Only about one-third of Canadian students say they are interested in class, or motivated to do well, reports a 2009 study of more than 32,000 children and teens from Grades 5 to 12.
And just because a student excels academically doesn't necessarily indicate the student is engaged - to be intellectually engaged requires a serious emotional and meaningful investment in learning.
Inspiring student engagement was the crux of education expert Bruce Beairsto's workshop presented to teachers, support staff, parents, trustees, principals and school district staff who drove from as far as Pemberton to hear him present at Eagle Eye Theatre on Wednesday (Oct. 20).
Beairsto's educational experience is broad and diverse - throughout his 35 years in the Richmond School District he taught secondary science, math and computer science, was a district co-ordinator for technology, had responsibility for all curriculum and pro-D services at the district level, established a unified Learning Services department, provided administrative support for a family of schools and concluded his career as a superintendent.
"We all know that student engagement is important for learning - in fact, it's the first principal of learning," said Beairsto.
"What is much less clear is what is meant by student engagement and how it can be achieved."
He said there wasn't a concrete concept of how to engage students and most teachers were left to their own devices when it came to engagement, but the Canadian Education Association (CEA), who completed several studies, is trying to change that.
Beairsto distributed the CEA report "What did you do in school today?" a study designed to bring life to new ideas about student engagement and focused on exploring relationships between engagement achievement and teaching.
To be more specific about the type of engagement Beairsto was looking to promote, he differentiated between social engagement, academic engagement and intellectual engagement.
Social engagement is a sense of belonging and participation in school life, academic engagement is participation in the formal requirements of school, whereas intellectual engagement is a serious emotional and cognitive investment in learning - essentially education for its own sake.
The study found that when comparing these three types and attendance, intellectual engagement was well below the other three.
Beairsto said the engagement question boiled down to this: Are the students doing this because they want to, or because they're told to?
The answer is often because they're told to.
He presented his own personal model that he considers useful - called conceptualizing engagement that illustrated the steps towards impassioned engagement.
It started with compliance and through interest reached attentive, through meaning reached connected and through joy became impassioned.
"Some students get too carried away with being compliant and it overwhelms all the other aspects - how many pages, do I need a title page, which font do you want," he said.
"These are often students who are externally motivated by outside influence such as praise or gifts."
He said it is the teacher's responsibility to reach the impassioned level, and might mean integrating the things students are passionate about in life with the academic necessities.
"What leads to students being more internally motivated?" he asked. "When it becomes meaningful to them. If you add curiosity, students engage to a deeper level."
He said students usually reach an impassionate area in an elective field such as music, theatre, athletics or woodworking where the payback is often sheer joy in the learning and the results.
"I think every student can get tot hat level of engagement at some point, in some subject and the profession of teaching is to bring students to that top level.
"You can open a door, light a fire and enable someone to learn."
He said the foundation was to take skills and embed them in something larger with meaning - a student who wants to have perfect writing skills to be able to write a letter to the mayor about a topic of great concern or a group of students learning about the fragile ecosystem in Costa Rica going to visit on spring break and helping install solar heaters.
Howe Sound Secondary vice principal Ryan Massey was impressed by the workshop and found separating the different types of engagement very interesting.
"Thinking about our own students here we really need to get students involved on the intellectual side and also to become passionate about a certain topic or subject," he said.
"I see it everyday, I talk to kids in the hallways and they come up and tell me they're interested in a certain thing. We need to make sure we don't create any roadblocks and if a kid is passionate about something, let's support them as much as we can in providing whatever they need for that learning."
