I have a colleague who directs our university’s journalism program. She loves attending editorial meetings of the campus newspaper, where the students’ eagerness to find compelling stories and to receive feedback on their writing is palpable.
Seeing students this excited to engage the process, to improve their skills, to work toward a collective goal … this is a teacher’s dream. But how telling that this learning context is extracurricular. How often do we see such obvious engagementin our actual classes?
I define engagement as students undertaking cognitively challenging work—whatever form that takes—that they find intrinsically motivating. Highly engaged students take initiative, setting their own goals for achievement and expectations for fulfilling them. And teachers become coaches who guide students to push past the boundaries of what they know and do well, which is far more rewarding (and far less transactional) than conveying knowledge and assessing its acquisition. Engagement correlates with academic success and later career satisfaction.
In other words, engagement is something every good teacher wants for their students. But here’s the conundrum: If we seek to cultivate engagement with traditional pedagogical tools, we will likely end up suppressing it.
This is partly because what engagement looks like is rarely as obvious as those newspaper staff meetings. After all, we can’t pry open students’ minds to see how intrinsically motivated they are. So, we can mistake behaviors that ostensibly indicate engagement but that don’t reflect students’ investment in cognitively challenging work.
For example, enjoymentis an easy stand-in for engagement. I want students, after all, to enjoy my classes. But there is limited added value in being a charismatic teacher or in making course material entertaining. Engaged learning can be enjoyableat times, and playful exploration—which is not the same as enjoyment—is crucial, but engagement must persist when the work (inevitably) becomes frustrating or tedious.
Rigor is another stand-in, because working hard and wrestling with difficult problems is fundamental to engaged learning. But rigor is too often imposed on students for the sake of rigor itself—i.e., for “proving” that the ivory-covered walls of merit are well-guarded. Rigor should emerge from engagement, not the other way around.
There is an even bigger problem: If we formally assess engagement, we compel students to perform whatever it is we tell them engagement looks like. This is the specter of Goodhart’s law; when a metric becomes the target of achievement (and surveillance of achievement), the metric becomes far less useful. Even worse, the carrots and sticks that come with assessment can drive out students’ intrinsic curiosity and their desire to challenge themselves—i.e., the essence of engaged learning.
This conundrum reflects a core conflict of formal education: Teachers are expected both to support student learning and to evaluate students at the same time, which is incredibly hard. While this conundrum may not be fully resolved, we can support engagement more informally. Here are two primary ways I do so.
First is that I frame engagement as an invitation. This includes giving students considerable autonomy over how they approach course assignments; it also means trying to build a strong sense of peer community. I joke with students—it’s mostly a joke—that an unofficial learning objective is for each of them to make at least one new friend.
Second is that I aim for transparency about the work students must do for an A—the grade most aspire to within the pressure cooker of contemporary higher education. In establishing this floor of achievement, I say nothing about the ceiling. But informally, I gauge how many students go above the floor.
Consider a line that represents an assignment’s cutoff for an A. The economics of incentives make it rational to do just enough to meet this threshold, so work students put in above the line suggests they are choosing to do so. This can be as simple as submitting 750 words when a rubric required 500 or citing eight sources instead of the minimum three. Or it can be more elaborate, as when a student team in my rhetorical theory course once created a video game to teach logical fallacies.
Full disclaimer: I have simplified, and arguably eased, my requirements for an A in recent years as I experiment with ungrading. Like other ungraders,I want to make grades less distracting so students can focus on learning rather than performing achievement.
My writing courses range from 20-25 students, and in a typical semester, I get a couple students who consistently exceed requirements for an A. If I’m especially lucky, four or five. According to my rule of thumb, these students are fairly engaged. This heuristic tracks well with other behaviors, as these students often participate most frequently and insightfully in class discussions (I do not grade for participation), and they tend to provide the most precise and thoughtful feedback during peer workshops.
This heuristic extends beyond the term, as when a student continues attending office hours to discuss course themes or evolving intellectual interests, or when they maintain a community partnership connected to the course, or when they launch a student organization from a class project. I have seen former students do all these things (if rarely).
What about students who work right up to the A cutoff but no further? And what about students who don’t reliably meet the cutoff, or who regularly show up late or miss class, or who come on time but look bored or sleepy or otherwise distracted, or who consistently submit assignments late, or who miss assignments altogether?
Students like these—i.e., the majority—show the limited value of my heuristic, which should only be used as affirmative evidence for engagement and not damaging evidence against it. And this evidence should never be used as a promise of additional rewards; it is merely a reference point.
Granted, when students look bored, it’s not unreasonable to assume they are bored, but engagement is a spectrum, and students have complex lives; they are more than just engaged or disengaged. Students can be justifiably reluctant to discuss what’s impeding them from completing coursework; some might be genuinely invested but beset by myriad life challenges.
Engagement is our birthright. Babies and toddlers soak up knowledge and experience, experimenting endlessly as they learn to sit up, talk, and walk, and as they become aware of the wider world. Formal education threatens to extinguish this passion for learning, but I believe most students would rather be like those young journalists than not.
I don’t wish to add performing engagement to the list of hoops students must jump through to survive in college; mindful of this risk, I try to scaffold a clear path to an A, and I invite students who are willing and able to tread further down that path. Some accept the invitation over time; they start putting in work above the A cutoff, or they participate in class discussions when they previously held back.
This is incremental and tentative progress toward the robust, collective spirit of the newspaper editorial meetings, and it is perhaps the most we can expect within typical academic settings, but the invitation remains open.
Teaching Inquiry 