One morning, I was having a discussion (more like a lecture) with my students about engagement. I was telling them that it was so important for them to stay engaged during a lesson and they were just staring back at me with a blank look on their faces. I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t understanding what I was saying (this was not our first conversation on engagement). Then, it hit me, do they even know what it means to be engaged? So, I asked them and there were a couple answers like “we need to focus” and “we need to do our work”, but I could tell that they did not have a full understanding of what it meant to be engaged. I realized that if we were going to continue to have discussions (no more lectures) about engagement, my students needed to have a full understanding and I needed to help them see what it looked like to be engaged. I decided right there that I needed to find ways to intentionally help my students understand what it meant to be engaged and reflect on their own student engagement.
Checkout these 5 tips and tricks for student engagement that changed my lectures with little action to whole class engagement that my students were excited about!
- Engagement Anchor Chart: Before I expected my students to know how to be engaged, I decided that I needed to make sure they knew what engagement looked like. So, one day during our morning meeting, we created the anchor chart above. I asked questions like, ‘What should you do to show you are engaged?” and “How can you tell another classmate is engaged?” and we added these to the chart. Yes, I did help come up with a couple of them, but the majority of them were ideas from my students. Now, when I reminded my students to be engaged, I could point at this anchor chart and they knew exactly what they needed to do.
- Engagement Check-ins: After we created the anchor chart, I started referencing this anchor chart throughout the day. We did something that I liked to call an engagement check. When I saw many students were not engaged, I would stop, ask students to check their engagement and then choose 1 way they could change their engagement by looking at the ways to be engaged from the engagement anchor chart. Often, I would ask them to share that with a classmate near them and then we normally could get back to our lesson or activity with more engagement! This did not take long to do, but the time spent doing it was very effective and helped my students see the importance of staying engaged.
- Engagement Daily Reflections: I am a true believer on reflecting to help ourselves grow and that was always something I wanted my students to do too. So, I created some daily engagement reflections that my students did at the end of the day to reflect on how there engagement was going. This was an easy way for them to reflect on their engagement. Click here to grab these daily engagement reflections for FREE!
- Engagement Take-Home Reflections: I found that some students needed more support with engagement than others. Sometimes, all my tips and tricks for engaging my students did not work for a particular student. So, I created a reflection page that students could fill out and take home for the parents to see. I did not use these often, but it was a great parent communication tool when it was needed. These are simple for students to fill out and are included in the free resource that I shared in the idea above this one.
- Engagement Raffle Tickets: One of mine (and my students) favorite ways to work on student engagement was with engagement raffle tickets! I created these to use right before the holidays when I knew my students were more distracted and needed to focus more on their engagement. When I saw a student showing engagement, I would hand them a raffle ticket and point it out to the rest of the class. For example, “I can tell Sam is engaged because she has her materials on her desk and her eyes are looking at my while I am speaking”. Guess what the majority of my students did as I handed her the raffle ticket? You guessed right! They put their materials on their desk and turned their eyes to me as I was speaking. My students would fill out these raffle tickets as they received them throughout the day and put them in a bucket near the front of the room. Then, I would choose 2-3 raffle tickets at the end of the day and those students would receive a small reward. My biggest tip with this is that you only use them when needed! I did not use these raffle tickets all year long. By only using at those times of year that my students needed extra reminders to stay engaged. By doing it this way, it brought in some new excitement and encouragement to be engaged when my students needed it. Click the image below to grab my Holiday Engagement Raffle Tickets that include different raffle tickets for different times of the year.
I hope there is at least one new idea that you can take and use with your class this week! Feel free to share what you plan to try or ask any questions in the comments below!
Hi Sammie!
What kind of prize would you hand out at the end of the day for the winners of the raffle prize?
I would normally do something like a pencil, sticker, a bookmark, 10 minutes of computer or drawing time sometime that week or sometimes they would get to pick out of our prize bucket.