Observation Tool: Student Engagement

With no lack of effort on the teacher’s part, I’ve often left classroom observations bored out of my mind.  Have you ever experienced that? The teacher may be doing everything in their power to teach: asking for volunteers, demonstrating something on the board, reading aloud, redirecting students, and so on. As an observer, where you can more easily put yourself in a student’s shoes, you feel the disengagement when it’s present.  

For example, I frequently see teachers reviewing a warm-up activity or even teaching new content, depending entirely on volunteers to answer questions one at a time, resulting in a handful of kids raising hands eagerly and the remaining 80% slowly melting into their desks with nothing active to engage in.  In the intro to Elena Aguilar’s Coaching for Equity, she describes a girl who she shadows who neither speaks nor is spoken to in class for three days straight. 

So as coaches, how can we support teachers in making meaningful and lasting changes to how they engage students in their learning environments?  This is a much bigger question that I’ll continue to post about.  However, we’ll start here: it starts with how you observe teachers’ lessons and what data you collect to inform your coaching. 

It starts with observing for engagement. 

My Observation Tool for Student Engagement
Below, I share the tool I use when supporting teachers around student engagement.  I focus on one primary measure: the percent of students on-task during the lesson.  I share my completed observation tools with teachers during coaching meetings to help them see the reality of engagement, and root causes for disengagement in order to create a space where all kids are actively learning.

In this tool, observers focus on student engagement by tracking how many students are on task approximately every 5 minutes.  Observers should capture this information whenever a new task is given, and also at repeated intervals throughout an activity. For example, your data may help a teacher see that there was a high engagement during a write-pair-share activity, but waning engagement during an overly long lecture.  You’ll likely surface trends in engagement depending on the type or lengths or activity, or related to how a teacher gives directions or frames an activity. 

In addition to just noting how many students are engaged at a given moment, and converting that to a percentage, also be sure to note what is happening in the classroom at the time. What evidence is there of the teacher actively working to build positive relationships with students? What types of activities are students engaging in, or was there no activity provided at all? What kind of misbehaviors are you seeing, and how are they addressed by the teacher? Are the learning activities rigorous or do they feel more like busy work?

Looking at the percent of students on task is just one of many measures of student engagement, but I’ve found it to be most helpful for a couple of reasons. First, it pushes observers to really focus on students first, and not just the teacher.  Second, it is a simple measure that can be used in any lesson with any grade level.. And third, when collected over a series of observations with the effective support of a coach, teachers will see their average of the percentage of students who are on task grow dramatically, reinforcing the work to make learning engaging. 

I have often been conflicted about collecting the number of students on task as a metric for student engagement, because it focuses on student compliance: are students doing what the teacher has asked of them?  But precisely because of this, it helps observers focus not only what students are doing at all times, but what types of tasks they are engaged in and why. We first have to see that students are not doing anything, or that they are doing something just out of compliance, in order to dismantle compliance-driven learning.

In a post later this week, I’ll share the two simple, equity-focused questions that I use with teachers in coaching meetings to analyze the data in the observation too. 

You can download a copy of the student engagement observation tool below. I hope you find it helpful!