Rethinking Student Engagement

The higher education classroom has undergone a tectonic shift. Whether it’s due to the aftershocks of the pandemic, the current generation’s reliance on an endless stream of passive entertainment, their discomfort with person-to-person communication (witness Gen Z’s habit of writing scripts for themselves when they need to make a phone call) or their near-record levels of anxiety and depression—or whether it’s all of these things and more—matters little in the end.

As college professors with 50 combined years of teaching experience, we find ourselves surrounded by dumbfounded colleagues in shock at the lack of engagement in both the virtual and physical classroom. They note the fact that students no longer seem to read, no longer bother to show up to class and in many cases rely on AI tools to generate their assignments. Some say that it’s now a professor’s job to teach their students skills in “studenting.” The phenomenon was even described to one of us by one college freshman this way: “It’s as if my generation got a memo that they’re supposed to send cardboard cutouts of themselves to class. When they show up at all, they sit there stone-faced. They don’t raise their hands to answer questions, they don’t ask questions when they don’t understand something, and they don’t even react when the professor says something funny.”

Engagement in the educational setting is defined as “the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education.” Our current model of effective education is built around this core tenet, and faculty are trained to encourage and reward students’ willingness to engage—with the material, with the instructor, with each other and with the outside world. If students are no longer willing to engage in this way, does this mean that education is no longer effective?

As educators, our goals clearly include presenting subject-matter content and skills as well as teaching students how to think, how to integrate perspectives and how to challenge ideas. Many of us share an additional implicit goal, which is to help students connect to the material by connecting with us and with each other. This goal is at the root of so many of our pedagogical techniques, including discussion-based seminars, case analyses and projects, and collaborative learning. The “sage on the stage” model of lecture-style classrooms has been largely replaced by small group work, lab sessions and Socratic seminars, each of which is of questionable value when students participate as little as possible and in ways that allow them to check the box without truly committing to deep learning.

Despite the fact that we have learned how to translate many of these approaches into the online classroom (in both traditional ways with real-time discussions and newer ones such as interactive discussion boards and polls), trying to engage with students online has proved to be even more exhausting for many faculty. Persisting with these techniques is clearly not working. Faculty are burning out, and the entire value of a college degree is being challenged. Students are voting with their feet by not showing up.

To attract students, colleges seem to be leaning into the value of extrinsic motivators with their increasing focus on placing students in co-ops, internships and jobs (though the job itself may be a moving target, changing daily as AI alters the landscape of work). But in addition to focusing on the ultimate employment goals of students, we believe in the value of an education—of exposure to ideas across subjects and of learning to grapple with new ideas and different perspectives. This process should encourage students to discover their intrinsic motivations and to develop a relationship with learning that will serve them well both during their formal education and far beyond that first job.

To make these things happen, we need to meet the current generation of students where they are. Within existing coursework, we need to reconsider the definition of engagement and remove the burden of having it rest so largely on person-to-person interaction. We need to think through whether and when social interaction is a goal based on when it facilitates learning (and when it is necessary, it needs to come with explicitly stated pedagogical objectives).

But a larger part of the solution, and the one that is most relevant for educators on the front lines, is the need for us to update our mindset and our assumptions about what engagement means for students. We should be open to the idea that deep learning can happen in ways that may not feel entirely natural to us (even as we consider, as one student requested this year, whether to translate all of the reading material into a series of TikToks). We need to return our attention to the elements of curiosity, interest and passion that will give these students the agility they need to pursue their individual paths forward, in whatever forms they take.