Engagement falters
Convincing students to see value in their education and to apply themselves to their work has gotten harder, the teachers said. From the core subjects all the way to electives like art, teachers have faced student disengagement in learning—and had to brainstorm new ways to motivate them.
“I’ve felt in the last couple of years the thing that was most prevalent and hardest to combat was not problems with skills—I’ve done that my whole life—but the apathy, the not wanting to try,” Griggs-Hopkins said.
While teaching one algebra lesson, she said, she often had to cajole each student individually to start a problem in a new exercise.
“I’m like, there are 40 of you; I cannot go to each of you individually” to start you on the work, she recounted. “And by the time I walk around the whole class and get back to the first, they haven’t even done one more.”
At the start of a new marking period in October, Griggs-Hopkins switched up the student groups in her class and spent the first part of her class soliciting math-punny names for the new teams, like Barely Functioning and My Limit Does Not Exist.
The exercise did double duty in the first after-lunch period, giving the ever-present stragglers time to make it to class and encouraging her students to socialize in the context of math. Explaining their team names helped students commit to their new classmates, while also giving them a low-key review of definitions like functions and limits.
Lack of engagement is a phenomenon that transcends urban, high-need environments to small, rural locales.
Clayton Hubert is used to juggling a lot of different student needs. He teaches art to all K-8 students and high school elective students in the 400-student Red Rock Central school district in Minnesota, a rural district not quite halfway between Minneapolis and Sioux City, Iowa.
But he, too, said students seem less motivated now than earlier in his teaching career.
“They run into something, and their instinct is not to persevere—but then I ask if they think they’re persevering, and they say yes,” he said. “What they think is working hard is not what the groups before them thought was working hard.”
It’s led Hubert to restructure each of his art lessons to make it easier for students to see their progress.
At the start of a unit on watercolors in October, Hubert let students paint freely for a while, then ran them through his “watercolor boot camp,” demonstrating and having the students practice 16 different painting techniques.
One afternoon toward the middle of the unit, students practiced making three wide, extra-long paper bookmarks using the techniques they had learned, refining the ones they liked best and could execute cleanly. One girl painted one bookmark entirely blue, then blotted it with a sponge for texture; a boy nearby carefully striped multiple shades of green down the length of his bookmark.
Later in the week, the students would create a final bookmark showcasing their chosen techniques for a grade.
“From beginning to end, hopefully you can say, ‘Yeah, I grew. I got better,’” Hubert said after class. “It’s about seeing and recognizing growth.”
Asked to what she attributes disengagement in school, Griggs-Hopkins blames the lack of engagement in part on the saturation of technology that, this past year, led to a backlash against cellphones in schools, both in Sweetwater and nationwide.
“It’s a slightly depressing thing, but I think part of it is that they aren’t interacting with other humans,” she said. “Technology allows them to not interact in real life—to go home and hole up in your house and play video games. It’s not every kid, but I feel like it’s gotten worse since the pandemic.”
Monegan takes a blunt approach to keeping her students off phones.
“If I see your cellphone, I will pretend I’m a pitcher, I promise,” she told her students during an October class, miming a baseball wind-up.
Encouraging students to take ownership of their learning—whether naming their math team, reflecting on their art progress, or setting future goals—is key to engaging them, teachers said.
One February morning, four 3rd graders at Horizon Elementary in Volusia County, Fla., sat in a solemn semi-circle around academic interventionist Kassandra Geyer. All had struggled on mid-year reading assessments, and Geyer focused first and foremost on getting them to take ownership of their progress. She shared each student’s current grade, reading off a spreadsheet on her computer, and asked them if they wanted to maintain their grade, or strive for something higher.
“Last grading period, you got a D. What do you want to strive for?” she asked one student.
“An A.”
“An A? Awesome, write that down,” Geyer said.
She turned to another student.
“Last semester, you got a B. You’re lower than that right now, are you going for the B or an A?”
“An A.”
“Sweet,” Geyer said.
Two more students, with a C and a B, echoed the goal of an A.
“Nice, I like those goals,” Geyer said. All four students perked up in their seats.
Her students, across grade levels, come from various racial/ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses. Three are English learners. Some have conflicts at home, such as divorcing parents, and others are experiencing homelessness.
But when they’re in Geyer’s classroom, they are simply students working with their teacher to make progress in English/language arts and math skills.
“They understand that they know what they need to do, and I just try to give them the respect, and then kind of want them to give it back to me, and that way they can respect each other,” she said.
