Creative Teaching and Learning

Surprise, Rehook, Engage – Sustaining Interest In PBL

When students' attention drifts away from a project, how can it be won back? James Fester shares his own three-step strategy for keeping and sustaining interest.
Science teacher with elementary school students pouring liquid into a beaker.

In the winter of 2021, I was in the process of completing my Master's thesis when I came across a quote by writer and new age critic Howard Rheingold. He said: 'Attention is a limited resource'. Since the focus of my work revolved around the idea of student engagement, it spoke to me and confirmed much of what I was reading and writing.

I have always felt that engagement is one of the most important classroom resources available to a teacher. It is a resource that, as Reingold said, is finite – and yet essential. Engagement is to a classroom what gasoline is to an engine; without it, no matter how clear your destination may be, you’re going absolutely nowhere.

It was with this in mind that I constructed a three-part strategy focused on helping teachers recapture and capitalise on this all-important element of instruction: Surprise, Rehook, Engage.

Identifying Disengagement

Diagnosing the illness is impossible unless you can identify the symptoms, so let’s first think about what it looks like when students are unengaged with a lesson we are teaching. We see:

  • Abnormally high classroom volume.
  • Levels of socialisation that seem a mismatch for the activity.
  • Informal assessments keep coming up as failures (e.g. when you ask a student to summarise the last point you made, you get few responses).
  • A lack of participation.
  • Abnormal levels of movement, either around the classroom or in requests to leave the classroom

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