My topic for the last few posts, Gen AI, may be the large, loud, and ostentatious elephant sitting in the corner of teachers’ rooms across the world right now, but I’ve found that many teachers’ rooms also have a second elephant these days, equally large but a bit more subtle: Student engagement, or more accurately the lack of student engagement. 

Engagement is an internal state, which makes it hard to measure and study. But to use a more modern metric, the vibes around it right now aren’t good, and the limited data we have mostly supports these troubled feelings. A recent study from Discovery Education found only about a third of high school teachers viewed their students as highly engaged. On the student side, one large study found only about a quarter of students said they loved school and another large survey found that from 2023 to 2024 students expressed drops year-over-year in all eight of the engagement criteria studied.

The list of potential things obstructing engagement (ranging from phones and AI to increases in student mental health struggles and reports of isolation) is daunting, but the good news is that our understanding of how engagement works has increased even as potential hurdles have. Over the next three weeks, I’m going to dig into what we now know about engagement and share positive tools we have to help turn the tide on growing disengagement. 

Today’s topic comes from a Gallup survey that had a result that stopped me in my tracks when I encountered it. The survey found that if students reported having “at least one teacher who makes me feel excited about the future” and that their school was “committed to building the strengths of each student,” the likelihood of them self-reporting high engagement in school increased by 30 times!

An increase of 30 times is a rather ludicrous finding—imagine going from one engaged student to an entire class. That is certainly worth a closer look. And for me, the key feature of these findings is the wording from the questionnaire of “at least one teacher” and “each student.” At the intersection of those is a concept I’ve seen over and over in a decade of researching for this newsletter: That when a student feels seen as an individual by someone in a school, engagement tends to follow. 

So today, I want to share four tools that I actively use in my classroom to help students feel seen and to help me to better see each of them as individuals clearly and often, even as I have more students than desks in some of my sections:

Tool #1: Saying a Proper Hello

This one couldn’t be more simple, and yet it is strikingly effective. A 2018 study found that standing at the door and giving a positive greeting to students led to a 20% increase in student engagement (or put another way, it is like adding an extra day to the week). In the harried and hurried days of a teacher, it is hard to pull this off every hour of every day, but I strive to stand at the door and welcome every student with a big smile and by name least three times a week. 

Tool #2: Strategic (and Regular) Sharing of Student Work

I first got serious about sharing student work while teaching over Zoom in 2020. That spring I began to regularly save and share student work as a way to build connection when we weren’t together, and the practice had such high rewards for relatively little effort that I not only continued it when we came back to in-person, I expanded it. I now strive to show and celebrate student examples 2–3 times a week, with my goal being that I share at least one exemplar from each student each semester (more on how I track that in a moment). I also cover my walls with student work (see this post from 2021 for my book recommendation wall and other ways I share student work, and see this recent post from Marcus Luther about his beautiful student language wall, which is a new way of sharing student work that I hope to try this year). 

Tool #3: Track What Matters

I have a post on this already, so I won’t go too deep into it, but of all the data I track concerning my students, the most important is my student notebook. Specifically, my notebook is an adaptation of Jennifer Serravallo’s conferencing notebook, where each student gets a page in a notebook that the teacher uses to take notes during reading and writing conferences throughout the year. Like Serravallo, I use this page to record notes from our conferences, but my page also has a biography section at the top with important information (think extracurriculars they do, their favorite or book, etc.) I learn about students over the year and a place to tally when I have a Moment of Genuine Connection with them or share their work, to ensure everyone is seen by me and their classmates regularly. 

Tool #4: Micro-Conferences

I have 57 minute classes and 34 students in some sections; this means even a five minute conference with each student eats up most of the week…every single time I have a full conference with students. Given those limitations, longer conferences don’t happen as much as I’d like, so I strive to have a lot of micro-conferences with students, where I come around during reading and writing time, tracking-notebook in hand, to discuss one specific aspect of the reading and writing they are doing in one minute or less (see one of my older posts for specifics, as my practice here has stayed largely the same for many years).

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These tools are some of the most impactful parts of my teaching practice because, like most teachers, I have way, way too much to do each day. And when one has a daily to-do list that closely resembles an Augean Stable or maybe a hydra, it is so easy to go days, weeks, or even months without taking time to really see students. What these suggestions share is they don’t take much time once the routines are established, and yet when taken together, their compound interest acts as something akin to a new glasses prescription—one that helps everyone in the classroom to see clearer and feel more seen.

Yours in teaching,

Matt

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