Maintaining high engagement in our classrooms is a top priority in today’s schools. Engaged students are 2.5 times more likely to do well in school and 4.5 times more likely to feel optimistic about their future than their unengaged peers.
However, determining whether your students are engaged can be tricky. As an educator, you’ve likely taught students who appear to be engaged in class, only to find that they struggle with the content you’re teaching when it comes time to take tests and write essays.
This is why quantifying engagement is key. By quantifying engagement rates, you are able to get a better assessment of whether or not kids are actually paying attention to the content you’re attempting to teach. Focusing your efforts on raising engagement will make your lesson plans more fun, too. This is important, as students who enjoy learning are far more likely to take your teaching on board.
1. Establish Metrics
Quantifying your classroom’s engagement rate can be an intimidating prospect at first — particularly if you fear that you’re struggling to capture the imagination of your students. However, establishing key metrics related to engagement is crucial if you want to improve your teaching abilities and engage the students in the room.
Rather than shying away from questionnaires and surveys, consider handing out feedback forms and multiple-choice questions that are easy to complete and assess engagement. Consider asking anonymized questions like:
- “I try hard in school”
- All the time
- Most of the time
- Occasionally
- Almost never
- “I enjoy learning new things”
- All the time
- Most of the time
- Occasionally
- Almost never
- “When we’re learning in class, I feel supported and encouraged to do my best”
- All the time
- Most of the time
- Occasionally
- Almost never
These types of questions will alert you to low engagement levels and help you pivot toward more engaging classes. You can also take in some qualitative feedback in the form of questionnaires. For example, you may want to start each lesson with a question like: “What did we learn last class?” or “What stood out to you the most from the lesson we just finished?”
This will help you identify potential pain points for students and keep track of what works well. Taking this approach will help you model a growth mindset and show students that it’s okay to learn and grow over time.
2. Creating a Supportive Learning Environment
Once you’ve quantified your engagement rate, it’s time to start seeking improvements. Rather than simply attributing low engagement rates on things like social media or other external factors, we can take our role as educators as an opportunity to instill a love of learning in your students.
This is particularly important if you teach older teens who are preparing to enter college. College students face heightened mental health challenges, and younger students will benefit from your preemptive support before they leave for university. You can do this by using your position to improve the mental health of your students. This is key, as after graduation, many of your students may experience:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Stress
- Eating disorders
- Substance abuse
Accounting for these struggles is crucial as an educator. We can’t afford to overlook the importance of external stressors and should be able to put our students in touch with the support services that schools offer. We can preemptively help our students respond to these stressors by teaching them how to:
- Get in contact with on-campus resources for mental health
- Navigate campus counseling, health centers, and insurance requirements
- Provide contact details for resident advisors
- Access support offered by the Americans With Disabilities Act and off-campus resources like therapists
Taking the time to understand the pressures that our students face can help us adjust to their needs. This will help create a supportive, engaging environment that accommodates kids who are working through other issues in their lives. This also sets students up for success in the future and will significantly boost participation in your lessons.
3. Boosting Participation in the Classroom
Participation is a clear indicator of engagement. Put simply, the kids who participate in your extracurricular activities and clubs are far more likely to be engaged when in class.
However, if you teach a STEM subject, you may find that participation in activities like rocket-building clubs and coding teams is largely limited to male students who are either Asian or White. This is largely due to stereotypes and poor representation which undermines efforts to boost participation.
You can overcome these barriers to participation and boost participation in STEM education by:
- Focusing on proper representation so kids from traditionally underrepresented demographics can see role models that reflect themselves
- Offering project-based learning to give students a taste of what extracurricular STEM sessions are like
- Offering the girls and women in your classroom supportive services to boost women’s participation in STEM
- Utilizing engaging teaching materials that encourage curiosity and questioning
Taking these steps can make learning fun and help you provide more opportunities to kids who may mistakenly believe that STEM isn’t for them. This will improve your engagement rates in class and may spark a deeper love for learning within your students.
Conclusion
Measuring student engagement is key if we want to boost participation and encourage learning in the classroom. We can use these metrics to make changes to our lesson plans and identify areas of concern, too. Just be sure to use the data you collect to improve your own teaching materials and strategies. This will help you create a fun, supportive environment that is conducive to learning.
