Since COVID-19, one thing educators agree on en masse is that student engagement is at an all-time low. I firmly believe that school closures were the right move for everyone's safety and well-being. The argument that COVID-19 did not medically impact kids is false, and evidence shows that kids were vectors to adults(1). Who could teach if all the adults were sick? Looking back, as bad as the outbreak was, it would have been exponentially worse had mitigation efforts not been taken.
It is also true that the time during remote schooling changed many students' attitudes toward school. School attendance numbers have remained low since then, while disengagement remains high. Teachers I work with discuss that expectations in most honors-level classes today are equivalent to regular-level classes ten years ago. I'm unsure that is 100% true, and maybe our expectations then were higher than necessary, but I can definitely agree that student tenacity and urgency to succeed are significantly lower than pre-COVID times.
The question becomes, how do schools re-engage students? As in all aspects of education, this is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The far ends of the student success spectrum, the high achievers and the high strugglers, still exist as they did. The same students who liked school before March 2020 value education because they enjoy learning or see it as a needed means to an end. The students who did not succeed in school still have the same challenges. The shift has been in the average student skewing the bell curve farther to the left. Today, the average student seems less likely to dig into a challenge, persevere, and take pride in problem-solving.
Schools have tried a multitude of strategies to rebuild student attitudes toward school as we still rebound from a year of staring at student ceiling fans through Zoom. Homework has been lessened or eliminated as students were not doing it anyway. More class time is provided for students to do the work that would have been assigned at home, meaning less content is covered throughout the year. Much more group work is assigned than independent study, and classes such as Woods and Autos have been pushed equally or more than college-level coursework.
All of these ideas help students avoid failing classes, but I have not seen them increase overall engagement in school. So, the question remains: how do we make this happen? This past week, I had an experience that reminded me. I was hired through Texas Instruments to work with a group of middle school students in Iowa whose school had purchased TI technology through a federal grant. The students with whom I worked had little to no experience with computer coding, let alone programming robots.
In each group, I started with a one-line program to simply turn on a light in the hardware. Immediately, the light went on in the technology and in the students' brains. The coolest part was that within a few minutes, while some students diligently followed along step-by-step with me, others had discovered how to activate other features and were making multi-colored LEDs blink while we were just getting the one color light to turn back off. Rather than stop the students who were exploring on their own, making great success and failure, to get them back on with the rest, I told them how cool what they were doing was and let them keep going. I had never met these students before, but I had a hunch about them.
Later, while students were actively coding robots to navigate mazes, the grant coordinator was overjoyed by the students who explored additional features on their own. My hunch played out exactly as I thought. She told me that those students were the ones who typically disengaged from class and struggled to succeed in school. It clearly had nothing to do with intelligence or ability, but finding the right motivation and letting that foster their curiosity and creativity.
This experience is one of many that prove key concepts of either Self-Determination Theory or Agentic Motivation Theory correct. Both look to describe aspects of intrinsic motivation. Self-Determination Theory describes the positive impacts of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Agentic motivation posits that we are motivated when we have agency over the situation and feel our actions impact the outcomes. Both motivation theories include the ability for students to have ownership of their work. Whether it is process or product may not matter as much, but the ability to safely explore to find meaning and enjoyment is needed.
The flipside is what has happened. In our best efforts to help students succeed, we have stripped down to the basics. Just do what I say, repeat it back to me, and you will pass. Support level classes have always been notorious for this. A belief that students lack the skills and ability to access higher-level work without mastering the very basics of reading and writing. So these students are repeatedly drilled on low-level math and reading skills without applying them, and are bored and continue to lack success.
low (relevancy + challenge + creativity + autonomy) = low engagement.
The beautiful part of that equation is that the low on each side can cancel itself out, and with that the disengaged will engage. Teachers need to give these kids a chance to show what they are capable of, not just what we think they need.
Source:
1) American Medical Association. "Study Sheds Light on SARS-CoV-2 Transmission in Homes with Kids." AMA, March 13, 2024. https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/study-sheds-light-sars-cov-2-transmission-homes-kids.
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