I converted the class into “Animal Class.” I assigned each student randomly to one of four groups: Authorities, Hunter/Gatherers, Nurturers, and Builders. Within each group, they had certain responsibilities and tasks to do each day. As each day progressed, I had the Authorities begin to exert more control over the rest of the groups. I warned the students beforehand that while things might get emotional, they must realize that what we were doing was just a class activity. Even though they intellectually knew that this was a class activity, they could not help but react to the Authorities gaining more power and control. In the end, they truly understood the story and also how this allegory applied to the Russian Revolution, because they lived it for about two weeks. In this activity, the emotional engagement was so high that I at times had to intervene so it did not devolve into shouting and physical altercations.
This idea of “living” the novel can be adapted to almost any other lesson, as it is just taking the material and making a real-world application of it. Easier said than done, of course, but most teachers have done this using a number of topics. As a teacher of Social Studies, I took students to the British Columbia legislature buildings to sit in on debate over the Nisga’a Treaty. We were afforded that luxury because we live in the same city, Victoria, as the legislature buildings. Rather than just reading about it, we sat in the gallery to listen to and watch the politicians go through the text. After returning back to the classroom, students then had better context to understand the historical significance of the treaty.
I toyed with the idea of doing the same for William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as I did with Animal Farm, but it was difficult to build in contrasting personalities that would line up with Ralph and Jack in the story. That, and the overall theme of the dark nature of human behaviour did not lend itself well to students enacting the plot!
Inquiry Projects generate high emotional engagement because at their core, ideas are directly generated from the student. Rather than a top-down approach from teacher to student, it works from the bottom up; the student deciding, with guidance, which direction the project will take. Trevor MacKenzie has excellent resources to help teachers and students navigate through guided inquiry.
These ideas are related to getting students involved in active participation in the lesson. The primary focus is behaviour, which is easily observable and often is described as “participation.” Generally speaking, the goal is for students to participate in an activity versus not.
Focusing on behavioural engagement in the classroom is something every teacher has done successfully. Generally speaking, these are active versus passive activities. Thus, watching a video may fall under cognitive engagement, or even emotional engagement, but not behavioural. The strategies suggested here are not new, nor are they unique; for many, they are reinforcement and confirmation that the teachers are already getting high student engagement. The goal in this section is to highlight the types of activities, which then can be applied to whichever grade level and subject area a teacher has.
The best examples of high behavioural engagement, especially in high school, come from the Applied Arts. Teachers of Woodworking, Foods, or Auto Mechanics, as a few examples, know that participation is the number one aspect of those courses. A student would not sign up for a Woodworking class expecting not to touch a piece of wood. In this case, participation is understandably a requirement. Dance, Theatre, and Music classes would operate similarly. Of the core academics, Science utilizes many activities that highlight behavioural engagement. Students are often tasked with using bunsen burners, or microscopes, or doing dissections that incorporate high behavioural engagement.
What about some of the core courses such as English, Math or Social Studies? Typically in the core subject areas, any hands-on activity will generate increased behavioural enagagement. Things such as:
making a poster
recording a video
doing debates
drawing/ colouring
playing/ making a game
All of the above activities may be done online or using a computer programs as well. For example, making a poster can be done using Microsoft Word, Google docs, or other word processing programs, or PowerPoint or Google slides.
Photo by Dale Sakiyama
The banner image at the top of this page is my Japanese class celebrating the time of the year called “Setsubun” (Seasonal division). First, students made masks by colouring the templates, cutting them out, and attaching elastic cord. Then the fun part was them going outside and, with a partner, taking turns throwing soybeans at each other. One would wear the mask as the demon (Oni) and the other would ceremonially ward off the demon by throwing soy beans and uttering, “Oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi!” (English translation: “Demon out, happiness in!”) The behavioural engagement involves creating masks, being physically active throwing the soybeans, and learning about Japanese culture through participation, rather than just reading about it. This activity is only done around February 3rd, as that is when Setsubun occurs, so not every class does this activity. For other times of the year, classes are able to honour and celebrate something different.
Recording a video is easier than ever with smart phones, but also can be enhanced by video editing software like iMovie, to create a movie trailer style video as an example. My English 11 class put together a movie trailer for a schoolwide competition to promote a novel. I have edited it down without students to just the trailer, done with iMovie. Behavioural engagement was high, as students were involved in all aspects, including directing, storyboarding, props, camera work, boom mic, and post-production editing.
