Student Engagement: What do we know and what should we do?

Challenge and change our assumptions on the purpose of education
“Improving the educational experiences and outcomes for young people in Canada
requires a reorientation in our thinking about student engagement that grounds it more
intentionally in what we genuinely want to achieve for all students” (Dunleavy & Milton,
2009, p. 16).
There are frequent requests in the literature for educational reform, educational
transformation, paradigm shifts, and cultural shifts in our education systems. There is
also near consensus that the standards and models we used in the past no longer work. A
discussion is needed to bring us all up to date on what’s needed and how education can
support those goals. As Gilbert (2007) says, we have all the ideas, tools, strategies, and
even resources we need to create the world class, innovative classrooms our students
require; however, those ideas and innovations have been “imported into education
systems that are build on the Industrial Age mental models” (p. 8).
Before we start using these ideas, we need to change the mental models that
underpin our thinking about education. However, before we do this, we need to
have a debate about what we think our schools are for in this new age, about what
we think students need and why, and about how we will know when we have been
successful in providing those things (Gilbert, 2007, p8).
One core debate is academic achievement versus learning discourse. Throughout the
literature the focus on achievement versus learning was glaring. Our measures, our goals,
and our language are geared toward higher achievement and completion, and not toward
learning and human development. Dunleavy & Milton (2009) allude to this in the
following:
The measures we currently use to assess school effectiveness tell us a lot about
the objectives of learning – students’ marks, attendance patterns, credit
accumulation, graduation, achievement on standardized tests – and very little
about the kinds of learning experiences described above (engaged learning). By
relying exclusively on indicators that treat learning as a cumulative event, we
have little sense of students’ emerging capacity as learners, the fuller scope of
what they are learning, or if they feel their learning contributes to outcomes that
are meaningfully connected to their aspirations” (p. 16).
Throughout this literature review, it was clear that, as Gilbert suggests above, student
engagement was used as a tool to improve student achievement and not to enhance
student learning. Good students can be categorically different than good learners.
Armstrong’s (2006) book The Best Schools: How Human Development Research Should
Inform Educational Practice asserts that “Academic Achievement Discourse transfers
control of the curriculum away from educators in the classroom and toward the
organizations that set the standards and exams” (p. 27). A focus on achievement – most
often measured through standardized testing – instead of learning “fails to take into
consideration individual differences in cultural backgrounds, learning styles and rates,
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