As much as teachers want students to be naturally fascinated by the topics they teach, it doesn’t work that way. But by following four key principles, teachers can build student engagement. 

 

Engagement doesn’t just happen. As much as teachers would like it if our own fascination with our content were contagious for every student, it doesn’t work that way. Engagement is something we plan for. A teacher discovers what’s engaging in the content and designs curriculum so students can discover it too. We profile one teacher, Mr. Garcia, who searches for the irresistible and uses it to entice students to learn. Garcia’s thoughtful design process for two curriculum units in his high school civics class illustrates four key principles that teachers of any subject or grade can use to plan for engagement.  

Principle #1: Engaging curriculum helps students make personal connections to content. 

As students interact with a new idea, they seek to make meaning of it by connecting it to their own experience or knowledge. These connections are the core of engagement. They make learning compelling. Engagement follows when a topic is relevant, culturally significant, emotionally evocative, or novel. When you ask engaged students what a topic they’re learning about has to do with them, not only can they tell you, they want to tell you. Making meaning of a new idea is exciting when you feel connected to it. 

Personal connections in Garcia’s curriculum 

Last year, Garcia gave his civics class course evaluations during the final week of school. He noticed some disappointing patterns in student responses. Many students had not seen connections between what they learned and their daily lives as high school students. Most had found what they learned about the U.S. Supreme Court uninteresting. In response to this feedback, Garcia redesigned two units, including his unit on the judicial system. 

Since Garcia’s students hadn’t found his Supreme Court lesson engaging, he decided to focus on helping students make personal connections to this content. Garcia thought studying the Supreme Court might become more engaging if students could focus on the justices as real people. He knew each justice had experiences to which his students could relate.  

Garcia began revising his Supreme Court lesson with a preassessment that asked students to review a list of experiences from the lives of the justices and then select several of interest from the list. This list included descriptors like: fought for equality in the workplace, was raised by a single mom, spoke Spanish as a first language, and championed women’s rights. Based on what he learned from the preassessment, Garcia grouped students for the lesson’s introductory activity and assigned each group one justice to research.  

Pictures of the justices hung on the classroom walls along with many “mystery fact cards” which applied to one unnamed justice. Garcia chose facts for the cards that he thought would seem relevant to his students’ lives or help them make an emotional connection with their justice, including:   

• Worked at a steel mill during summers in college for tuition money;
• Reread Pride and Prejudice every year for many years; 
• Grew up in poverty with a father who was a farm worker and a mother who was a housekeeper;
• Was captain of the high school football team; and
• Had both a sister and mother die before graduating from high school.

Then, Garcia gave each group information about its justice. When their research revealed that one of the mystery facts described their justice, students moved the card with that mystery fact under their justice’s picture. When all cards were matched with a justice, students participated in a jigsaw to report key information about their justice to their peers. Garcia noticed that most students seemed eager to share what they’d learned.  

Principle #2: Engaging curriculum gives students meaningful choices. 

Giving students important choices about their work can improve student effort, performance, and intrinsic motivation (Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008). When students make their own decisions about what or how they will learn, they feel empowered. Students often see learning as more meaningful when they can make choices that play to their interests and strengths. 

Student choice in Garcia’s curriculum 

In the next stage of his Supreme Court lesson, Garcia developed a task that called on students’ practical, analytical, or creative processing strengths (Sternberg, 1985). Garcia knew students often had a particular preference for one of these three areas. He felt students would be more invested if they selected an approach that was appealing to them, so he designed three task options that all caused students to focus on the responsibilities and qualities of Supreme Court justices. 

The practical task asked students to imagine they had been hired as a copywriter to redesign educational web sites about the Supreme Court targeting younger students. The web sites described the justices’ duties, lifelong terms, and key personal and professional qualifications. For the analytical task, students used a flow chart, web, or other diagram to illustrate and explain the relationships among a justice’s duties, term length, and qualifications.  

The creative task called on students to write a script for a scene involving senators questioning a nominee for the Supreme Court during a hearing. One senator’s questions revealed his misconceptions about the duties, term length, and qualifications of a justice. The other senator corrected those misconceptions through skillful questioning of the nominee, while also encouraging the nominee to highlight relevant experiences, accomplishments, and personality traits.  

When Garcia presented these options to the class, no student hesitated in deciding which task they wanted to do. At the end of the lesson, Garcia reflected that, compared to the work of past classes with projects on this content, this group’s work demonstrated greater depth of thought and insightful connections. The students also seemed to enjoy it more. 

Principle #3: Engaging curriculum focuses on ideas worth learning. 

Curriculum that fosters student engagement reflects careful decision making about what is worthy of study, separating what would be nice to learn from what is critical to learn. Good curriculum begins with establishing clear learning goals, or statements about what students will know and be able to do as a result of a unit, as well as essential understandings related to the content that unlock a powerful idea (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). An understanding shares insight that illuminates thinking, offers a core truth, or provides explanatory power for a concept. Such an understanding allows students to transfer an idea to a new context and answers the question, “Why do I need to know this?” It makes the content’s worth apparent.  

Powerful ideas in Garcia’s curriculum 

As Garcia reflected on the comments of last year’s class that they had not experienced how their new knowledge connected to their daily lives, he recognized that part of the problem was covering too many facts and uncovering too little understanding (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). When Garcia redesigned his unit on the judicial system, he took a hard look at his learning goals. The standards said students needed to list the duties, qualifications, and terms of office for key government officials — in this case, Supreme Court justices. As he worked to draw a big idea out of the fact-focused standard, Garcia recognized one of the key concepts he wanted students to consider throughout his course: leadership.  

Garcia recognized the power of having students think about leadership as they studied many of the topics in his civics course. He wanted students to grapple with several key questions: Who is a great leader? Are great leaders born or made? Do the qualities of great leaders change in different contexts and periods of history? Which of those qualities are already evident in me? Which are still emerging?   

After focusing on this key concept, Garcia decided he wanted students to uncover this understanding about Supreme Court justices, which also applies to other leadership contexts: Effective leaders share the common characteristics of expertise developed through experience and personal traits that help them overcome obstacles. Each aspect of his new lesson on the Supreme Court targeted this understanding.  

The second unit that Garcia decided to redesign was his unit on the U.S. Constitution. Garcia chose to focus on the key concept of balance, and so he crafted an understanding for this unit that said: A constitution can both empower and limit a government by balancing the granting of governing authority against the protection of individual rights. Garcia’s goal was to design a unit that would make learning irresistible to students who could see how it applied to their own lives.  

Principle #4: Engaging curriculum teaches up to challenge all students and support success. 

Designers of powerful curriculum craft learning tasks that “teach up” (Tomlinson & Javius, 2012). Teaching up ensures that every learner gets meaningful access to understandings by lifting up students to reach rigorous and engaging content rather than watering down content. The goal is to create the richest curriculum possible and then provide scaffolding to help the broadest range of students access it. All students work to explore the same understandings, but the tasks they accomplish to get there may look different. All students are challenged to interact with big ideas and are given the support they need for success. 

Teaching up in Garcia’s curriculum 

Garcia’s redesigned U.S. Constitution unit included a lesson on random drug testing of public school students, a topic he believed students would be eager to explore.  

In this lesson, Garcia focused on the understanding that a constitution can both empower and limit a government by balancing the granting of governing authority against the protection of individual rights. He also focused on the essential skill of analyzing evidence to determine its strength in supporting or challenging a position. Garcia recognized that students would span the spectrum of readiness to work with this skill. He designed a lesson that allowed all students to uncover the understanding in a meaningful way and to practice the skill at a challenging level. 

After hooking student interest through a discussion about the government’s war on drugs and the public’s interest in reducing drug use among youth, Garcia gave a quick lecture on the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as Supreme Court cases that applied it to random, suspicionless drug testing in public schools. While the Court has held that it is constitutional for a public school to randomly test students involved in competitive extracurricular activities, the Court has not ruled on whether schools can test any enrolled student without reasonable suspicion. During this lesson, students would consider whether such a policy would be found constitutional and whether it would be prudent to apply.  

Challenging students with different readiness 

Garcia asked students to imagine they were preparing to attend a public comment session hosted by the school board to share their thoughts on the board’s proposal to adopt a policy requiring all high schools in the district to administer random, suspicionless drug tests on any enrolled student. Garcia assigned students to three groups for the activity based on preassessment data. Using materials that Garcia selected to offer varied levels of challenge, students searched for evidence to support or oppose the policy. Then students chose which stakeholder role to play at the school board meeting. 

Students who were ready to work with the lesson’s essential skill at an advanced level played the roles of high school civics teachers or school board attorneys. Their purpose in attending the meeting was to ensure that everyone was well-informed about the Supreme Court’s past decisions on random drug testing of high school students. Garcia posed an open-ended, guiding question for them: How will you use your research on the Court’s opinions in these cases to help the community evaluate the proposed policy? 

Students whose skills were on grade level played the roles of parents, substance abuse counselors, or university faculty. They attended the meeting to raise awareness of research findings about whether random drug testing deters drug use among high school students. Garcia posed more structured questions to this group that guided students in identifying the most important research findings on the issue and determining whether the findings supported the board’s policy.  

Students who were ready to work with the lesson’s essential skill  at an emerging level played the roles of students, administrators, and local psychologists. They attended the meeting to help the community consider the policy’s effects on the daily running of the town’s high schools and on relationships between students and administrators in the district. Garcia posed the most structured guiding questions to this group that supported students in analyzing evidence by raising issues to consider step by step. Garcia met with each group while students prepared to scaffold their continued growth in content and skills. 

During the mock public comment session, student arguments demonstrated that policy supporters believed the public’s interest in health and safety was the more pressing concern, while policy challengers believed student rights should be protected. After the session, Garcia’s students had an impassioned discussion about the countervailing interests at play in the scenario: the protection of individual rights balanced against society’s interests championed by the government. After the bell rang, students carried their dispute down the hallway and into the cafeteria.  

Engaging curriculum’s message to students 

This year, when Garcia gave his civics class course evaluations during the last week of school, comments included: “Before this class, I didn’t know civics was about me,” and “I always seemed to work hard in this class, but that’s OK because it was really interesting.”            

While we’ve highlighted the work of a high school civics teacher here, the four principles of engaging curriculum hold true when planning for any subject at any level.  

When any teacher designs curriculum with student engagement in mind, students hear this message: You matter. I care about whether you can make meaning of this content by finding a personal connection to it. I care about giving you significant choices. I care about whether what I teach is worth your learning because it helps you unlock a powerful idea. I care about whether you are challenged and whether you have the supports you need to grow. Because your engagement matters, I’ve helped you begin to see how learning can be irresistible. Now it’s your turn. 

References 

Patall, E.A., Cooper, H., & Robinson, J.C. (2008). The effects of choice on intrinsic motivation and related outcomes: A meta-analysis of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 270-300. 

Sternberg, R.J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 

Tomlinson, C.A. & Javius, E.L. (2012). Teach up for excellence. Educational Leadership, 69 (5), 28-33. 

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD. 

 

Citation: Dack, H. & Tomlinson, C.A. (2014). Searching for the irresistible. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (8), 43-47.