3 questions to find out whether you are in the 'engagement trap'

Imagine a Year 5 class learning French vocabulary for food. Rather than simply asking pupils to retrieve and practise the words, the teacher organises the retrieval task into a treasure hunt.

Clues are hidden around the room. Pupils race between them in teams, trying to be first to complete the challenge. There is noise, laughter and competition, and nobody is staring out of the window.

By almost any visible measure, the lesson is a success.

But what are the pupils actually thinking about? Are they thinking about French vocabulary, or about where the next clue is, who is winning and whether there is an envelope behind the bookcase?

This is the engagement trap: confusing engagement with the activity for engagement with the learning.

It’s why “the children loved it” is one of the most seductive judgements we can make about a lesson.

Interesting but irrelevant?

Of course, disengagement is hardly an aspiration - children who are paying no attention are unlikely to learn very much. But it does not follow that everything that increases visible enthusiasm also increases learning.

The distinction matters because learning is difficult to see. We can see hands up, excited faces, completed posters and children bustling around a classroom, but we cannot look inside a pupil’s long-term memory and watch knowledge being stored. Instead, we reach for engagement as a proxy.

Cognitive science gives us reason to be cautious. As Daniel Willingham puts it, “memory is the residue of thought”. In other words, what pupils remember is strongly influenced by what they spend time thinking about.

Experiments by Fergus Craik and Endel Tulving found that when participants were required by a task to think about the meaning of a word, they remembered it better than when the task only required them to think about whether the word was in capitals or rhymed with another. This demonstrates that activity is not enough; for learning to occur, we need pupils to be thinking about the right thing.

We can see this particularly in research into what psychologists call “seductive details”. In experiments by Shannon Harp and Richard Mayer, participants who read scientific passages containing interesting but irrelevant details recalled fewer of the important ideas and performed worse on subsequent problem-solving tasks than those who read versions without them. In short, the more interesting material had done its job rather too well.

Our treasure hunt may have the same problem. The French vocabulary becomes the price of entry to the exciting part of the lesson, rather than the thing the excitement is directed towards.

What’s creating the interest?

However, teachers should resist the common lethal mutation of these research findings: “apparently the evidence says fun lessons are bad.” Interest can absolutely support learning. Chris Hulleman and Judith Harackiewicz, for example, found that encouraging students to make connections between science content and their own lives increased interest and improved performance for some students. Relevance can therefore be a tool for positive engagement.

The question teachers should be asking is: what creates the interest? If success in a game requires pupils to repeatedly retrieve French words, distinguish their meanings and use them accurately, then the game may be doing useful work. If the French is incidental to racing around the room, perhaps not.

The same test can be applied elsewhere. While playing Top Trumps with Greek gods, are they thinking about Olympian dynamics or just trying to win a game? During a science practical, are they attending to the principle the experiment demonstrates or simply enjoying the spectacle? When pupils make a model of a Roman fort, how much of their thinking is about ancient military organisation and how much is about teamwork and glue?

The thing pupils will remember from your lesson is the thing they were thinking about during the lesson. If the fun, engaging activities you’ve laboriously planned and resourced are what dominate their thought, the activities are what they will remember. We must plan for thought, not activity.

Enjoyment is a means, not a learning objective

A useful starting point when planning a lesson is not “How can I make this engaging?” but “What do I want pupils thinking about?”

Ask yourself three questions:

1. Does completing the activity successfully require pupils to think about the intended learning? If the learning can be largely bypassed while the task is still completed, that should make us suspicious.

2. What else will compete for pupils’ attention? Elaborate resources, competition, movement and technology all have the potential to support learning. They also have the potential to become the lesson’s most memorable feature.

3. What will pupils remember tomorrow? Or next month? The answer will not always be the thing that produced the loudest enthusiasm today.

We should not aspire to boring lessons. Nor should we feel guilty when pupils enjoy themselves.

But enjoyment is a means, not a learning objective. The question is not whether our pupils are engaged; it is what they are engaged with.

Thomas Kent is a deputy (executive) headteacher across an infant school and a junior school in Southend-on-Sea, Essex