Designing student engagement strategies

Your team will need to develop a strategy for nurturing students’ engagement and motivation. Keep in mind that the strategy might be rooted in other learning program design choices. For example, curriculum and discipline choices can have a major impact on students’ engagement and motivation.

Resources

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Book and video.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research, Daniel Pink asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction is the need to direct our own lives, learn and create new things, and do better by ourselves and our world.

Give Teachers Autonomy to Arrange Schools So Students Want to Learn
Commentary.

Kim Farris-Berg writes that teacher-powered schools “place a strong emphasis on helping each student figure out their sources of motivation, and how to tap into those sources in order to learn and graduate.”

How to “Bake” Intrinsic Motivation
Commentary.

Kim Farris-Berg explains how students develop intrinsic motivation when teacher-powered schools focus on developing their sense of autonomy, mastery goal orientation, academic press, and belongingness.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Book and Website.

Drawing upon decades of research, psychologist Carol Dweck argues that it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success, but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset.

Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots, Chapters 6 and 7
Book.

Chapters 6 and 7 describe how teacher-powered schools nurture students’ motivation by changing how they work. Teachers move from “experts who impart information” to “unfinished learners” and position students to be active, ongoing learners as well.