I’ve been thinking about student engagement for weeks. Ever since Dr. Derek Williams asked on a recent Office Hours session:

Who is engaged in our classrooms? Who isn’t? And how do we know?

Student engagement, and its sibling term meaningful student engagement, are heavily used terms. The number of whitepapers and blog posts that purport to define what student engagement is, how to measure it, and how to maximize it – pandemic or not – is simply staggering.

Should I add to the cacophony?

The truth is, I think TeachFX has a responsibility to jump into the fray. Because we actually can measure meaningful student engagement. And therefore help 

We all have a sense of what student engagement is. But it’s hard to monitor. 

Dr. Williams defines student engagement as being made up of four components:

Social: How are students interacting with each other in regards to the material? 

Emotional: How are students feeling as they go through a lesson?

Behavioral: What does students’ body language, facial expressions, or other outward behavior seem to show us? 

Cognitive: How are students absorbing the material? What are they missing?

We can only see one of these four elements – the behavioral. And even that isn’t a reliable measure of engagement. For example, we see a student leaning back with their arms crossed, their feet stretched out.

Their body language might suggest they are less than attentive. But at the same time, we don’t know what’s going on in their mind. They could be very much paying attention to what we’re doing. We just don’t know. 

Of those elements of student engagement that we can see, each is nearly impossible to accurately measure while actually teaching. Teaching requires maintaining a focus on so many things at once, and making so many decisions in any given moment, it’s nearly impossible to also objectively and accurately measure the engagement of each student.

Can we bring in an outside observer? Any outside observer is only human, and will bring the same limitations – that student engagement is nearly impossible to fully measure with our own eyes. Plus, when we introduce classroom observations to the mix, we’ve changed the environment. And in most cases, evaluations provide little, if any, positive value to the educators involved. In the worst case, they can be adversarial and contentious, eroding professional relationships.

And, of course, student engagement isn’t enough. We want our classrooms to be engaging and equitable. So how do we measure student engagement? And how do we know whether the student engagement we’re fostering is equitable?

I’ve read so many big promises on this front. It seems like every EdTech provider under the sun claims to measure and maximize student engagement.

But, here’s how TeachFX does it. And why I’m pretty confident in saying we’re the only app that measures meaningful student engagement. 

• Academic Language: We measure the words students use in the classroom, revealing to teachers visible evidence of learning

• Student talk time - We show teachers what percentage of the class time students spoke. We also show how many times students speak in class for extended periods (8 seconds or more).

In addition to showing teachers clear, objective data about student talk in the classroom, we show them what’s working to get students talking.

• Questioning: Which questions asked got students talking the most

• Building on student contributions: We surface when teachers engage in practices like acknowledging, revoicing, reformulating, clarifying, guiding, or asking follow-up questions

• Think time: We measure how many times teachers provide wait time after they speak, and after their students speak

Too many EdTech tools claim to measure student engagement in forms that really boil down to usage of the app itself. But decades of research has shown that students need to talk to learn.

The only true measure of meaningful student engagement is objective measurement of meaningful, equitable classroom dialogue.

That’s why I’m so thrilled to join the TeachFX team of passionate educators. And, it’s why I look forward to continuing to explore with you how we can focus the learning experience on helping every student experience engaging, equitable learning in every classroom. To get articles like this in your inbox each month, subscribe to The Practice.

PS: If you'd like to learn more about just how TeachFX surfaces those insights, join us for next week's Office Hours.