Real Skills Answer Students’ Call for Meaning — and Reignite Engagement

Engagement is the gateway to learning. When students are not engaged, motivation—that inner drive to take action—diminishes.

In March 2025, AASA launched its Public Education Promise to ensure every child has experiences that prepare them for college, a career, and real life. I’ve been involved in one pillar of the Promise, Real Skills for Real Life, co-leading AASA’s national Summit, turning its insights into a certified training course, and creating resources for educators. One thing is clear: For these skills to take hold across the country—as we believe they should—communities need a shared understanding of why they matter. This article is the first in a series exploring that essential question.

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Outside, the winter evening was becoming darker and colder. But inside my house, the emotional temperature was rising. It was the end of a weekend, and my twelve-year-old grandson still needed to revise a book essay for school. He had sidestepped the task for two days, but time was up. No wonder these end-of-the-day scenes are called “arsenic hour”—the moment when fatigue, pressure, and unfinished responsibilities collide.

My grandson wasn’t just procrastinating, though. He was in what Rebecca Winthrop of The Brookings Institution and author Jenny Anderson call “resister” mode in their book, The Disengaged Teen. He was pushing back, not because he was apathetic, but because the task felt disconnected from anything meaningful to him at that moment.

What was happening in my house was a micro-version of a macro-problem: a crisis of engagement.

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Engagement: A Missing Metric in Education

I’ve long wondered why engagement isn’t considered a fundamental metric in schools. In my workplace research, we always assessed employee engagement—as do employers—because it’s a proxy for productivity. Yet in education, where student engagement is arguably even more important, it’s rarely assessed.

Engagement is the gateway to learning. When students are not engaged, motivation—that inner drive to take action—diminishes.

When I interviewed her for The Breakthrough Years, motivation researcher Wendy Grolnick shared how her husband sums up her life’s work: “She studies WHY we do WHAT we do.” That, at its core, is the essence of motivation—it’s what energizes our actions and guides our behavior.

At the AASA Summit on Real Skills for Real Life, Rebecca Winthrop elaborated. Motivation is internal. Engagement is what people do with that motivation. It’s the visible part of the learning process.

Jennifer Fredricks, researcher and author of Eight Myths of Student Disengagement, adds another element: Engagement isn’t only about individual students; it’s also about the environments we create for them. Children bring their own interests and values, she says, but they also need tasks that spark curiosity and teachers who build strong relationships.

Engagement isn’t just about “liking school.” Fredricks has found that it predicts outcomes that truly matter. Engaged students are more likely to achieve more academically, stay in school longer, experience better mental health, and build more positive relationships. Engagement is foundational to learning and well-being.

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What Students Are Telling Us—Loudly!

Before the AASA Summit, my organization co-led a national study of youth,¹ where we found that only about a third of fourth through twelfth-graders reported feeling engaged at least half of the time or more. The older the children, the less engaged they are. Winthrop shared another striking finding from her research at the Summit: three-quarters of third graders say they love school, but by tenth grade, only a quarter still feel that way.

But Winthrop argues that merely labeling students as “engaged” or “disengaged” oversimplifies the picture. The research she conducted with Jenny Anderson for their book reveals that there are four modes of engagement. Some students are resisters, like my grandson was, avoiding his homework. Some coast along as passengers. Some are achievers who work hard to excel, doing what teachers say it takes to get an A, but are fragile learners—excellent followers, not independent thinkers. And some—too few—are explorers who are deeply engaged, curious, and emotionally healthy. Students move in and out of these modes constantly, even within a single day.

I saw this with my grandson. He shifted from resisting to exploring when I began to talk with him about the book—because I had read it, too, and could reconnect him with the reason he had chosen this topic to write about. But here’s the troubling reality that Anderson and Winthrop found: Fewer than 4% of middle and high school students regularly experience opportunities that put them into explorer mode.

When we conducted focus groups with students, they described why. Fourteen-year-old Nico said, “They teach us math and history, but they don’t explain how it’s useful for real life.” Seventeen-year-old Violet continued that school often feels unconnected to her life: “I don’t feel prepared because I’m not learning things that feel applicable.”

Students have always asked these questions. But technology has changed the stakes. As Violet added, “Kids think, ‘Why do I need to learn this? I can just look it up. I can just use ChatGPT.’”

She wasn’t being glib. She was pointing to a major reality: Content alone in the age of AI feels less worthwhile. Students want meaning. They want relevance. They want to know why.

Their comments made me wonder: What if students understood not just what they were learning, but the underlying skills—and how those skills matter in the real world?

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Real Skills Are Job Skills, Not Just School Skills

When they ask, “Why do we have to learn this?” students told me that the typical response was to explain the content in a school context. Algebra is necessary before geometry, reading literature and writing essays develop language skills.

All of that is completely valid, but it doesn’t address the beyond-school, real-life implications.

What if students learned, explicitly, that math helps develop the problem-solving skills that employers crave; that reading literature promotes perspective taking, which is essential for teamwork and leadership; that writing essays strengthens creative thinking, a key ingredient in workplace innovation?

This is the essence of Real Skills for Real Life: Helping students understand the practical implications for beyond-school learning. Because learning today is not just about memorizing facts that you can look up online.

Real Skills Underlie Learning How to Learn

In addition, these real skills—critical and creative thinking, perspective taking—are also about learning how to learn—the ability to reflect on how they learn and discover how they can best remember, think flexibly, and achieve goals.

These skills matter more than they have in the past, especially in an era shaped by artificial intelligence. Right now, only 13% of students feel strongly prepared for their futures, while many more—53—feel “somewhat” prepared.

Life today is uncertain. Uncertainty can feel difficult, but it also represents an opportunity. With an unknowable future, the student of today will have to learn how to learn so they can direct what’s to come, rather than have it happen to them.

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Reigniting Engagement Through Meaning and Hope

Students aren’t disengaging because they don’t care about learning. They’re disengaging because they’re searching for meaning—and too often, it’s missing.

Imagine a school day where students routinely understand how why what they’re learning matters, where adults help them connect academic content to job skills and to learning how-to-learn skills that they’ll need to navigate their futures.

Imagine classrooms where exploration, not mere compliance, becomes the norm; where relationships fuel motivation; where students see themselves as capable thinkers today and tomorrow.

Reigniting engagement doesn’t always require sweeping reforms. Sometimes it begins with something small: instead of saying “good job,” an adult can point out that the child is learning the skill of “taking on challenges” and why that skill matters.

That moment can turn resistance into curiosity. It can transform a passenger into an explorer. And it can foster confidence that grows into lifelong learning.

That is the real promise of real skills.

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I’m so grateful you’re reading Research to Thrive By on Substack! My book, The Breakthrough Years is available for purchase here.

1. The Youth Voice on Arts and Thriving Study was conducted by Ipsos for Families and Work Institute and Johns Hopkins International Arts + Mind Lab in May-June 2025 of 1015 11-24-year-olds and their parents. Here, I discuss findings for students in the fourth through the twelfth grades.