Research Center

You need to improve factors that determine whether students are engaged. What should you do?

What does the research say about what you need to do to engage students? Who’s doing great work, and what are they doing?

When we present survey results, audience members often ask, “What can we do to get better?”

We went straight to the source to learn more: the schools that are doing the best on the most important metrics.

Earlier this fall, we began a series sharing what works based on research and on-the-ground examples from district leaders. We began with staff. This month, it’s students. (Next, we’ll talk through parents.) And it’s pretty timely. Twice in the past few months, we’ve highlighted articles on our LinkedIn from EdWeek and NPR that demonstrate student engagement is not in a good place. 

Student engagement is such a powerful and obvious driver of educational achievement that researchers have spent the last few decades intensely focused on one version or another of this question:

How can schools ensure their students feel engaged and ready to learn?

For educational leaders, however, the answers that generally work may not be the answers that work in your context. We went back to the school districts who showed exceptional progress on increasing student engagement to ask them what they did to raise engagement levels.

Consistent standards

Since the 1990s, educational research has repeatedly found – and policymakers have repeatedly stressed – that holding consistent, and consistently high, expectations of students is a key driver of academic performance.[1] Our surveys and interviews show that this kind of consistency affects every other aspect of children’s school experience, as well.

Among the schools we work with, Waupaca is among the best districts for students knowing their teachers care about them.

Director of Teaching and Learning Mark Flaten said that success started with a focus on academics and ensuring staff were coordinated across grade levels – once students are performing better academically, a teacher is going to “feel better about (themselves) and those relationships just begin to grow.” A process where student achievement generates psychosocial rewards for their teachers creates a virtuous cycle that builds student success and teacher quality simultaneously.[2]

Similarly, Waupaca performed well for students who said they talk to people outside of school about what they’re learning. Flaten points to clear, simple communication about the school’s learning expectations at each grade level, which allows students and parents to speak the same language about what’s happening in classrooms.

“If I’m a parent who is not in the world of education and is maybe working two jobs and who didn’t love school but they’re still trying to be great parents, how are we providing them information to say (to their child), ‘Hey, this unit that you’re on is about plate tectonics, what’s a plate tectonic?’” he said.

“Unless our parents know that those are our expectations, it’s harder for them to engage in those conversations that are meaningful back to the students.”

These comments reflect a broad finding in the research literature: having students, parents, and teachers on the same page about learning goals and measures of progress maintains an all-around focus on the things that matter, clears up communication issues, and builds a maximally supportive environment for student learning.[3]

Superintendent Jennifer Thayer has a similar approach in New Glarus, where they stress the “essential learning outcomes” over and over to both students and parents for each grade level. That includes the early elementary grades, where those learning outcomes are written in simple enough language for students to understand.

“There’s this constant, ‘I do know what it is that I’m supposed to be learning,’ so then they know it, then they can more easily say it,” she said.

Start with staff

Thayer’s district is a standout on some of the most important student metrics on School Perceptions student surveys for overall satisfaction. Many of them – “I can be myself at school,” “I know my teachers care about me,” and “If I were bullied, I would feel comfortable talking to someone about it” – are based on recognizing the importance of relationships.

“We also try to take things off teachers’ plates so that they have time to care rather than being (too) busy,” Thayer said, noting that includes not scheduling too many meetings.

Thayer’s reflections – and her results – fill in a blank in the research literature: the space between the importance of caring in schools and factors that improve student outcomes.

For one segment of the academic research, caring or feeling cared-for is the only outcome that really matters.[4] For another bloc of researchers, though, “care” is too vague a concept to be reliably correlated with academic outcomes and so is often excluded from lists of important factors. But Thayer’s comments show us that caring affects engagement, and we already know that engagement drives student success.

New Glarus’s interventions are ways of leveraging care in real ways to boost student engagement.

Importantly, in New Glarus, building administrators and staff responsible for student welfare spend time out of their offices in the buildings. Thayer noted that building principals have open-door policies and school guidance counselors are “extremely visible to kids.”

Building a maximally supportive environment for student learning can include interventions to make staff feel at home. Strong student response to the statement “I know my teachers care about me” started by focusing on staff, said Weyauwega-Fremont School District Administrator Phillip Tubbs. District leaders built trust and relationships and made sure they were providing necessary support to staff with adjustments to benefits, providing meals during professional development days, and doing wellness activities.

“Then I believe that parallels how the teachers start treating the students,” he said.

In some cases, the work starts even before people are employees. Waupaca’s hiring process is focused on finding good people who can also be good teachers, Flaten said, noting that interview questions and job postings tell the story of who you’re trying to attract.

“I don’t want to find an excellent AP social studies teacher who can’t connect with students,” Flaten said.

Once hired, teachers go through an on-boarding that is focused on “what does it mean to be a part of a greater community, and what do we expect out of our newest Comets?” It includes reading the book, “Lost At School” to help better understand what challenges students face.

These comments, too, reflect an important strand of the academic research, one that measures the impact of teachers’ sense of belonging to a school community and a commitment to their students.[5]

“Our new teacher onboarding isn’t about teaching you to be the best high school tech ed teachers or the best fifth-grade math teachers or the best kindergarten teacher,” Flaten said, because teachers at all levels of all subjects go through it together. “I focus on community and dispositions.”

Create paths for concerns, relationships

It’s also about the number of staff in student services departments, Flaten said. In his district, there are multiple social workers, full-time counselors at both the high school and the middle school, and counselors split between their two elementaries.

That allows students to have multiple options for who they go to when they need help – whether that’s an issue with bullying or simply another adult who that student knows cares about them.

“It’s just recognizing that everybody needs something different,” Flaten said.

Again, the academic research backs up Flaten’s words: The more opportunities students have to express concerns, and the greater the variety of adults who will listen, the more likely students are to feel engaged and the less likely they are to fall through the cracks.[6]

Weyauwega-Fremont leaders stressed the number of clubs, activities, and athletics offerings for students at the middle and high school level. The more options, the more likely a student is to be involved and have an adult they connect with through that activity.

“Through those opportunities, students have been able to connect with an adult or have a trusted adult – maybe it’s somebody that they don’t necessarily have as a teacher,” said middle/high school principal Jodi Alix. “It’s been an opportunity to build up those relationships, so students feel like they have that trusted adult.”

In New Glarus, the school set up an anonymous reporting system at the middle and high school levels for students to share a safety issue without concern for the stigma that can follow walking into an office during the day. While some students still may prefer to share information in-person, not everyone does.

“They see different avenues that work for them,” Thayer said.