Changing What Matters—Student AND Teacher Engagement In Learning

Over the past three years, we’ve seen a real disruption in American education, setting achievement back. According to last year’s national “report card”: national proficiency in reading and math declined during the pandemic:

• In 2022, 36% of 4th graders scored at the proficient level or above in math (five percent lower than in 2019); 33% scored at this level in reading (two percent lower than in 2019).¹

• 26% of 8th graders scored at the proficient level or above in math (seven percent lower than 2019); and 31% in reading (three percent lower than in 2019).²

Furthermore, chronic absenteeism is high:

• Nationwide, 29.7% of students, nearly 14.7 million, were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year. In fact, roughly 6.5 million more students were missing 10% or more of school days, when compared with the school year prior to the pandemic.

Most of the solutions I hear call for more of what we’ve done before—more instructional time, more tutoring, smaller class sizes. While these ideas have real merit, my decades of conducting research on child/adolescent development and on the adult workforce/workplace and my concern over teacher shortages lead me to a different question:

Would measuring and changing student AND teacher engagement as metrics of school success jumpstart educational improvements?

This is not a new question for me.

For many years, I led research teams studying the impact of efforts to improve the quality of early childhood education/care in a series of states: Georgia, North Carolina, California, Florida, Connecticut, Missouri, Hawaii and New Jersey. In those studies, we used behavioral measures of quality including assessing how teachers interacted with children, how they managed classroom challenges, and the kind of learning activities they provided and then conducted analyses to see how those factors were linked with children’s cognitive, social and emotional development.³  Although we had scores of data collectors in classrooms administering these measures, there was something we weren’t measuring—something I noticed whenever I visited classrooms:

• In some classrooms, the children kept right on working, almost oblivious to a new person in their midst. There was a fire in their eyes as they learned.

• In other classrooms, the children seemed bored, easily distracted. Either they stared or rushed up to me. The fire in their eyes was dimmer.

In other words, some children seemed engaged in learning, while others didn’t.

I also saw that teacher engagement tended to parallel the children’s. When the children didn’t seem engaged in learning, neither did the teachers—there was little fire in their eyes too.

Our research indicates that when teachers are more excited by, motivated to, intentional about learning, the children are faring better cognitively, socially, and emotionally.⁴

I began to suspect that we should measure engagement in children AND adults and began to search for how.

What Is Engagement In Adults and Children?

I’ll never forget the opening pages of the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow,⁵ where he details his discovery that happiness isn’t something that happens by chance, nor something that money or power can buy, nor even something that can be directly sought—yet we all have moments when we feel exhilarated. Csikszentmihalyi, who grew up in Europe during World War II, realized how few adults in his life “were able to withstand the tragedies that war visited on them,”⁶ which sparked his desire to understand what fosters a life worth living. He spent decades searching for what characterizes optimal experiences and found:

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is something we make happen.⁷

Note that Csikszentmihalyi mentions being “stretched” voluntarily when accomplishing something “difficult and worthwhile.” He writes, “In the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery,” and that kind of moment “comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.”⁸

It's not just happiness, but engagement, I thought. When I read this book, Csikszentmihalyi’s research really clarified the concept of engagement for me. These optimal experiences, periods of “flow,” are close to what I see as the peak of engagement.

In the business world. where engagement is routinely assessed because it is seen as a proxy for productivity, it is usually measured as involvement, enthusiasm, and commitment, leaving out resilience in tackling challenges.

Ultimately, we did find a measure for our nationally representative studies of the workforce—the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale that taps into vigor (including being resilient), dedication and absorption.⁹ We also use an adaption of that measure for our nationally representative studies of students.¹⁰

A scholar of student engagement, Jennifer Fredricks of Union College, takes a similarly holistic view of engagement.¹¹ She explains:

• Engagement is behavioral, which includes actual involvement in classroom learning.

• Engagement has an emotional component: being interested in, excited by, and valuing learning.

• These emotions are shaped by social experiences. Fredricks finds that feelings of belonging are important for deeper learning.

• And there’s the cognitive component. Fredricks says this is more than doing well academically; it’s also making an effort to understand and master content and challenges.

Does School Engagement Matter?

Studies find that when young people are engaged in learning, they are more motivated,¹² have higher grades,¹³ and are more likely to stay in school and to go to college. Students who are actively engaged are also more likely to have positive relationships with other students and less likely to get in trouble or to be depressed.¹⁴

While engagement is a very good thing, there can be too much of it. Studies have also found that students might be fully engaged in school, but also burned out and exhausted by the work, so engagement has to be monitored for burnout.¹⁵

How Engaged Are Students in School?

In The Eight Myths of Student Engagement, Fredricks reports that 40 to 60 percent of students nationwide show signs of disengagement.¹⁶ Our own findings parallel these. In the nationally representative study conducted for The Breakthrough Years, we found that 56 percent of nine through nineteen were engaged or very engaged in learning in school prior to the pandemic. During the pandemic, that dropped to 33 percent.¹⁷ Clearly school engagement needs to be increased!

But CAN Student Engagement Be Increased?

Barbara Schneider of Michigan State University is deeply invested in improving education.¹⁸ To do so, she has worked to define and identify the key components of engagement, which, taken together, comprise optimal learning moments.¹⁹ Once defined and identified, her goal has been to increase these moments because she, like I, was seeing too little of this kind of learning in her own studies of adolescents.

To pursue this goal, Schneider teamed up with Finnish researcher Katariina Salmela-Aro (a co-creator of the student engagement scale we use) as well as Jari Lavonen of the University of Helsinki and others to conduct an education study funded by the National Science Foundation. They developed a conceptual model of optimal learning moments that included drivers of engagement, like interests, skills, and challenges. Their model also includes detractors from these moments, like being confused or bored, or enhancers, like feeling happy and confident.²⁰

To test their model, they decided to use a project-based learning approach.²¹ The curriculum was created by the classroom teachers and researchers using a civic approach called Teacher-Researcher Partnerships.²² This, I suspect, is an important factor in its success.

In the study, teachers taught both their regular lessons and the new project-based learning lessons—both designed to meet state and national standards—so the learning in each could be compared. Their question was: Can we identify the key elements of optimal learning moments, and can we increase the number of these engaging moments through project-based learning?

In order to take account of the context and the moment, the research team decided to use the experience sampling method that Csikszentmihalyi had pioneered, where young people randomly receive a beep on their phones during the day and are texted questions like: “Were you interested in what you were doing? Did you feel skilled in what you were doing? Did you feel challenged in what you were doing? How engaged are you?”²³

I visited several schools participating in the U.S. portion of this experiment. The students in those classes seemed on fire with purposeful activity and so did the teachers. In Washtenaw International High School in Ypsilanti, Michigan, I watched students learn a lesson about magnets, beginning with a spirited conversation about the use of magnets on high-speed trains. The students posed questions, but they weren’t answered immediately, as is the norm in many schools. The point was to enable students to plan and conduct their own investigations to obtain answers, which has been found to maintain curiosity, promote challenge, and spur ongoing engaged learning.²⁴

The U.S.-Finnish team is excited that their model has been effective to date—they can measure the components of optimal learning moments and they can increase engaged learning. With real joy, Schneider told me:²⁵

It’s working! What does that really mean? It means that we can change the state of learning—that there’s an opportunity to make learning different so that some students, maybe all students, can become more engaged.

And teachers, too, can become more engaged.

So What? Now What?

That’s a question that Mort Sherman, recently retired from AASA, the School Superintendents Organization, is fond of asking. When he hears about a promising way to improve education, he wants to know why and how this practice might be implemented in schools and ultimately scaled.

There are a number of important efforts to increase and measure student engagement and student voice, like Harvard’s Ron Ferguson’s Tripod Survey that provides wonderful feedback to teachers²⁶ and the work of the National Center for School Engagement.

What seems to be missing is looking at student and teacher engagement together. The fact that teachers were learning and becoming more engaged (just as were the students were) in Schneider’s research is something that should not be overlooked.

What if we called on the creativity and commitment of teachers to brainstorm what would increase their own engagement in teaching AND students’ engagement in learning. In my nonprofit, we’ve had huge success in efforts to take both employers and employees’ perspectives in making work “work” better for both.²⁷

It is a bold idea worth trying and I think it would help to jumpstart the kind of educational improvement we all yearn for.

1. Achievement-level results,” The Nation’s Report Card, https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/nation/achievement/?grade=4; https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4.

2. “Achievement-level results,” The Nation’s Report Card, https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/nation/achievement/?grade=8; https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=8.

3. Studies included Susan Kontos et al., Quality in Family Child Care and Relative Care (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1994); Annette Sibley,  Martha Abbott-Shim, and Ellen Galinsky, Child Care Licensing: Georgia Impact Study (Atlanta, GA: Quality Assist, Inc., 1994); Carollee Howes, et al., The Florida Child Care Quality Improvement Study: 1996 Report (New York: Families and Work Institute, 1996).

4. Ellen Galinsky et al., The Study of Children in Family Child Care and Relative Care: Highlights of Findings (New York: Families and Work Institute, 1994). 

5. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).

6. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow, the Secret to Happiness,” TED, February 2004, https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness ?language=en#t-20282.

7. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 3.

8. Ibid., 4.

9. Wilmar Schaufeli, and Arnold Bakker, Test manual for the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Unpublished manuscript, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, 2003), Retrieved from http://www.schaufeli.com; Wilmar Schaufeli, Arnold  Bakker, and  Marisa  Salanova, “The measurement of work engagement with a short questionnaire,” Educational and Psychological Measurement 66, no. 4 (2006).

10. Katariina Salmela-Aro and Katja Upadaya, “The Schoolwork Engagement Inventory: Energy, Dedication and Absorption (EDA),” European Journal of Psychological Assessment 28, no. 1 (2012): 60–67, https://doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759/a000091.

11. Jennifer A. Fredricks, interview by Ellen Galinsky, June 9, 2017; Jennifer A. Fredricks, Phyllis C. Blumenfeld, and Alison H. Paris, “Potential of the Concept, State of the Evidence,” Review of Educational Research 74, no. 1 (March 1, 2004): 59–109, https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059; Fredricks, Eight Myths of Student Engagement; Jennifer A. Fredricks et al., “What Matters for Urban Adolescents’ Engagement and Disengagement in School: A Mixed-Methods Study,” Journal of Adolescent Research 34, no. 5 (September 2019): 491–527, https://doi.org/10.1177/0743558419830638.

12. Johnmarshall Reeve, “A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Student Engagement,” in Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, ed. Sandra L. Christenson, Amy L. Reschly, and Cathy Wylie (Boston: Springer, 2012), 149–172, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2018-7_7.

13. Yibing Li and Richard M. Lerner, “Trajectories of School Engagement During Adolescence: Implications for Grades, Depression, Delinquency, and Substance Use,” Developmental Psychology 47, no. 1 (2011): 233–247, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021307.

14. Ibid.

15. Katariina Salmela-Aro et al., “Integrating the Light and Dark Sides of Student Engagement Using Person-Oriented and Situation-Specific Approaches,” Learning and Instruction 43, no. 3 (January 2016): 61–70, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2016.01.001.

16. Jennifer A. Fredricks, Eight Myths of Student Engagement: Creating Classrooms of Deep Learning (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2014).

17. Ellen Galinsky, The Breakthrough Years: Raising Thriving Teens (New York: Flatiron Books, 2024).

18. Barbara Schneider, interview by Ellen Galinsky, April 20, 2017.

19. Barbara Schneider et al., “Investigating Optimal Learning Moments in U.S. and Finnish Science Classes,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 53, no. 3 (March 2016): 400–421, https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21306.

20. Ibid.

21. Kalle Juuti et al., “A Teacher–Researcher Partnership for Professional Learning: Co- Designing Project-Based Learning Units to Increase Student Engagement in Science Classes,” Journal of Science Teacher Education 32, no. 4 (March 2021): 1–17, https:// doi.org/10.1080/1046560X.2021.1872207.

22. Ibid.

23. Barbara Schneider, interview by Ellen Galinsky, April 20, 2017.

24. Janna Inkinen et al., “High School Students’ Situational Engagement Associated with Scientific Practices in Designed Science Learning Situations,” Science Education 104, no. 4 (February 2020): 667–692, https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21570.

25. Barbara Schneider, interview by Ellen Galinsky, April 20, 2017.

26. Ronald Ferguson and Charlotte Danielson. "How Framework for Teaching and Tripod 7Cs Evidence Distinguish Key Components of Effective Teaching." Designing Teacher Evaluation Systems: New Guidance form the Measures of Effective Teaching Project. Eds. Thomas J. Kane, Kerri A. Kerr, and Robert C. Pianta (Jossey-Bass, July 2014).

27. Ellen Galinsky, “Research to Action: Review of Research Conducted by the Families and Work Institute”, in The Oxford Handbook of Work and Family, Eds. Tammy D. Allen, and Lillian T. Eby (Oxford Library of Psychology, 2016; online edition, Oxford Academic, 3 Feb. 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199337538.013.24, accessed 18 July 2024.