The Science Of Keeping Students Engaged: From Traditional To Virtual Classroom

Think back on your days as a student. If anyone asked, the class was either boring or okay, without much room in between. There’s a fair chance most of us wouldn’t have said engagement—or lack of—was the reason we condemned one class to the former and praised one as the latter; there’s also a fair chance engagement was the exact reason behind our vote. How do you keep students engaged? It’s a question we often want to frame as philosophical, doing no one a favour in the process. The fact is, there’s a science to keeping students engaged—a practical approach that enhances learning for students and teachers.

A versatile approach, too. Whether you’re aiming for better student engagement with your weekly theatre lessons or through your MSN FNP programs online, the context matters little. Engagement is engagement; all that changes are the finer details. Let’s unpack student engagement and look at strategies you can adopt to keep your students engaged.

What Is Student Engagement?

When students care about the lessons we teach them, that’s student engagement. It’s a conscious choice—an investment, on their part—to look past a lesson’s formality and embrace the long-term, out-of-classroom gains from taking that lesson onboard.

Interest, attention, curiosity, and optimism; if you want to know how engaged your students are, look to these signals. In an environment as mercurial as the classroom, they’re the closest things we have to tangible measures.

Why Is Student Engagement Important?

Education is preparation. It’s many other things, too, but if you distil it down to what matters most, time spent learning, whether in a traditional classroom or online, is how we get ready for what lies ahead for what lies outside the classroom.

Abstract terms aside, how ready a student feels will depend on how engaged they feel in class each day. That’s why student engagement is more than simply important; it’s vital. It’s the first hurdle every teacher must clear to connect with a class and unlock each student’s potential. Fail to clear it, and the race to genuinely prepare your students is over.

Keeping Your Students Engaged: Strategies To Adopt

To what extent these strategies apply to your situation will depend on you and your students. That said, they all warrant your consideration and all carry value, should you use them.

Relationships Rule

Cliche. Gospel. But the one rule to rule them all. Spin it how you like, but education—like so many other areas of life—is a business of relationships. Successful education relies on successful relationships. There’s no getting around it.

Developing positive and sustainable relationships with your students in both traditional settings and virtual classrooms is the first building block toward positive and sustainable engagement. More than anything, this requires you to look beyond traditional teaching frameworks. For example, think of your lessons less as transactions (where I give you information) and more as interactions (let’s explore this information together). The more agency you give your students and the more you erase the teacher/student hierarchy, the more they’ll contribute to the class.

Positive relationships are a two-way street. The benefits move in both directions. The emotional benefits—such as fulfilment and well-being—usually come first, but remember to keep your mind open to the academic benefits. Children are smart and intuitive; given the chance to ask, a single question from one of your students may have you thinking differently about the lesson you’re giving.

Customize Customize Customize

We’re all snowflakes, or so we’re told. Whether you believe this statement or not, the truth is, we’re all different in some way. This is the great challenge for any teacher: finding a way to cater to a class full of nuanced individuals.

As educators, it’s a challenge you must rise to by customizing your lessons, regardless of whether you teach in person or over Zoom. Yes, this approach will demand you plan more, but what’s a few extra hours of work each week compared with a life full of practical knowledge once class is over? Customizing your lessons will help each student thrive, simple as that.

This approach involves making each student feel as though your lesson was made just for them. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel; you just need to find a way—and find the time—to take the high-end aspects of your lesson and explain them in ways each student responds to. Class surveys can be a fun exercise and a way to get a glimpse into your student’s lives outside class. Go deeper than ‘What’s your favourite TV series?’ and ask ‘Which characters do you most relate to?’ Depending on how honest your students are, you may learn what qualities they admire and want to emulate.

More planning, yes, but the pay-off is more reward.

Relevance Also Rules

Students, especially high school students, are into stuff that’s relevant to them. And there’s a lot of stuff outside the class they find relevant. How do you compete with external influences like TikTok that grip millions, on almost any topic imaginable?

A simple answer to writing but not achieving: find ways to weave these disparate interests into your lessons. This task builds on things like the class surveys, although this time it’s about you doing your own research based on their answers. If this means listening to new music or watching a new TV series, so be it. Part of your job is to understand your students; the better you try to understand them, the better the lessons you can provide.

It’ll be trial and error, mark our words. But a few clumsy attempts to find common ground with your students—particularly if there’s a generational gap—will, at worst, get students laughing. And without meaning to, you’ve connected with the class.

What works for one class—for one lesson—will change for another. This you can’t avoid. You can only meet the challenge, head-on.

Data around attendance and performance often dominates discussions on effective teaching, and too often the focus is on the school itself. Student engagement focuses on students, which is the idea behind education in the first place, is it not? It deserves its time under the hot lights, and the better we understand it and the more we embrace it, the better off we all are.