How to Rethink Levels of Student Engagement for Greater Impact

What does engagement look like in your classroom? Does it happen in fits and starts, or is it smooth and uninterrupted? Levels of student engagement help you understand what is happening in your classroom, assess the effectiveness of your lessons, and identify where you can make improvements. Exploring how to teach essay writing can be a powerful way to foster deeper engagement, as it encourages students to think critically and articulate their ideas effectively. This article will give you valuable insights into the different levels of student engagement—and how to move students toward a higher, more active level.

EssayGrader's grading software for teachers can help you achieve this goal by providing clear, actionable feedback that improves student performance and boosts engagement. 

What are the 5 Principles of Student Engagement?

1. Dialogue: Building Meaningful Relationships through Communication

Student engagement thrives on communication. Yet, not just any type of communication will do. For meaningful engagement to occur, it must be dialogic. That is, it must be multi-directional and responsive to the concerns and ideas of all partners involved, underpinned by recognized processes of providing feedback and taking actions that close the feedback loop. 

2. Building Trust: Creating a Safe Space for Student Engagement

Trusting relationships are crucial for students and staff to develop engagement and partnership with one another. Transparency in processes, a willingness to share information, multidirectional communication, and honest dialogue are core to building practices that can support sustainable partnerships. 

3. Equity and Inclusivity: Ensuring Diverse Student Engagement Approaches

An increasingly diverse student and staff body requires diverse approaches to student engagement underpinned by: 

• Universality
• Inclusivity
• Representation

The partnership recognizes that the learning experience is shaped by the lived experiences of each individual engaged in higher education. 

4. Empowerment: Giving Students a Voice in Their Education

Empowerment in decision-making, both individually and collectively, is required for students and staff to realize the full potential of engagement and partnership with one another. Recognizing inherent power imbalance and the impact of power dynamics is required to acknowledge meaningful pathways to building the capabilities of students and staff to work together to influence and inform change. 

5. Students as Co-Creators: The Shift from Passive to Active Engagement

A partnership cannot exist without co-creating and co-designing knowledge, actions, and outcomes, where engagement culture shifts from passivity to collaboration. Developing this culture elevates partnership from conceptual to tangible, where the role of students can be focused on both the process and the product of engagement. 

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Reimagining Levels of Student Engagement as a Continuum of Learning Behaviors

Classroom observation forms often ask how many students are engaged during a lesson. The standard procedure is to look around the room and count the number of students who appear to be doing what they've been asked to do. The problem is that this limited view of engagement narrows a complex task to strictly outward signs of behavior. 

• Are they looking at the teacher? Check. 
• Taking notes? Check. 

Or:

• But what about that student looking out the window? 
• Or the one rifling through a backpack? 
• Are they engaged? The answer is no. 

The window-gazing student could be thinking deeply about the teacher’s rhetorical question. The topic might have sparked a connection for the backpack-rifling student, who wanted to find her book to look at a key passage. 

Herein lies the problem: Engagement isn't simply about low-level compliance. Indeed, existing and new research can help us understand engagement and how to identify it in a new light. 

Defining the Three Dimensions of Student Engagement

An older model of student engagement proposed by Appleton and colleagues suggests that it occurs across three dimensions: 

1. Behavioral Engagement

Behavioral engagement includes behaviors and actions. Readily observable indicators are frequently cited as evidence of this, such as: 

• Participating in class discussions
• Following classroom rules
• Completing assignments 

2. Cognitive Engagement

Cognitive engagement is an indicator of the psychological effort students exert. Cognitively engaged students monitor their understanding and make connections with the new learning. This is more difficult to identify based on outward actions only. That student gazing out the window might have been cognitively engaged while reflecting on her knowledge. 

3. Affective Engagement

A third dimension is affective engagement—how students feel about their learning. Students who are emotionally involved are interested in the content. Perhaps the student who pulled a book from her backpack had been surprised at some information the teacher shared and wanted to compare it to something previously read. She was responding emotionally to the content, eager to satisfy her curiosity. 

Integrating Behavioral, Cognitive, and Emotional Engagement for Holistic Learning

Truly engaged learners draw on all three dimensions. A student who is only behaviorally engaged may go through the motions of schooling with little investment in the learning (yet look engaged). 

One who is cognitively but not effectively engaged may lack the will to persist when learning becomes more difficult. A learner who is only emotionally engaged may feel a great interest in the subject but put forth little effort. 

Bridging Theory to Practice: Amy Berry’s Engagement Continuum 

Though Appleton's model has many merits, teachers need a model that more explicitly bridges theoretical constructs to what engagement looks like in the classroom to recognize engagement and teach students what it looks and feels like. 

Australian researcher Amy Berry has provided precisely that. Through interviews with teachers about their descriptions of indicators of engagement and disengagement, she developed a continuum of engagement and disengagement that weaves theoretical principles with classroom application and helps teachers gauge more precisely how much kids are engaged (or not) in learning. 

The Engagement Spectrum Defined

Continuum of Student Engagement: From Passive Participation to Active Involvement

• Berry found that most teachers focused on the “doing” aspect of learning—the behavioral dimension. She recognized that a student's degree of passivity or activeness within the school also influenced their investment in education. 
• She located behavioral-only engagement on the more passive end of her continuum and called this category “Participating.” 
• Some teachers also described passive disengagement, which led Berry to extend the continuum in another direction to create the passive disengagement category of “Withdrawing.” 
• Berry found students can be actively engaged or disengaged. Students with a somewhat high degree of active engagement "Investing" ask questions about the content and seek relevance in their learning. 
• Some actively disengaged students "Avoiding" try to evade work, such as with off-task behavior. 

Participating: The Passive End of Engagement 

“Probably the first thing is where their focus is at, so if they’re looking at their work or quietly completing the task.” 

This form of engagement is characterized by students’ compliant behavior and willingness to do what the teacher has asked. Behaviors associated with this type of engagement include: 

• Being on task
• Being focused
• Paying attention
• Doing work
• Responding to teacher questions

When directed to do so by the teacher, engaging with peers is limited to working in groups or pairs. When expectations for engagement are at this level, the focus is on listening to the teacher, following the teacher’s instructions, and completing the tasks the teacher has assigned.

Investing: An Active Form of Engagement 

“Students who are engaged ask a lot of questions, are keen and curious, want to know more, and think actively about what they are working on.” 

When students move from passive compliance to this more active form of engagement, we see signs that they are personally invested in and find value in their learning. Behaviors include: 

• Showing curiosity and interest
• Displaying signs they are enjoying learning
• Asking questions about what they are learning
• Engaging in discussions about learning
• Thinking more deeply about what they are learning

Driving: The Highest Level of Engagement 

“That was important to them. That was the focus that was driving them, and every thought they had was what they wanted to do. They kept asking, ‘When are we having time to plan?’” 

In this most active form of engagement, students strive toward a goal they have set that is personally meaningful to them and involves a certain level of challenge. We sometimes refer to this kind of challenge as “hard fun.” Behaviors associated with driving include: 

• Setting goals for learning
• Engaging in self-reflection
• Self-assessment and self-evaluation
• Seeking feedback to help them improve
• Looking for ways to extend their learning

Withdrawing: The Beginning of Disengagement 

“They’ve just pulled the blinds down; you can see them automatically glaze over, and it doesn’t matter what you’re saying—you’ve lost them.” 

Passively disengaged students in the learning experience are often described as “flying under the radar.” They are not trying to call attention to themselves or cause any disruption, but they are also not participating in the planned learning experience. Behaviors associated with this form of disengagement include: 

• Appearing distracted
• Not making eye contact
• Daydreaming
• Physically withdrawing from the group
• Staring out the window
• Lacking participation or effort

Avoiding: An Active Form of Disengagement 

“They find excuses to go out of the room a lot, or go to their bag a lot. They sit on the computer and find other things to do instead of staying on task.” 

Students at this level of disengagement are often described as being off task and actively looking to avoid engaging in the planned learning experience. Unlike the withdrawing form, students are not as concerned with going unnoticed and actively seeking out other things to do rather than passively disengaging. 

Disrupting: The Active End of Disengagement 

“They go around to someone else’s desk and start an argument about something — goofing around, being loud, and causing a bit of trouble.” 

In this form of disengagement, students actively disrupt the learning environment or explicitly refuse to participate in the planned learning experience. Behaviors include: 

• Arguing with the teacher or peers
• Being non-compliant
• Trying to distract others
• Moving around the room in a way that disrupts learning (e.g., running around, rolling around on chairs)

Teaching Students About Engagement 

Berry's work has inspired some educators to teach students about how their own level of engagement influences their learning and how they might progress. In the video accompanying this column, high school history teacher Thomas Tutogi introduces the continuum to his students and allows them to co-construct indicators of engagement and disengagement. 

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