Student engagement is key to long-term success. Students who are engaged have higher skill development, achievement, and learning, and student engagement is the primary theoretical model for understanding dropout rates and promoting school completion.

Through extensive partnerships with educators across the United States, we have adapted our approach to create numerous tools, exercises, and strategies to interrupt these most pernicious patterns. Every community—every classroom—is unique, but here are some of our core, tried and true strategies for increasing classroom engagement.

In-class Reflection

Some students jump in immediately with questions or ideas while others hang back, continuing to process. By building space for in-class reflection, you can invite the answers of those who may not otherwise engage as they spend time collecting their thoughts and considering the prompt. By creating 2 minutes of space in which students thoughtfully reflect on a question, you can invite students who process questions differently, but more than that, you’re normalizing thinking before speaking.

Questions

When engaging with difficult topics or creating a new classroom dynamic, it is essential to carefully craft questions in order to invite the kind of engagement you want to see in the classroom. It’s about designing and patterning questions to elicit a story, underlying values and assumptions, and nuance. It can be easy as teachers to fall into some limiting habits of asking questions:

Structure

When reshaping patterns, we must interrupt the routines that fed a previous pattern of engagement. Superimposing a new form on an old conversation allows us to imagine and experience new ways of engaging. Once these new structures have been learned—like taking turns talking around the room, letting people finish without being interrupted, asking clarifying questions—the new patterns become part of classroom dynamics even when the given structure is not imposed.

Read the full article about student engagement by Danielle Isbell and John Sarrouf at Getting Smart.