Teacher & Student Engagement:
The Agency Gap is an Inequity

Video Transcript:

Let’s talk about teacher and student engagement.

This is an important topic because there is a tendency for our intuitions to deceive us about how engaged others are.

As educators or leaders we look out on the folks we are attempting to engage with and we presume that we can accurately gauge the impact we are having.

Here’s a scene from Young Sheldon Season 1 Episode 3 to illustrate a challenge to that presumption.

[[Excerpt

Young Sheldon: I bet a nickel.

Meemaw: Hold on there a minute, Moonpie, I wanna teach you something. Look at your cards and now look in the mirror.

Young Sheldon: Hey, I'm smiling.

Meemaw: Uh-huh and what does that tell me about your cards.

Young Sheldon: That I like them.

Meemaw: Attaboy. Now look at my face, tell me what you see.

Young Sheldon: That you're old.

Meemaw: It's a good thing I love you. I'm a look at my cards again.

Young Sheldon: You’re unhappy, which means you don't have good cards.

Meemaw: mm-hmm. So, I'm gonna see you nickel and raise you a quarter.

Young Sheldon: A quarter.

Meemaw: You can fold.

Young Sheldon: No, I have good cards, you have bad cards. I'm in. Nines and fives.

Meemaw: Oh, that's too bad, three Queens! You lose! Ha, ha, ha…

Young Sheldon: But you were unhappy.

Meemaw: I made you think I was unhappy.

Young Sheldon: But that's lying! You lied to your Moonpie.

Meemaw: I bluffed my Moonpie.

Young Sheldon: Do people know about this.

Meemaw: Sheldon, what's on a person's face is not always what's in their heart.

Young Sheldon: Well this changes everything. How do you know who to trust?

Meemaw: You don’t, that's what makes life interesting.

Sheldon: Meemaw liked to teach me things that kept me awake at night.]]

The Equity Angle on Student Engagement

Translating the idea of bluffing into the school context, it is not hard to imagine powerless students made to participate in activities they did not choose nor trust the folks who made the choice on their behalf bluff their teachers into believing that they are engaged.

They hide in plain sight by going through the motions externally and keeping their inner lives locked away behind a facade.

Let’s raise the stakes to clarify why engagement is an equity issue.

Here is less than a minute of an all time favorite song of mine that captures the critical psychological insight that should inform our efforts to gauge our impact.

Musical Insight into Psychology

[[~49 sec. song excerpt:

You don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know my mind,

you hear me talkin’ but you don’t know, you don’t know my mind

and if you hear me laughin’, yes I’m laughin’ just to keep from cryin’.

If a smilin’ face is what you see,

you can’t tell what may be worryin’ me

you don’t know my mind

and if you hear me laughin’, well I’m laughin’ just to keep from cryin’.]]

Don: That was an excerpt of Guy Davis performing You Don’t Know My Mind which I found on the Putamayo album Mali to Memphis, but which is also the title track from one of his albums.

The title of the song summarizes the point I want to make.

Just because you will observe some outward expression that you will automatically interpret to be an indicator of some particular emotion or attitude that that person seems to have, that does not mean that you got it right.

If a smiling face is what YOU SEE,

YOU CANNOT TELL what may be worrying me,

and IF YOU HEAR me laughing,

well, I’m laughing just to keep from crying,

you do not know my mind.

This is why we need a science to more accurately understand what engagement is and how it actually works.

Engagement definitions, models, and suggestions that are unscientific have a seductive allure because they are not too far from the scientific truth.

However, models and suggestions that fail to tap into the causal forces for deeper learning are wasting your time and effort.

Only when the scientific truth is properly taken into account will you be enabled to do your best for your teachers and students.

To make matters worse, even the science-based offerings in the education literature tend to be a decade or more out of date.

The Science (and Non-Science) of Student Engagement

My name is Don Berg.

I am a member of the community that studies engagement scientifically.

My definitions, models, and suggestions are all derived from Self-Determination Theory, the framework with the widest scientific support for understanding human motivation and engagement.

Teacher and student engagement has been studied for many decades and SDT provides the most robust and well-supported model of engagement.

According to SDT, there are four components of engagement, although you might see a lot of educational publications referring to only three.

That is, when they are not pulling random advice out of their ass.

On a lark I compiled a list of about a hundred classroom and school engagement recommendations from the internet that seem to have nothing to do with the science, despite randomly using a few terms that might be the same, or similar to, words used by engagement scientists.

Below this video there is a link to a four page PDF file you can download to see what I came up with.

You also can learn about how an ASCD Leadership Magazine column perpetuated an engagement myth by watching a video I made about it at Holistic EquityDOTorg slash engagement DASH myth DOT html.

The intuitive notions are not completely wrong nor stupid, BUT you can be sent on a wild goose chase because you will inevitably apply your own intuitions and experiences to interpreting what they say.

Of course, you will use the same mental process to interpret the scientific words, too.

But the difference is that the science can reliably guide you from your initial misinterpretations towards a more accurate understanding of the reality of engagement.

Behavioral Engagement

So here’s the real deal.

First, there is the obvious external indicators of engagement that we all agree exist: behavioral engagement.

When the song talks about “hearing the talking” and “seeing the laughing” those are indicators of behavioral engagement.

In the classroom this is usually compliance with the instructional program.

As teachers and leaders, when we look out on our audience to see them smiling away at us and doing what we told them to do, we conclude that they are engaged.

But remember what the song is really about.

Just because you see and hear me that does not mean that you know what is in my mind.

Sheldon saw his Meemaw’s frowny face, but did not discern her intentions.

Emotional Engagement

That brings me to the second component: emotional engagement.

To be emotionally engaged you must experience positive emotions while enacting the activity.

Experiencing boredom, anxiety, or other forms of psychological negativity means that you are emotionally disengaged from the activity.

If you are laughing just to keep from crying, that does not suggest to me that the internal experience behind that outward laughter is actually positive.

Even if you go through the motions and might put on a good face, if the inward emotions are not positive then regardless of the outward expressions you produce you have not achieved emotional engagement.

Cognitive Engagement

Speaking of going through the motions, the third component is cognitive engagement.

If I use the very simplest strategies for learning, then I am not cognitively engaged.

Cognitive engagement means deploying more sophisticated cognitive strategies for managing the situation.

For instance, simple rote memorization is an indicator of cognitive disengagement because it is one of the simplest ways to memorize .

More sophisticated tactics, likes making memory palaces or synthesizing disparate perspectives by finding multiple sources that present the same information in different ways, are examples of cognitive engagement.

So far, we have reviewed the behavioral, emotional, and cognitive components of engagement.

In the few educational resources on engagement that rely on the science, that is often all you will find.

The Agency Gap & Agentic Engagement

This is what I call the agency gap.

The fourth component was first proposed in 2011 in the journal, Contemporary Educational Psychology.

Since then many researchers have done extensive follow-up studies to verify that the proposed addition to the engagement model is sound.

But the education world seems to take at least ten years to catch up to the psychological research.

That addition is a component called agentic engagement.

Agentic engagement is different from the other components because it is not solely a trait of the student.

Agentic engagement indicates how the student puts into the learning environment their own ideas, identities, opinions, and preferences in order to improve the educational value of that environment.

It is a social phenomena, not merely a personal one.

Agentic disengagement occurs when hostile social forces devalue or even ridicule the contributions of the student, such that the student withdraws from contributing.

You become agentically disengaged when you go along with the program, but without actively contributing your self to the social milieu in which you are attempting to learn.

Inequity in the Song

Remember the song lyrics.

you hear me talkin’ but you don’t know my mind

and if you hear me laughin’, well I’m laughin’ just to keep from cryin’.

If a smilin’ face is what you see,

you can’t tell what may be worryin’ me

you don’t know my mind

Let’s take a moment to reconsider what the songwriter means by the line “and if you hear me laughin’, well I’m laughin’ just to keep from cryin’”

Our intuitions about what a laugh normally means suggests that we would automatically interpret laughter to indicate happiness and joy, in other words positive feeling and agentic engagement with the situation.

The person laughing is injecting something into the situation.

They are taking an agentic risk by exposing an emotion.

In this case the risk comes from the fact that their actual experience is that of a very sad situation.

The sadness underlying the laughter is creating emotional complexity which might get completely misinterpreted by being reduced to the assumption that laughter only indicates happiness, instead of something much more difficult to deal with.

This song comes out of the Blues tradition.

The next verse deals with the effects of the Sunset Laws which made it illegal for Black folks to be out after sunset.

Black folks subjected to such unjust laws were forced to deal with the powerful agents of that racism, usually the local sheriff.

They were forced into a position of relative powerlessness.

One of the ways they coped with this kind of inequity was effectively hiding their true selves in the cloak of predictable emotional misinterpretation by the White folks.

Collectively, they learned that White folks have systematic intuitive reactions to their emotional expressions.

White folks automatically oversimplified the emotional lives of Black people.

That pattern enabled the Black folks to express themselves to each other in sophisticated ways that usually escaped the notice of their racist oppressors.

The pervasive patterns of disengagement that have been amply documented as plaguing our schools and workplaces is a sign of massive inequities that have nothing to do with any particular outcomes.

When equity is properly defined with reference to needs, which you can learn about in my videos on Equity versus Equality or Achieving Equity in Schools, then it does not matter what the pattern of any other outcomes are, when needs are systematically thwarted then inequity is present regardless of outcomes.

We need to have a proper scientific understanding of engagement in order to know how to properly assess engagement in others.

If we discover that there is an unacceptable level of disengagement, the science then provides us with precise means of responding.

It is not enough to observe from the outside.

We need to ask about how students and teachers are experiencing the environments that we are co-creating with them.

We need to find out about their emotional, cognitive, and agentic lives, not just observe and manipulate their behavior.

A great big thank you, to not only Guy Davis, but also the authors of the song Virginia Liston, Samuel Gray and Clarence Williams.

It is a tragedy that generations of people were forced to live for generations in blatantly racist cultures such that they had to hide in plain sight, but it is important to learn from this important psychological insight that they put into song.

If we take the time to learn from their tragic experiences, with the added help of science, we will be able to co-create the kinds of deeper learning environments that we aspire to in schools.

Thanks for watching.