As educators, we’ve seen disengagement in all its forms: the glazed-over look in students’ eyes, the non-stop side conversations, and the adamant lack of participation.
Despite how frustrating this can be for teachers, it’s important to remember that student behavior is a form of communication. Disengagement doesn’t mean we’re failing; it means our students are trying to tell us something.
In this way, when students are withdrawing from our classrooms, we have an opportunity to reflect on our practices, to understand our students’ experiences, and to try something new.
In this blog, we’ll dig into ways teachers might confront disengagement in literacy classrooms and bring the spark back to their instruction.
Understanding the “Why” Behind Disengagement
First, it’s important to understand that there are a myriad of reasons why disengagement can happen: disinterested in the content, overwhelmed by other classes, disempowered by a lack of agency in their learning, and distracted by personal or community issues.
One way to take out the guesswork: Ask your students. When you notice disengagement becoming more consistent and widespread, this is a perfect opportunity to survey your students about their experiences in your classroom. What’s working for them, what isn’t working for them; what they wish they could learn; how they wish they could learn. This feedback can help diagnose the root causes of disengagement and develop responsive solutions.
No matter the underlying reasons, it’s important to remember this: literacy is inherently relational. Reading, writing, and discussion allow us to connect with ourselves and others.
When we lean into the relational aspects of literacy by integrating authentic collaboration and providing real, meaningful work, we can start to engage students by tapping into our collective need for connection.
Here are some practical literacy strategies to energize and motivate your students.
Re-engaging Students Through:
Reading
- Offer Choice
Find ways to meaningfully integrate student choice into their reading experiences. This might mean offering choice independent reading time where students have protected time to read whatever they choose. It might mean curating a selection of texts that thematically align with your current unit of study. However you navigate this, giving students choice and autonomy is an effective way to foster real engagement.
- Make Reading Social:
Reading doesn’t need to be a solitary activity. In fact, for many students, buy-in increases when reading becomes a shared experience rather than an exclusively individual one. Integrating chances for students to talk about what they’re reading helps normalize the range of experiences we have in texts—for example, times when we’re confused or curious or excited.
This might include brief peer check-ins, informal book talks, or small-group conversations with guided questions. Even short, low-stakes discussions can reignite interest and help students feel connected to a community of readers. This connection fosters motivation and persistence, necessary traits for any successful reader.
Writing
- Integrate Free-Writing
It is important for students to have opportunities for low-stakes writing—writing that isn’t graded, isn’t evaluated; writing that is just for them.
Free-writing is a powerful way to make students feel like writers, and it can easily be integrated into classrooms. For example, you can start or end the first or last 5 minutes of class with free-writing time where students can simply write about whatever they choose. You might also offer a few prompts for students who struggle to write completely unprompted.
The main point here is for students to have the freedom to use writing as a tool that meets their own needs: reflecting on their day, venting about a conflict, sharing their hopes and wishes.
- Encourage Risks
When every assignment feels high stakes, students can become burned out and
disengage. This can take the magic and creative potential out of tasks like writing. One way to counter this is by creating opportunities that explicitly encourage risk-taking in student writing. This means valuing creativity, experimentation, and original thinking over polished perfection.
When we invite students to take risks without fear of “getting it wrong” or hurting their grade, we can tap into their natural creative energy. Encouraging students to try new structures, play with voice or perspective, or explore unconventional ideas are all ways we can reengage students in the writing process.
- Make it Authentic
Writing becomes more engaging when students understand its power beyond the
classroom. When students write with the teacher as their only audience, they may lose interest and wonder what’s the point?
Instead, try to find ways students can use writing in real-world contexts: writing letters or
emails to local government officials or school administrators to advocate for a change; writing op-eds in their local news outlets; creating a school literary magazine; writing letters of gratitude to people who’ve positively influenced them. These opportunities can connect students with their passions and demonstrate that writing can have real impacts. Such authentic writing experiences help students see and experience the power of literacy.
Discussion (Speaking and Listening)
- Make Time for Student-Led Discussions
So often, students feel a lack of agency in their own learning, which can lead to frustration and withdrawal. Student-led discussion protocols create meaningful opportunities where students are in charge of their own learning. Such generative and empowering discussions can lead to students creating new ideas, asking thoughtful questions, and building new connections with peers.
There are a host of structured discussion protocols that set students and teachers up for success. These might include Socratic seminars, fishbowls, or inside-outside circles. No matter the format, student-led discussions bring a fresh and stimulating energy to the classroom.
- Integrate Conversations:
Engaging students through discussion doesn’t need to be a heavy lift for teachers.
Integrating small but consistent opportunities for students to talk can dramatically increase engagement by democratizing students’ experience of learning; instead of feeling like the teacher is the sole holder of knowledge, frequent opportunities for students to talk shift the dynamic to one of more student agency and participation.
This might simply look like ensuring that every lesson has at least one opportunity—a turn-and-talk, think-pair-share, or small-group discussion—for every student to talk. As long as the discussion formats are varied from lesson to lesson, students will feel more like active participants.
Designing for Engagement
Disengagement can feel discouraging. This is especially true when teachers spend hours creating thoughtful lesson plans that are met with blank stares or protests.
Disengagement can also serve as an invitation to pause, reflect, and re-center students’ needs in our literacy classrooms.
Re-engaging students doesn’t necessarily require a complete overhaul of classroom instruction. Often, it begins by listening to our students and understanding their experiences. Then, we can make small, intentional shifts that respond to our students’ challenges, whether it’s offering more choice, making more space for authentic work, creating more autonomy for students, or leaning into the relational power of reading, writing, and discussing.
At Inquiry by Design, we believe that engagement is not an add-on; instead, we design our curriculum so that engagement is at the center of every lesson. Our lean, research-based curriculum is intentionally written to reduce teachers’ planning demands while providing structure for meaningful literacy experiences. By weaving authentic reading, writing, and discussion throughout each unit, our curriculum supports teachers in keeping students connected, challenged, and engaged in their own learning.
When literacy classrooms are designed with purpose, authenticity, and connection at the center, students don’t simply comply; they actively participate, meaningfully engage, and demonstrably grow. If you want to make this a reality in your school, reach out today to learn more about our literacy curriculum!