Student engagement strategies are methods to involve students in the learning process and

increase their motivation and participation .Some examples of student engagement

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strategies are :
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 Question-and-answer sessions, discussion, and interactive lectures

 Quick writing assignments and experiential learning
 Guess the directions and pop culture presentations
 Personality analogies and soundtrack matches

4 Effective Strategies for Student Engagement

When attention wanes in the classroom, teachers
can reach for activities that help students re-
engage with content.
By Jill Fletcher
February 7, 2024
 monkeybusinessimages / iStock

Like most teachers, I have my favorite engagement

strategies that work for my students. Generally these
strategies work well throughout the year even as students
become familiar with them. But when we’re about to go on
break or when we’re returning from one, that’s when my
students need the most help staying focused— and my
favorite strategies don’t always keep their engagement.
So, I do my best to come up with different engagement
strategies to adapt to my students’ needs. I make sure to
consider strategies that will help students build
relationships with each other and engage with the content.

Here are four somewhat involved engagement strategies

that I tested last year and yielded positive results and
higher student engagement.

1. GUESS THE DIRECTIONS

As students are more and more distracted by their phones,
there are times when I don’t give my class direct
directions. The reason for this is that I sense they’re tuning
me out when I give directions, and then when it’s time to
do work, they’ll ask, “What are we supposed to do?”

In order to mix it up and keep them engaged in this

process, I‘ll sometimes give them a Google Form with a
few questions related to the directions . We then check our
answers together. If information is presented in this
fashion, students feel more invested because they want to
know if they guessed correctly. This method works well
when you have very specific directions that are a bit
complex and you want to ensure that the whole class
understands the details clearly. Because as most teachers
know, having oral and written directions and repeating
them sometimes just isn’t enough.

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2. POP CULTURE PRESENTATIONS
To review content, students select a term or concept and
then create an analogy based on something trending in
pop culture. If some students aren’t familiar with the
term pop culture, I say “social media” and they get the gist.
Some examples that students have come up with are
comparing famous figures in history to various Pokémon
characters or types of cars. I tell students to take what
interests them and then find ways to make the concepts fit
that. For example, if a student likes playing video games, I
suggest they use a video game meme and match it to a
science concept. The idea behind this is to get students to
see links between what they enjoy with academic topics.

Because I teach a course where students need to share

and review the learning from core classes, this gives us
freedom to explore concepts from a variety of content
areas, including English language arts, science, social
studies, and math.

3. PERSONALITY ANALOGIES
When we’re in the fourth quarter, and I have a sense that
my students know one another fairly well and have a
mutual respect for each person in class, personality
analogies can encourage a lot of student engagement.
However, to be clear, this engagement strategy should
only be used when you know that all of your students will
be respectful toward one another.

This is how I use it: When reviewing a complex concept,

have students compare their peers’ personalities to the
concept. For example, if the concept is a cell, then “Jeina
would be the nucleus because she’s always in the middle
of everything, and Tiati would be the cell membrane
because she’s shy and doesn’t let people into her space.”

Students would present these comparisons in class to

further help their peers. This strategy builds relationships
between peers in a playful and content-driven way. If your
students aren’t particularly close or don’t know each other
well, then this strategy can be applied where students
discuss how their own personality traits match or don’t
match a concept. For example, “I would never be the
nucleus because I don’t like to be in the middle of
everything.”

For fun—with permission, of course—students can take

photos of each other and add them to Google Slides. I’ve
found that this makes for a fun and lighthearted review of
content. All students have parent permission to have their
photo taken or appear in video or voice recordings taken
by the school, but for this activity, students ask each other
for permission. I try to normalize the practice of having
students ask permission because of all the secret photos
and recordings in classrooms that I see rampant in social
media—especially on TikTok.

4. SOUNDTRACK MATCHES
This is a quick strategy where students are asked to match
a song to a concept. For example, if the concept is the
moon phases, a student might select “Moon,” by Jin of
BTS, or “Harvest Moon,” by Neil Young, or “Talking to the
Moon,” by Bruno Mars. This strategy could also be used
based on how the students feel about a concept. So, if
they understand and feel good about what they know, they
can select a song that they like.
Since students often enjoy different types of music, it’s
also a fun way for students to learn about their peers that
doesn’t take up much learning time. To execute this, I
create a Google Form, and students share the concept
with the song title and artist. From there, I’ll have the
students present their concept briefly, and during that time
I’ll find the song on YouTube Music (free) and play a short
snippet of it for the class. This strategy has had a lot of
success in terms of engagement, especially when we do it
in reverse. This means I ask the students to pick a song
that does not match the concept.

When coming up with engagement strategies, I try to keep

the concept simple and easy to execute within a portion of
a class period (10–15 minutes at most). I don’t intend for
this to take up the entire period, nor for it to be graded. I
consider what all my students would be capable of doing
and of course make exceptions and change things as
needed. With engagement strategies, a good approach is
to keep it interest- and peer-focused to create a learning
environment where students feel seen and heard.