The Engagement Equation: Place + Connection + Expectation

EXPLO Elevate has some great clients for strategic work this Fall–Keystone Academy in Beijing, Zurich International School, Bentley School in Berkeley, CA, Newton Country Day School in Newton, MA, Catholic Memorial in West Roxbury, MA, Cheshire Academy in Cheshire, CT, and Webb School in Knoxville, TN. It is a fantastic line-up! As we head into a busy season, I have been thinking about how to create the right conditions for learning engagement…for students, yes, and for faculty, staff, and parents/guardians as well.

From my point of view, engagement is the grail of great learning experiences, and it lives at the core of great schools. Therefore, it must center all of the best strategic design work, whether a school is designing/redesigning its use of the daily schedule and yearly calendar, its use of space, or its curriculum/ program. 

When we work with schools at EXPLO Elevate, we immediately bring the focus to student experience and learning. Engagement is the healthy heartbeat of both. It requires three things from the school to create the ideal context: Place, Connection, and Expectation. The success of a school in creating and maintaining strengths in each of these three areas sets the context for student learning.  

We can represent this in an equation: 

PLACE + CONNECTION + EXPECTATION = ENGAGEMENT 

• Place: Students need to feel that the school is theirs, and they should graduate placing a value on stewardship. Such schools create a sense of intellectual and physical safety.
• Connection: Students need connections with peers and with adults that, in turn, attach them to the school and permit them to see their role in it. Trust in one’s peers and adults is requisite for students to feel the human connection necessary for deep and lasting learning.
• Expectation: Often, what students need is not what they ask for in the moment. Generally, however, students want to be in a school environment where there are expectations for their character, their behavior, and their achievement. When schools hold learners to high expectations, they demonstrate a faith that learners can meet and even exceed them. High expectations, then, are a way of demonstrating commitment to learners. 

In all the thinking about schools of the future, teachers and leaders can not lose sight of the primacy of student engagement in setting the teaching, learning, and design compasses for the path ahead. For example, the ascendancy of Artificial Intelligence will require a rethinking of school. However, schools cannot take their eye off what it takes to create engaging learning environments. Keeping eye on the engagement equation may be the essential strategy for facing game-changing shifts in the context of learning, in this case, AI. Some more thoughts about engagement:

• Engagement begins with teachers building trusting relationships with students. For students to lean into the discomfort of great learning, there must be faith in the adult creating the context and driving both formative and summative assessments. 
• Students will not be engaged in the intended learning if the teacher is not.
• Deep engagement is not comfortable. It is born of curiosity and a need to know more that outweighs the desire to stay comfortable in pre-existing knowledge or belief.
• Engagement is a gateway to vital components such as collaboration and critical thinking. Once a student feels a need to know and to understand, the necessity of reaching out to others becomes natural. Efforts to create collaborative environments where critical thinking is central hinge on student engagement.
• Without engagement, academic experiences are only that – academic. Without engagement, classroom experiences are empty calories, a virtual skimming across the surface of learning. Most dangerously, such experiences can become cynical exercises in jumping through hoops for academic rewards.
• We will fall far short of our responsibilities to our students if we are comfortable with student passivity.

Somehow, almost impossibly, passivity has become more and more seductive over the last two decades. Think about it: the active verb that captures what many young people…and adults, including teachers, are likely doing while you read this is “scrolling,” an activity marked by gently rubbing your thumb against a glass screen. Schools have a responsibility to serve as the antidote to passivity, and therefore, they must become centers for engagement. With this in mind, keep the Engagement Equation in mind:

PLACE + CONNECTION + EXPECTATION = ENGAGEMENT