Listening to Students About Engagement

The pedagogy wars rage on, with camps arguing about the effectiveness of specific approaches to teaching various concepts, students, or specific topics. I am not attempting to debunk any of these arguments — I believe that following the evidence of effectiveness is always a good and valuable thing.

However, there is a critical element in the battle for better pedagogy that gets missed way too often. There is a little discussed psychometric principle known as “face validity” which gets at the degree to which the test subject feels the test is valuable and worthwhile. If a student does not feel a test is worthwhile, they are likely to withhold effort and the test is no longer measuring what it purports to measure. We need to spend more time thinking about this notion of ensuring we are getting students’ best efforts in learning and testing.

The research on student engagement is damning in that we can see student curiosity, effort, and engagement drop precipitously as they move through their schooling experience. Students enter kindergarten full of wonder and curiosity and by 6th grade they are dreading their school experiences and by 11th grade they are actively forming work-arounds to game the system.

If we want to ensure high quality learning for our students we need to give serious attention to getting high quality effort from students. And to do that, we need to listen to what students need and want from schooling experiences.

We need to listen to students in a serious way. Too often we ask students what they want from school in a superficial manner or we discount their voice as being immature or not serious. If we hope to improve student engagement, we need to recognize that students are in charge of their efforts and we are profoundly unable to mandate or compel their engagement.

We need to recognize that asking students what they need from school does not simply mean interviewing a few students over pizza, although that’s not a bad place to begin. Engaging students means giving them agency and voice in shaping what school is. Embracing student voice is about recognizing, at a fundamental level, that schools were built for the students and they should be at the center of our decision making.

Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms — you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.

―Seneca