Do you want to Increase Student Engagement in your classroom?

Student engagement is crucial for student success. Student engagement is when students show up to class, ready to learn and participate. The 3 areas impacted by student engagement are behavior, emotional and cognitive.

• Behavior, high student engagement equals, improvement in behavior.
• Emotional, if students feel they belong to the classroom, their  engagement increases.
• And the ultimate one is Cognitive. Our goal as teachers is for students to learn, so if students are engaged in the classroom in all 3 areas, then they can get into the business of learning.

When looking to increase student engagement, there are so many things as teachers that we do not control. We do not always control our curriculum(how boring it can be), decisions admin makes, our students and what they have going on  outside our classroom. As a result, in order to begin increasing student engagement, we need to begin with what we can control and that is our classroom environment.

Is your classroom environment such that it encourages student engagement?

We need to ask ourselves, am I bringing positivity or negativity in my classroom? Nobody is bringing negativity on purpose, here are the ways we can ensure that we are bringing positivity and creating the environment we are seeking, to increase student engagement.

Student Engagement #1: Positive Classroom

Have you ever heard of the 5:1 ratio? Where for every 1 negative encounter, there should be 5 positive encounters to balance out the effect of the negative encounter. This comes from a study John Gottman and Robert Levenson conducted on the effects of negativity on couples, but it can applied to how we relate to our students or anybody  as well.

How can you increase your positive interactions with students?  The simplest way is to take advantage of the day to day interactions to sprinkle some positivity. Students want you to see them in a positive light (even the worst behaved ones).

• Greet as they come into your classroom in-person  or virtually, by name. “Good morning, Alex!” As they get comfortable with you, the more dramatic you make it the better!
• Ask them about their day, evening (depending the time of day), how they are doing. “How are you today?””What’s new?”
• If all else fails, ask them about what they ate. Kids love talking about food, “What did they serve in the cafeteria today?” “Was it good?” “You know Ms. Mendoza’s loves food, Have ya’ll eaten anything or anywhere that you recommend?”

This gets them interacting with you in a positive way.

Story time:

I did not realize that I just do this subconsciously. My current school focus on assisting high school students cover credit.

I had a student that was totally disengaged, was absent a lot, etc. He slowly started, feeling more comfortable, participated more in class and confided with me what was going. I was like awesome!

For thanksgiving, the school had students write Thank you  notes to their teacher of choice. He wrote one to me and in that he said, “Thank you for always asking me how I am doing every day and caring about me.”

I was surprised because I did not realize that I was doing this, but it had become a habit that I do everyday. This students was able to pass Geometry and continue with his other credits, towards graduation!

Student Engagement Strategy #2: Positive Reinforcements in the Classroom

This might be the most difficult, but it has worked wonders to increase student engagement in the classroom.

Picture this, you are standing at the door greeting students, the bell rings, you walk in your classroom, a couple of students have completed your Beginning Procedures and everyone else has not. What do you do?

My initial reaction is to get after the students that are not doing what they are supposed to, but the problem with that is that it begins my class in a negative way, This negativity will trickle to the rest of the class period and other days.

Instead this a perfect opportunity for positive reinforcement in the classroom.

“Great job John on completing Beginning 3 and working on your warm up, by the time the bell rings. Who else?”

This encourages students to get it together and follow classroom expectations. You will have most students falling in line and you have conserved your positive classroom environment and increased student engagement in the warm up.

What are other opportunities to increase positive reinforcements in the classroom?

Anytime students meet classroom expectations.

• Beginning/ Ending Procedures
• Showed their work
• Ready to take Notes
• Are taking notes
• using their notes
• completing work
• working
• completed their homework
• followed instructions
• used testing strategies
• answered a question/ Participated in class (even if it was wrong) “Thank you so much for trying!’ “I love how you did not give up”

You get the point. Students do good in the classroom every day, and if we reinforce the positive going on, we will  have less negative in the classroom. We do not have to wait until a student does something amazing to reinforce the behavior.

Side Note: I am not a believer of giving tangible rewards for positive reinforcement, maybe stickers (and yes my middle/ high schoolers go crazy for them). My goal is for these to become habits for students, they can take with them when they leave my classroom.

Student Engagement Strategy #3: Have Fun

Our students are kids/ teenagers. They will mess up. They will not feel like doing work. I mean how many times do we as adults not have it together. I can say for me, it is most of the time!

Because of this,  let’s have fun in the classroom along with teaching the curriculum. How do you do that?

• Joke with the kids
• Incorporate games
• Share stories along with what you are teaching.

There are so many out of our control as teachers, but our classroom is OURS! We control the environment, within our 4 walls. Not admin, not students, not anything else going on outside of our control. In order to keep it positive and increase student engagement, we need to keep it positive with these 3 things:

• Positive Classroom Interactions
• Postive Classroom reinforcements
• Have fun

If you want more examples and information on this, please checkout my Facebook live on this topic.  I also have a blog discussing  using ZOOM in the classroom. 

Check them out.

Feel free to ask any question or suggestions below in the comments.