When devising ways to help students with the agitator or retreater mindset, educators must consider multiple factors. First, students need academic challenge. Sometimes rigor is swapped for compliance (Sedlak, Wheeler, Pullin, & Cusick, 1986, as cited in Schussler, 2009). Districts cannot put the least experienced or least capable teachers with our most challenging populations. Alternative programs for students with the agitator and retreater mindsets need the best teachers.
Next, lack of academic challenge in the classroom communicates disrespect to a young mind. Research shows that students actually want academic challenges (Sizer & Sizer, 1999). Students with the agitator and retreater mindsets perceive short-term gains when they avoid work. They ultimately feel that the teachers don’t care enough to try. When a student has a bargain-making teacher, one who barters away school rules or learning norms for behavioral compliance, that student gets a crushing blow to engagement (Schussler, 2009). Alternative program teachers who work with students who underperform must scaffold instruction and make it more complex gradually. These students need missions (highly complex and highly engaging activities) more than students with any other mindset.
My wife was an alternative high school teacher in Michigan. Her school has helped many students succeed with its intense level of care and instructional expertise. Imagine being a disengaged student who transfers to a place where all the adults communicate and work to make sure you succeed. It creates a relatedness and a positive affective bond. My wife’s former students still seek her out and thank her. When the instruction matches the student-teacher bond, the student is more likely to take risks and leave the retreater or agitator mindset behind (Parsons, Nuland, & Parsons, 2014).
It is important to recognize that not all students begin with an agitator or retreater mindset and then move forward on the continuum; some come to us already with the probationer, aficionado, and academician mindsets. In this book, I focus on ways to help students move forward on the continuum from wherever they are and help academician mindsets maintain the highest level of engagement.
What’s in This Book
Chapter 1 will define student engagement in regard to the five mindsets on student engagement, link it to Ryan and Deci’s (2009) self-determination theory (SDT; which asserts that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are crucial to engagement), and further clarify its importance. This chapter will also take into consideration student perception in order to understand how students perceive assigned tasks. You’ll see terms like chores, games, burdens, and missions throughout to that end.
Chapters 2 through 6 will cover each of the five mindsets on the student engagement mindset continuum: (1) agitator, (2) retreater, (3) probationer, (4) aficionado, and (5) academician. No matter what a student’s grade level, all learners need to feel a high level of relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Each chapter will tie those concepts together and explain how a teacher can use them to engage students. For each, I identify those students’ motivations. These chapters open with a description of an actual student I taught or coached who had the specific mindset, and I describe the mindset in detail. Then, the launching and consolidating sections are balanced. The launching sections present classroom scenarios that highlight strong hooks, and the consolidating sections present a critical concept or multiple research-validated strategies when engaging students with that mindset. Chapter 7 offers guidelines to help you, preK–12 teachers and administrators, create a culture of engagement throughout your school, increasing sustainability.
What you read in the coming chapters helps you build the systems thinking instructional principles—(1) relationships, (2) communication, (3) responsiveness, and (4) sustainability—you need to engage students. Let’s dive in.
CHAPTER 1
STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
Teacher instruction either inspires or dulls engagement. The launching (contexts) and consolidating (situations) that you create influence students more than any other aspect of their education (Parsons et al., 2014). Other elements can inspire students, but your teaching practices are at the center of a student’s desire to learn in your classroom. Sadly, educators often focus improvement initiatives on changing students, not changing their own practices. I, too, have been guilty of this. All the research in this book (including Dweck, 2006; Fisher & Frey, 2015; Muhammad, 2018; Ryan & Deci, 2000a, 2000b) tells us that educators are the ones who need to adjust. It also tells us that when we do adjust and use the most effective strategies, our students are more likely to succeed (Hattie, 2012).
How should educators and other stakeholders define engagement? What is its significance? How can they measure it? What are its elements? How can educators and stakeholders implement those elements? We’ll answer these questions in this chapter.
Definition
Because I reveal what the motivations are for each mindset, let me distinguish between the two concepts. Although some use these terms interchangeably, motivation is not equivalent to engagement. Motivation prompts us to act; it’s the driving force behind what we educators do. Ryan and Deci (2000a) distinguish between two main types—(1) intrinsic and (2) extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation means “doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable” and extrinsic motivation means “doing something because it leads to a separable outcome” (Ryan & Deci, 2000a, p. 55). Motivation that’s intrinsic comes from within; extrinsic comes from elsewhere, and the most common in traditional classrooms are rewards (a free homework pass, for example) and punishments (a docked grade for incomplete homework).
Engagement is bigger than that. It blends positive motivation with academics, feelings about school, and self-regulating behaviors. It may help to think of the relationship like this: engagement is the destination, instruction is the car, and motivation is the gasoline.
If asked about engagement, most teachers would identify elements of student behavior like raising hands, attending class, or completing homework. When a student is disengaged, it may be easy to identify behaviors such as sleeping, doing other work, or even disrupting as disengagement. In my experience, when teachers talk about engagement, we identify behavior first because it’s observable. As researchers and education consultants Adena M. Klem and James P. Connell (2004) spell out, “Regardless of the definition, research links higher levels of engagement in school with improved performance” (page 3). That bare-bones breakdown implies how significant engagement is.
Significance
Student engagement is a valuable tool for predicting academic performance. In fact, it is a “robust predictor of student learning, grades, achievement, test scores, retention, and graduation” (Skinner & Pitzer, 2012, p. 21), as student disengagement can lead to dropping out. Increasing student engagement helps educators to change the school, district, community, and, most important, a student’s life. To help elaborate on this point, I need to share a personal story.
I was a Detroit kid. Living three doors down from me was my best friend for most of my childhood, Joshua. We spent every day together for most of our young lives. Joshua and I both attended public school until ninth grade. At that point, we began attending different schools. I knew Joshua was a brilliant, intellectual guy—he was an avid science, fantasy, historical fiction, and comic book reader and had deep passions for the arts, including anime (long before it was popular in the U.S.) and all kinds of music from all over the world. He excelled at social studies and science. Beyond that, he was a kind and moral person; he was the