Agency and Student Engagement

“Everyone agrees, then, that engagement is beneficial. But how can teachers lead students, particularly those who are reluctant or struggle, to become motivated on a daily basis?”

ReLeah Lent and Barry Gilmore in Ed Week Teacher

My final task at the end of 2024 was to help the principal of a secondary school I’ve been working with develop a detailed plan for lifting student engagement for all students in 2025. Like many secondary schools, his school has been facing a significant decline in regular attendance and participation in class since COVID. Aside from being an important thing to focus on anyway, the motivation for my involvement came from an offer from a potential benefactor to fund some additional support for the school provided they could come up with a detailed plan for how they will address the issue, including the metrics they will use to demonstrate the extent to which their plan and implementation is successful.

As we worked to create a response to this challenge we found ourselves grappling with a number of issues. What, at first, appeared to be a relatively straight-forward task, turned into quite the journey. Sure, using the hard data around student attendance would be a relatively easy thing to do, delving deeper into trying to assess and record the reasons for absences in order to then design appropriate strategies to address the issue for each student became more challenging. But we persisted, and now have a range of strategies in place for teachers to implement for both monitoring and addressing the issue of student absence.

It seems that we weren’t the only ones doing this. Over the break I read a post by Jeremy Cummings (deputy principal at Motueka High School) on Linkedin in which he describes how he and Jacqui Kareko (Deputy Principal) have designed a data tracking system and Personalised Learning Plans (PLP), whereby all students’ attendance was tracked for the first six weeks of the 2024 school year, and are now focusing on continuing to monitor the first six weeks of the school year and continue to tweak the Personalised Learning Plans so they are manageable for staff. In his post he shares examples of the Data Tracking Template and Personalised Learning Plan they have designed and used. I suspect they are not alone – and that there are many schools now embarking on similar strategies to address what has become a significant problem in our schooling system.

The decline in student engagement represents one of the most pressing challenges facing our education system today. Research consistently demonstrates that as students progress through their academic journey, their connection to learning progressively weakens – a trend with profound implications for individual and collective educational outcomes. It would appear that there are many reasons for this, including the gap between classroom experiences and students’ real-world interests and the continued use of passive learning approaches that are eroding students’ intrinsic motivation and curiosity.

The importance of student engagement cannot be emphasised enough. It is the fundamental bridge between curriculum and meaningful learning. When students feel genuinely connected to their educational experience, they build stronger metacognitive capabilities, develop deeper critical thinking skills, demonstrate higher academic achievement and show increased resilience and persistence. Engagement isn’t just about academic performance, but about developing lifelong learning skills!

The findings of new research from the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) that included over 1,200 students, reveals how active participation and meaningful connections can transform learning experiences, boosting motivation and confidence. (Dr Katie Martin of the Learner Centred Collaborative explores these findings in her recent Bright Spot post on Learner Engagement)

In the podcast Rebecca Winthrop begins by explaining how her observations of her own two children during the pandemic remote learning was a starting point for this work. One child was highly motivated by the opportunity to simply focus on the work being provided while the other became ‘switched off’ and disengaged through the lack of personal connection. This experience led her to reflect and research more deeply the underlying patterns of such behaviours and, using this understanding, to consider the ways in which educators and parents might respond to help build the level of interest and engagement in learning again.

The authors reference compelling research that shows a link between how students feel about school and their achievement, and the evidence of from student feedback of a growing lack of relevance they feel in terms of their experience at school and their lived experience outside of school. Using this research to help understand how this might explain the different behaviours observed in students they go on to describe four modes of learner:

• passenger – those coasting along, not really vested in the learning etc.
• achiever – aspiring for top grades, performance oriented, (if it’s not counted it doesn’t matter) etc.
• resister – avoiding, withdrawing, acting out, cry for help etc.
• explorer – agentic, engaged, curious, risk taker etc.

Given my work on learner agency, my interest was piqued when I heard the authors speaking about how giving students greater ownership over their learning can boost their engagement, academic achievement, and overall well-being. In their podcast they explain that Agency and Engagement are the core concepts in their theory of change that they explore in the book, describing each as:

• Engagement: The thoughts, feelings and behaviours around learning
• Agency: the skills and will to set reasonable goals and marshall resources to achieve them

They go on to position the four modes of learner in a matrix they have designed to show how they are the likely result of where they sit at the intersection of high or low levels of agency and engagement:

Just as I was getting really engaged in the podcast and thinking about the application of this work to what I am doing in schools and with teachers, Winthrop and Anderson threw me a curve ball in the podcast, explaining how they had originally pitched their book to be about school design, but had pivoted to become about about support for school/family engagement aimed at parents. Their rationale being that shifting schools is a very difficult problem and that by shifting the focus of the book to parents and what’s happening at home would be more likely to have the impact on student engagement are hoping to see.

The authors argue that parents are often forgotten in the process of school reform, yet are equally impactful in shaping or influencing student engagement. They reference the work of Australian academic Johnmarshall Reeve who notes that the influence of parents is 50% more predictive than socio-economic status, highlighting the positive impact when parents and/or teachers make even the smallest moves towards increasing agency.

They also reference John Hattie whose recent analysis shows a student’s achievement levels are affected negatively by many new factors. These include boredom, teacher-student dependency (where a student is over-reliant on their teacher) and corporal punishment. He argues that parents shouldn’t be regarded as “first teachers” but “first learners” – as the parents learn, so do their children. Hattie asserts that parental expectation about learning is among the most powerful home influences, and the home needs to promote a “language and love of learning”.

This is not to say that efforts to improve student engagement should be left entirely to parents. Schools and teachers must be equally focused on this issue – it is a partnership that is required, and this involves being intentional about how we are creating opportunities for learner agency to develop. When learners have the opportunity to pro-actively influence the flow of instruction, even in small ways, it will become more interesting to them – and thus more engaging.

The webinar is now available as a Podcast and I’d strongly encourages readers of this blog to listen – it’s well worth the investment of 50 minutes of your time!

Reimagining Student Engagement

In light of the insights from Anderson and Winthrop’s work, how might we move beyond reactive, fragmented approaches to education. Here are some starting points to consider:

Prioritise Student Voice

• Create structured mechanisms for students to provide meaningful input into their learning experiences
• Develop feedback systems that genuinely empower students to shape their educational journey

Redesign Learning Experiences

• Develop more flexible, responsive curricula that connect directly to students’ real-world experiences
• Integrate project-based and experiential learning approaches that promote active participation

Promote Home Learning Partnerships

• Provide resources to help parents understand modern learning approaches
• Create workshops on supporting student-driven learning at home
• Develop communication tools that make classroom learning transparent

Engage in Collaborative Goal Setting

• Involve parents in collaborative discussions about student learning objectives
• Offer structured ways for parents to contribute insights about their child’s interests and motivations
• Create joint student-parent-teacher learning plans

Provide Digital Literacy and Empowerment

• Offer training on how parents can support digital and interactive learning
• Work with tools and platforms that allow meaningful parental involvement
• Provide guidance on balancing screen time with engaged learning

Invest in Professional Development

• Provide teachers with training in student agency and engagement-focused pedagogical strategies
• Support teachers in developing more dynamic, interactive teaching methods

The pandemic exposed critical gaps in our educational approach. Now is the moment to transform these challenges into opportunities for meaningful, student-centred learning as a way of addressing the emerging crisis in student engagement.