Simple solutions to the age-old challenge of classroom engagement

Maintaining a good level of classroom engagement is the perennial challenge for educators, especially in large classes. It’s widely believed that engagement depends on class size, the time and duration of lectures and the students themselves. There is also a widespread attitude that teachers can only do so much when they’re competing with gadgets and social media for students’ attention. 

I used to take this view until I stepped back into the shoes of my former self as a student to reflect on why I never participated in classroom activities unless I was forced to. I concluded that we, as teachers, need to recalibrate our expectations about classroom engagement and do things slightly differently. I put my theory to the test in teaching a large intermediate microeconomics class with more than 200 students.

There is an important distinction to make between engagement in the sense of students paying attention versus engagement in the form of proactive participation in class activities and answering questions. In my experience, most students do pay attention in class, but few want to participate and bring attention to themselves in front of their peers. They might be shy, lacking confidence or simply reserved. And of course, who wants to risk public ridicule if they give the wrong answer or do the wrong thing in front of everyone else?

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A common misconception is that classroom engagement means all students are involved in an activity, but this is not the case. For example, to elicit a point in game theory about the distinction between simultaneous and sequential move games (not in terms of timing but in terms of information available to players when they make their moves) I ask for one single volunteer to come up and play rock-paper-scissors with me in front of the entire class. 

I boast I'm the world champion in rock-paper-scissors to build unnecessary drama and to provoke students’ competitive spirits in the hope one person will volunteer. I play three versions of the classic hand game: the first where we both play at the same time, the second where I play first, pre-committing and showing my rival my move in advance and the third version where I play first, showing the class my pre-committed move hidden behind my back, but not my student rival. Through this, the class can see and realise that versions one and three of the game are essentially the same, despite me technically making the first move in version three. The point is that while only one student is playing the game, the entire class is engaged, watching and thinking about the demonstration as if they were playing themselves. 

Another misconception about classroom engagement is that it must be public. I used to pose a question to the class, then ask “does anyone know the answer?”, only to face awkward silence. I’ve grown wiser since. Now I ask the question and get students to work out the answers themselves or with someone else. The difference is that I am not actively soliciting their answers. I just ask them to put their hands up if they got answer X or answer Y. Students are much more likely to respond if others are doing so as well. 

When posing questions to the class, it is important they are sufficiently challenging without being impossibly difficult. When I was a student, I would immediately switch off if the teacher asked a question that was too simple or offensively basic. Make the question, or other activities, interesting – it fosters students’ intrinsic motivation.

When trying to engage a whole class, it is important to stand in the shoes of students rather than those of the teacher. Once you do that, the level of engagement might not be the foregone conclusion you thought it once was.

Tony So is a teaching fellow at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. He has a background in behavioural economics.

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