Three ways for every teacher to build pupil engagement

In my first year of teaching, I had very different experiences with two of my classes. My Year 10s were a small group who had all chosen history for GCSE, so I knew them well and looked forward to their lessons. My Year 9 group was a different story – I taught them after break and my nerves would increase steadily as I waited for them to arrive. They were frequently disengaged, producing little work and disrupting the lesson.

What I really wanted to know was, how could I help my disengaged Year 9s become more like my engaged Year 10 class?

The first thing that would have helped me was a better understanding of the problem.

What affects pupil engagement in the classroom?

Pupil engagement can be thought of as pupils’ “state of connection with the school community”, which operates on both a social and learning level (Wong & Liem, 2022). Engagement is important because it leads to positive outcomes for pupils: improved attainment, increased attendance, and protection against risky behaviours (Skinner et al., 2008).

There are two key insights that affect pupil engagement:

• Pupils’ engagement is a product of the interactions they experience in school (Pianta et al. 2012).
• Interactions are reciprocal – they can create positive or negative cycles (Skinner and Pitzer, 2012).

How did this affect how I taught my classes? My Year 10s were a (generally) enthusiastic group who I enjoyed teaching. This starting point created positive interactions that would reinforce each other over time. I would be more likely to assume the best if they appeared to be off-task, giving a reminder rather than a sanction. They would be more likely to trust me when I asked them to try challenging work, and I could use my knowledge of the group to link the curriculum to their interests.

In contrast, I worried about teaching my Year 9s. This made me more likely to sanction them in the early stages of the lesson to pre-empt poor behaviour, which caused conflict. Their lack of engagement encouraged me to use tasks that kept them busy rather than getting them to think hard. I felt that I couldn’t seek their input into the lesson for fear of going off-task.

Looking back, it’s easy to see that my Year 10s were in a positive reciprocal cycle where their engagement improved over time, whereas the engagement of my Year 9s declined. The crucial question then becomes, how do we shift from a negative to a positive cycle?

This isn’t easy for at least two reasons. Firstly, some classes are more difficult to engage than others, making ‘negative’ interactions more necessary to keep them on track. For example, my Year 9s were a much more challenging class than my Year 10s.

Secondly, it’s hard for teachers to change their pattern of interactions when there’s so much else to focus on in the classroom. But it is possible to make gradual improvements from a negative to a positive cycle of interactions.

Three ways for every teacher to build pupil engagement

You or your team might be facing similar challenges to me. You can shift the pattern of your interactions by analysing and refining them through the lens of pupils’ psychosocial needs from self-determination theory. These are the emotional, social and psychological factors that are key to wellbeing. They are:

• Autonomy
• Competence
• Relatedness

(Bureau et al. 2021). Here are three approaches to help.

1. Work on building relatedness

We all have a need for relatedness – to feel seen, known and valued as individuals. It’s likely that my Year 9s didn’t believe that I knew them well or valued them because of how frequently our interactions were negative.

An evidence-informed approach to tackling this is for teachers to deliberately make time to have non-directive interactions with pupils (Duong et al. 2019). Most of our meaningful relationships don’t revolve around telling our friends what to do or trying to get them to learn something. Because this is the starting point of teacher-pupil relationships, it can make them feel artificial.

Taking time to interact one-on-one with pupils and understand them as individuals can help foster relatedness. However, there are some potential pitfalls to this, as explored by these example and non-examples.

Example

Having a non-directive interaction:

One-on-one interactions with pupils could include asking open questions (about pupils’ interests or opinions), being genuinely curious or providing validation.

What might this look like?

1. “I notice that you had a different viewpoint from your partner during the last discussion – what made you think that?”
   “Ah, interesting, so you’ve put more emphasis on the first quotation than the second.”
2. “You gave a really detailed response about energy systems in muscles – do you play a lot of sport outside of school?”
   “That explains it, I can see why a gymnast would know a lot about strength training!”

Why does this work?

It communicates warmth and interest from the teacher – the foundation of relatedness.

Non-examples

i. Having a directive interaction:

Giving an instruction, issuing a correction, asking a question related to work in a whole-class situation.

What might this look like?

• “I’d like you to complete questions 1-3.”
• “Everyone should have their eyes on the board.”
• “What’s the boiling point of water?”
• “Why might water boil at lower temperatures at high altitude?”

Why doesn’t this foster relatedness?

There are limited opportunities in these interactions to build connection and warmth.

ii. Having a non-directive interaction that still feels controlling:

Asking pupils about their lives outside of school so you can use it to influence their behaviour in future.

What might this look like?

• “You wouldn’t get away with that behaviour on a football pitch.”
• “I would expect someone who wants to be a lawyer to be interested in this topic, not staring out of the window.”

Why doesn’t this foster relatedness?

While this appears to show an interest in pupils’ lives, it suggests that the teacher is only interested because it helps them to better control and influence pupil behaviour. This undermines relatedness.

2. Help pupils taste success through competence building

We all have a need to be able to interact successfully with our environment. One factor that caused my Year 9 pupils to disengage was the fact that they found the work in history lessons hard.

I spent a lot of time circulating the classroom persuading and cajoling the pupils into attempting tasks that they still failed at. This contributed to negative cycles of interaction and disengagement.

A key approach here is to break down tasks into such small steps that pupils are almost guaranteed to succeed. Worked examples are a great way to achieve this. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) offers excellent guidance in their ‘FAME’ approach to support teachers’ decision-making in this area.

The EEF suggests that to maximise the impact of our worked examples, we can think about:

• Fading support
• Alternating examples with practice
• Mistakes (sharing deliberate errors or non-examples)
• Explanation (getting pupils to articulate each step in the process)

Earlier and more consistent experiences of success enhance how pupils feel about their lessons. They also provide opportunities for more positive interactions between teachers and pupils.

3. Help pupils find their autonomy

Autonomy is our need to act according to our own reasoning; agreeing with what is expected of us. I assumed that my Year 9 class weren’t interested in history and therefore made few attempts to help them see the relevance and importance of what they were learning. Lessons therefore became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I expected them to be disengaged in what I was teaching and they confirmed my assumption when I made little attempt to explain why the lessons were important.

One way of tackling this is to help pupils to realise that their current knowledge is incomplete (Rotgans and Schmidt, 2018). This can involve using a well-chosen prompt such as an image, quote or demonstration which directs pupils’ attention and scaffolds their curiosity. It gets them to generate questions about the upcoming lesson content.

This has two effects:

• Pupils can identify gaps in their existing knowledge and pay attention to lesson content that feels relevant to them, increasing engagement.
• Teachers can realise that their pupils aren’t destined to be uninterested in what they are teaching. Instead, when pupils are given the opportunity, they will drive their own learning.

This can create positive cycles of interactions where pupils see their teachers as offering interesting and meaningful learning. In turn, teachers recognise and foster their pupils’ curiosity and interest (Ryan et al. 2023).

A strategic approach to building pupil engagement

None of these approaches would have changed the engagement of my Year 9 class overnight. But by analysing my actions and their responses, I could have taken positive steps to shift the pattern of our interactions.

Learn more about what pupil engagement is and how to enhance it in your school. Explore our Build Pupil Engagement and Belonging programme.

Read more about self-determination theory and psychosocial needs in Achieve and thrive: A research-based guide to pupil motivation and engagement.

References

• Bureau, J. S., Howard, J. L., Chong, J. X. Y., & Guay, F. (2021). Pathways to Student Motivation: A Meta-Analysis of Antecedents of Autonomous and Controlled Motivations. Review of Educational Research, 92(1), 46–72.
• Duong, M. T., Pullmann, M. D., Buntain-Ricklefs, J., Lee, K., Benjamin, K. S., Nguyen, L., & Cook, C. R. (2019). Brief teacher training improves student behavior and student–teacher relationships in middle school. School Psychology, 34(2), 212–221.
• Pianta, R. C., Hamre, B. K., & Allen, J. P. (2012). Teacher-Student Relationships and Engagement:
• Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Improving the Capacity of Classroom Interactions.
• Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, 365–386.
• Rotgans, J. I., & Schmidt, H. G. (2018). How individual interest influences situational interest and how both are related to knowledge acquisition: A microanalytical investigation. The Journal of Educational Research, 111(5), 530–540.
• Ryan, R. M., Reeve, J., Kaplan, H., Matos, L., & Cheon, S. H. (2023). Education as flourishing: Self-determination theory in schools as they are and as they might be. In R. M. Ryan (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of self-determination theory (pp. 591–618). Oxford University Press.
• Skinner, E. A., & Pitzer, J. R. (2012). Developmental Dynamics of Student Engagement, Coping, and Everyday Resilience. Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, 21–44.
• Skinner, E., Furrer, C., Marchand, G., & Kindermann, T. (2008). Engagement and disaffection in the classroom: Part of a larger motivational dynamic? Journal of Educational Psychology, 100(4), 765–781.
• Wong, Z. Y., & Liem, G. A. D. (2022). Student engagement: Current state of the construct, conceptual refinement, and future research directions. Educational Psychology Review, 34(1), 107–138.