- 10 Feb, 2026
- 0 Comments
- 6 Mins Read
Teaching How to Care about Learning: Tips to Improve Student Engagement
Student engagement may be one of the most crucial—and also one of the most challenging—aspects of teaching. As a teacher, you may have the most brilliant lesson plan, highly individualized and full of inciteful discussions and hands-on activities; however, if a student is not engaged, for whatever reason, learning is just not effective. Student engagement can be difficult—even for experienced teachers. Let’s examine this phenomenon!
Challenges to Student Engagement
What are the barriers to student engagement? Maybe examining what is necessary for learning will give us an idea. According to Rick Lavoie, in The motivation breakthrough: 6 secrets to turning on the tuned-out child, people must have their primary needs met first (e.g., hunger, safety), and then they are motivated by their secondary needs (e.g., need to belong or connect with others). However, what is motivating for one person may not be motivating for another. Tricky! Learners must then be ready to learn something new, and the learning task must not be too difficult or too easy. The setting where the learning occurs must support that learning, and learners must be willing to take risks. Learners must be able to imagine success and feel that they have the strengths and tools to overcome any challenges, leading to effort and perseverance. Successful learning requires that learners understand why particular learning is important and relevant to themselves personally. While there are many other factors that can affect the teaching and learning process, these are some of the foundational aspects of learning that form the basis for engagement. When these pieces are not in place, learning can falter.
Tip #1: Promote Readiness for Learning
Readiness for learning can take many forms, but students must be available both physically and mentally. Optimally, students will have all their basic physical needs met and will not be bothered by conditions like fatigue, hunger, thirst, or lack of safety (Lavoie, 2008). They will not try to learn while they need to use the bathroom! Knowing a learner’s motivational style can also be very helpful in promoting readiness for learning. Mentally, students must have the cognitive capacity to learn; in other words, they cannot already be overwhelmed with ideas and information or be struggling with negative mindsets or trauma-related thoughts. Mindfulness techniques can be very beneficial here. Taking just a few moments for a breathing technique or to ground the body can bring learners back into the present. Then students are ready for you to activate their prior knowledge and experiences, showing them what they already know and providing hooks on which they can latch new knowledge and skills. In essence, they are ready to be fully engaged!
Tip #2: Consider Learner, Task, and Setting
Whether you are a classroom teacher, homeschooler, coach, or some other instructor, you already bring a lot of planning and care into the teaching and learning experience. Corinne Smith (2004), one of my personal mentors, offers a framework for maximizing learning effectiveness by considering the learner, task, and setting. What do you know about the learner’s cognitive strengths and challenges, motivational style, levels of empowerment, personality, interests, etc.—in other words, the learner profile? Are there ways to further individualize and support the learner? Have you thought fully about the learning task? Is it too easy or too difficult? Are you offering enough support or challenge? What are the executive function demands of the task? Do you need to pre-teach strategies to maximize success? Are the purpose and expectations of the task clear to you and the student? Finally, how does the setting contribute to, or detract from, the learning experience? Are there auditory or visual distractions? How well does the environment match the preferences of the student? By considering learner, task, and setting, teachers can set up instruction for maximum student engagement.
Tip #3: Teach in an Empowering Way
In the teaching and learning process, a positive mindset is everything! When students feel empowered, they are engaged in their own learning. As teachers, we can use the Five Keys to Empowerment, by Dr. Ellen Arnold, to build a teaching mindset that can support student empowerment and engagement:
- Self-knowledge: Help students understand how they learn, including their strengths and challenges and the various factors that impact their learning.
- Strategies: Directly teach strategies for content and supporting skills (e.g., research, executive function) that support the task demands.
- Involvement and Choice: Ask students for questions and ideas related to the topic and involve students in decisions related to learning (e.g., strategy use, methods of assessment).
- Belief in Self: Point out student strengths and demonstrate interest in successful methods and strategies students are using.
- Self-Advocacy: Provide students with opportunities to ask for what they need and support their use of appropriate language and tone for making successful requests.
With your help, learners who feel empowered will be more engaged in their learning!
Tip #4: Focus on Strategies
With government, school district, and other mandates, you may feel pressured by the amount and depth of content you need to cover. As educators, we may get lost in the weeds of teaching content. Often, what students need to be taught is how to best access the content. Which information can be found easily using technology? Which information is better memorized to reduce working memory load during a task? Which skills need to be practiced, and which strategies will help to make the task easier or the learning more effective? There may be strategies that specifically help with a particular task or subject area (e.g., a strategy to remember the steps of long division), or there may be strategies that assist with root causes of learning difficulties (e.g., executive function). If, for example, organization is a challenge for a student, and the student frequently feels less engaged due to missing or lost materials, directly teaching a strategy for organization can benefit the student in many facets of life. In this way, strategy instruction can improve both short-term engagement and lifelong learning!
Tip #5: Make Learning Relevant
In this digital world with so many inputs and competing priorities, students need to filter through what isn’t relevant. Hopefully, that isn’t whatever you are trying to teach. That being said, much instruction begins without setting the stage for why it is important or personally relevant to students. Help students understand the purpose and value of learning something by showing them how it will help them succeed or how it can be applied to the real world. Begin, at least sometimes, by targeting student interests or real-world activities. Identify student challenges and desires for improvement prior to teaching strategies. Provide scenarios and case studies and stories of success. Preemptively strike against the age-old question: “Why do I have to learn this?”
What Student Engagement Looks Like
Imagine this scenario: A classroom is filled with students milling around and discussing a topic with enthusiasm. Debates are intense, and emotions are high. The room is noisy. Unfortunately, this real scenario ended with an administrator disciplining the teacher for lack of control and ending a new teacher’s career. No worries—this new teacher became a successful children’s librarian. However, the message is that learning—engaged learning—can be messy. Sometimes student engagement looks like students in chairs maintaining eye contact and taking notes or a student working diligently with full effort and persistence on a task. Other times, it may require a loosening of the reins or a delay in getting to the next topic. Flexibility may be necessary to allow the space for authentic student engagement. As a homeschooler, I often scheduled a certain amount of time for a lesson only to scrap the entire schedule because of a meaningful, but extended student-driven debate about a topic. That was real learning!
References:
- Lavoie, R. (2008). The motivation breakthrough: 6 secrets to turning on the tuned-out child. New York: Touchstone.
- Smith, C.R. (2004). Learning disabilities: The interaction of students and their environments (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Image: Photo by Евгения from Pixabay
Original Post: February 10, 2026