What Do We Mean by “Engagement”?

A closer look at one of education’s most-used buzzwords

One of educators’ biggest frustrations is helping students get engaged—and stay engaged—in their learning. While trying to wrangle a room full of students to care not only about today’s lesson but also their futures has always been a challenge, teachers have reported that it’s gotten a lot harder recently. 

Teachers responding to a 2024 Pew Research survey said many students “have been reluctant to engage in class.” A majority of teachers also recently reported that their students “show little or no interest in learning,” along with ongoing distraction from their phones. Pandemic school closures certainly didn’t help. 

Many educators know student engagement is key to learning, academic achievement and overall well-being. The hard part is figuring out how to turn the ship around, how to help move students from disengagement and apathy to engagement and, maybe if you’re lucky, excitement about the future. 

One of Opportunity Education’s top priorities is helping educators, leaders, and schools create environments where students can grow and flourish together; places where students can not only get engaged with learning, but also help shape a version of their future they can get excited about. Our formula for success includes engagement as part of a whole picture that includes mastery, which is why we created our own student engagement framework to help educators and schools build a coherent system for student success. 

But first, it’s important to know what we mean by “engagement.” It’s become an educational buzzword and is often misunderstood, misused, and misappropriated. 

What Engagement Isn’t 

Let’s start with what isn’t considered “engagement.” 

Sometimes engagement is meant as a signal that students are active, with educators playing the role of Master of Ceremonies to a string of entertaining activities. In the book Instructional Illusions, learning scholars Paul Kirschner, Carl Hendrick, and Jim Heal write that some modern classrooms perform a “carousel of activities, constant hum of discussion, and often-performative busyness,” in the service of keeping students’ minds occupied. “We instinctively associate action with performance; movement with mastery,” they write. 

But if the activities don’t lead to actual learning, then how engaged students appear doesn’t matter much. Researcher Graham Nuthall, in his book The Hidden Lives of Learners, lists what he calls “poor proxies for learning,” and many look like engagement, including a calm, orderly classroom where a lot of work gets finished, students are motivated to complete work, and students are receiving feedback and explanations. 

“Our pedagogical intuitions, shaped by cultural conditioning, lead us to conflate the appearance of learning with its actual occurrence,” they write. In the hum of constant activity, students can appear engaged even when nothing new is being learned—while the kind of cognitive work that leads to durable progress often appears to the untrained eye as “unengaging.” 

Imagine a student struggling to apply her new knowledge of quadratic equations to a math problem on a worksheet. While her mind recalls the formula and she compares it to the problem in front of her to figure out how to apply it, she is deeply engaged in problem-solving. But to an outsider, the student may look like she’s not doing much, even staring off into the middle distance. 

Educators should reframe the concept of engagement as an “internal cognitive process” instead of a list of activities, the scholars write. When students are academically engaged, they are often asking themselves challenging questions about the significance of a concept, like “what lies beneath the surface of this idea?” 

Authentic Engagement: a Continuum of Pulling Students In 

So if completing work, appearing motivated, and staying busy doesn’t necessarily constitute authentic engagement, what does? Put simply, engagement is a continuum. It’s a student gradually taking on the cognitive load of learning themselves, doing the thinking rather than just the activity, and starting to steer where it goes.  It helps to understand how researchers look at how students show up and participate at school.

Decades of research have shown that student engagement is a complex, interconnected mix of how students behave, think, and feel, according to AIR senior researcher Sarah Frazelle. Behavioral engagement describes what students do—from regular attendance to turning in assignments on time; cognitive engagement refers to how much students are thinking about the content they’re learning, but also how they think about directing their own learning; and emotional engagement comprises the ways that students feel connected to people and their surroundings, including motivation, belonging and relationships. 

But new research has moved beyond the three-prong framework, placing students on a continuum of engagement that better reflects the reality in most schools, from actively disruptive and disconnected to fully invested and driven to create a meaningful plan for the future. 

In her book Reimagining Student Engagement: From Disrupting to Driving, Australian researcher Amy Berry, who has spent more than a decade researching how students engage with school, reveals a nuanced portrait of the six stops along this continuum.

Berry said there are 3 forms of disengagement: disrupting (the rarest and most active); avoiding (trying to get out of doing work); and withdrawing (choosing invisibility by design). 

Berry said on a recent podcast that while the disrupting kind of disengagement often gets the most attention, it’s relatively rare. Passive disengagement tactics like avoiding and withdrawing are much more prevalent in today’s classrooms. It’s been a problem, especially coming out of the pandemic—but while it’s often less visible, the results are the same: students can fly under the radar while being emotionally and cognitively checked out of learning. 

On the other hand, there are also 3 forms of engagement that move from passive to more active: participating (including showing up prepared, following instructions, turning things in on time and respond to questions), which Berry says is often the “ceiling for engagement” in many classrooms; investing (students demonstrating interest and curiosity about what they’re learning, and a willingness to take their thinking deeper); and driving (when students have a clear and personally meaningful goal in mind for what they want to achieve, and a plan for how to achieve it) — what we’d call the where engagement tips into agency and becomes self-direction.

But often, Berry said, helping students get on track is seen as “secret teacher business,” where it’s the teacher’s responsibility to get students where they want to go and entice them to be interested in their own learning and success. Berry’s research has shown a more complex picture: a partnership between student and teacher is more likely to lead to success. 

Building on Berry: Adding the Missing Bridge

Amy Berry’s Continuum of Learner Engagement is one of the most important frameworks in student-centered education — a practical, research-backed map of how students develop as learners. OE’s student engagement framework is built directly on her foundation.

As we applied Berry’s continuum in real classrooms over the years, we identified a stage that deserved its own name: the bridge between investing — being curious and willing to go deeper — and driving, where students set their own goals and plans. In practice, that bridge is where some of the most important growth happens: students begin making choices, seeking feedback, creating their own plans, and pursuing opportunities available to them.

We call this stage owning. It’s the third step in our student engagement framework (Participating, Investing, Owning, Driving) — and it’s OE’s contribution to the continuum Berry built.

How Schools and Classrooms Move Students Closer to Owning and Driving Their Learning 

Engagement researchers name a few key practices that foster the kind of student engagement that goes beyond compliance and going through the motions. 

• A positive school climate and culture, where students feel like they belong and have strong relationships, is positively correlated with both student wellbeing and student engagement. 
• Academic curriculum that’s both challenging and relevant provides students with more opportunities to inquire and explore ideas. 
• Evidence-based instructional techniques provide students with more opportunities to truly engage with academic material, creating ‘desirable difficulties’ that may not be entertaining but lead to more learning.  
• Intentionally building a culture of high engagement, including valuing challenge and risk-taking, and welcoming failure as an opportunity to learn; valuing hard thinking and thinking together, and moving performance culture to learning culture. 
• Student voice practices, such as seeking students’ input and feedback, and acting on it, increase student agency. Teachers acting on student input and feedback has been shown to be more effective for increasing agency than merely offering choice.

None of these practices work in isolation, and none of them happen by accident. They require a school to be intentional about the conditions it creates, not just the activities it plans. That’s the shift we’re most interested in at Opportunity Education: helping schools move from managing behavior to designing for engagement, so that showing up becomes investing, investing becomes owning, and owning becomes driving.