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Experienced teachers know that there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to teaching their students. Each student is unique, with different learning styles, strengths, and weaknesses. They also know how important a positive classroom community is to boost self-esteem, enhance learning, and promote risk taking. Kagan strategies can help educators build a caring and kind environment to help all types of learners thrive.

Overview of Kagan Strategies

Source: kaganonline.com

Kagan is a scientific research-based program focused on student engagement. Back in 1968, Dr. Spencer Kagan began researching child behavior and realized he could create cooperative and competitive learning for children by placing them in different types of situations. He became a leader in the cooperative learning movement. Today, he continues to dedicate his life to creating positive learning environments for students of all grade levels and abilities.

Benefits of Using Kagan Strategies in the Classroom

Source: kaganonline.com

Kagan actively engages all students, unlike traditional teaching structures. With traditional teaching, students sit at their desks listening to the teacher and are called on one at a time. Students compete to shine and have a chance to speak. At the same time, shy and lower-achieving students avoid participating instead of trying to engage in class.

With the Kagan method, all students face each other and have a chance to share. All students are engaged simultaneously within just a minute or two. Students develop self-esteem, social skills, leadership skills, and communication skills. They become teammates while learning the curriculum, bouncing ideas off one another.

When students work in teams, they work together instead of competing against each other. This camaraderie is similar to the positive benefits sports teams build. Cooperative learning leads to academic and social gains since every student has an equal turn. Behavior improves while disruptions disappear.

Kagan Classbuilding and Teambuilding Structures

Dr. Kagan and his team have developed approximately 200 different Kagan structures. His book Kagan Cooperative Learning is his all-time top-seller and the book that started it all. From there, he and his team have branched out with numerous books specific to grade levels or particular strategies, smart cards containing numerous strategies in an easy-access foldable, and more.

While it would be impossible to cover all of the strategies in one article, here are a few examples of the most popular Kagan classbuilding and teambuilding structures to incorporate in the classroom. Apply these strategies to any subject area.

Examples of Kagan Classbuilding Structures

Classbuilding Structures involve activities where the whole class engages with one another. Some of my favorite Classbuilding Structures are:

Find Someone Who

Students circulate around the room, finding classmates who can answer questions on their teacher-created Find Someone Who form. Students must find a different classmate for each question, which leads to communication with everyone in the class.

Line-Ups

Students line up in a specified order, requiring communication and cooperation. The topics can be personal, such as lining up in birth date order. Other ideas include providing each student with a card with an event from a story or history and having students line up sequentially.

Mix-Pair-Share

Students mix around the room to music or just the beat of their own drum. When the music stops or the teacher calls "pair," students pair up with the classmate closest to them. The teacher then gives the class a topic to discuss with their partner. This can be repeated multiple times with the same or different questions, making sure students pair up with a different classmate each round.

Corners

Students choose one of four designated corners of the room and interact about a topic with other students in their corner. Each corner has a different answer to a question, opinion to a topic, etc.

Examples of Kagan Teambuilding Structures

With Teambuilding Structures, students are first grouped into small teams, usually composed of four students. If your students already sit at tables or desks put together to form small groups, your teams are already in place. Some of my favorite Teambuilding Structures are as follows:

RoundRobin

Anyone familiar with Kagan Structures knows this one, and it is a trendsetter. After placing students in teams, each student shares something with his or her teammates. RoundRobin may involve a single turn each or multiple turns. Everyone takes turns listening to each teammate, and everyone shares.

Fan-n-Pick

Group students into teams of four, in which each student has a different role, which rotates each round. Students answer questions from a deck of index cards, with questions relating to a subject area. The student roles are: Student 1 fans the cards; student 2 picks and reads a card; student 3 answers the question; and student 4 paraphrases and praises the answer.

Team Charades

This is just like the game we all know and love from our own childhood. First, students pick a card. Next, they act out whatever is on the card, without revealing it to the team or saying a word. This is a great way to strengthen kinesthetic intelligence.

Placemat Consensus

Create a Placemat (worksheet) with spaces for each student to write, with a Consensus space in the middle. If using a circle shape, first make a small circle in the middle of the circle. Next, draw spokes separating the outer circle into four spaces. After each teammate writes in his or her space, teammates take turns elaborating on their own ideas. If the team as a whole decides an answer is important, they write it in the Consensus space.

Feedback From Fellow Teachers

Here's what other teachers who use Kagan strategies regularly in their classrooms told me:

"I can see students' self-esteem and achievement improve when using Kagan strategies. Kagan strategies are great to motivate and keep students involved." -Maria Smith, elementary school teacher

"Kagan is an extremely effective way of allowing students to express knowledge in different ways, giving all students a chance to succeed using different learning styles. It's also a good informal assessment tool for teachers to understand where students may need reinforcement in different subjects." -Samantha Tannenbaum, elementary school teacher

"Kagan strategies make learning more fun for all. They can easily be applied to so many different topics. I love how the entire class becomes engaged simultaneously." -Sara Harris, high school teacher

More Resources for Kagan Strategies
Read more about specific research studies, theory, and rationale here.
Watch this video for a five-minute overview of the Kagan rationale and methodology.

What are some Kagan strategies you've tried in your classroom? Share your thoughts in the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE on Facebook.

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All posts by Stephanie Sanders, M.Ed., Elementary Education, M.Ed., Educational Leadership

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Find out how Kagan Strategies help educators build a caring and kind environment to help all types of learners thrive.

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Copy of BVUSD  Thin Slides Activity- Worst Pet Ever

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EP333: Engagement isn’t extra: boredom busters that prime the brain for learning (with Katie Powell)

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Podcast Episode · Angela Watson’s Truth for Teachers · 09/07/2025 · 49m

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Emoji Generator

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Goal: pursue an idea. A paragraph is more than facts!

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How Our Brains Learn - Hidden Brain Media

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Have you ever fallen asleep in school or during a work meeting? What’s missing from these classrooms and conference rooms is engagement: A state of being absorbed, alert, and eager to learn.

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Teachers can use a mix of approaches to overcome students' attention span limits so they stay engaged in learning.

Recent research highlights a growing concern: Attention spans are shrinking. Across all age groups, maintaining focus and engaging with others is becoming more difficult. David Brooks notes that even adults are struggling with the habit of actively tracking a speaker. In classrooms, teachers face the challenge of capturing students' attention for even a fraction of the time they used to.

Studies identify three key dimensions of engagement: behavioral, cognitive, and emotional. Behavioral engagement is seen in students following directions, while cognitive engagement reflects their investment in learning and willingness to tackle challenges. Emotional engagement relates to students' positive feelings toward a topic and their sense of belonging. These dimensions are interconnected and critical in fostering deeper learning.

For example, in a virtual discussion, behavioral engagement might be shown by a student writing a post, cognitive engagement through the depth of their ideas, and emotional engagement by their enthusiasm for the topic. Teachers can integrate these dimensions of engagement to overcome the attention span deficit and help students feel more engaged in their learning.

Integrating the Dimensions of Engagement

To maximize student learning, new research suggests mixing engagement strategies within short intervals, such as shifting between direct instruction and collaboration with peers every three to six minutes. In addition, research suggests that combining a mix of low-challenge and high-challenge tasks every three to six minutes boosts academic achievement and replenishes energy to sustain attention and reengage in more complex tasks.

How do we then combine direct instruction and collaboration while rotating between complex and low complex tasks while maintaining high engagement? Here are some approaches you can take in class today.

Quick wins: Start lessons with brief, explicit instruction and guided practice before moving into larger group activities. This ensures that students grasp key concepts early, with a strong "we do" approach that incorporates modeling and questioning. For example, a teacher decides to break down a lesson into several parts rather than one longer lesson and begin by demonstrating how to compare fractions with common denominators. After three minutes, the teacher asks students to identify fractions with common denominators. This is repeated with additional intervals across the lesson.

Integrate SEL into content: Instead of isolating social and emotional learning, weave executive functioning strategies into academic lessons. This could involve a brief interval where students reflect on how they manage their time or attention within a math or science lesson, promoting both self-regulation and content mastery. For example, after students have engaged in a few intervals related to food chains and food webs, they reflect on the three dimensions of engagement-e.g., Cognitive: What did I learn about food chains and energy pyramids? Emotional: How confident do I feel in explaining the flow of energy in an ecosystem? Behavioral: What steps did I take to progress to this point in the lesson or unit?

Small, structured collaboration: Begin group work in short, structured bursts-just one to four minutes. As students build confidence and deepen their understanding, gradually extend the time. This keeps the cognitive load manageable and aligns the duration of group work with the difficulty of the task. For instance, after a social studies teacher presents key figures in the Civil Rights Movement, students spend three minutes working in pairs, sharing their personal reflections on fairness and comparing them with what they've learned about historical struggles for equality.

Low-Challenge/High-Engagement Activities

Teachers should infuse a few three- to six-minute activities that are low challenge and high engagement for students into each lesson. These should not take much time to create and should be designed to replenish student attention by integrating cognitive, emotional, and behavioral approaches to engagement. These could be strategies to consolidate previous learning.

Question generation: Have students create questions on the topic for younger students. For example, you could ask ninth-grade world history students to create questions for students in third and sixth grade on this same topic. Instead of answering questions, students create them! In pairs or small groups, they have three minutes to write questions based on the lesson content. After the time is up, they trade questions with another group and try to answer each other's questions. The teacher may ask them why those questions are so important for younger students to know.

Trivia/quiz activity: Have students participate in a short quiz, such as answering questions about key events from a history lesson, while competing as part of an ongoing trivia game that lasts several days or weeks. To do this, consider designing questions that blend knowledge with fun by incorporating interesting facts, pop culture references, or challenges. Make sure to keep the format light and competitive, providing multiple-choice or timed responses to add excitement and encourage participation.

Two truths and a lie: Students work in pairs or small groups to come up with two true statements and one false statement about a topic they've learned from the past several units (e.g., historical facts, scientific theories, literary events). They present their three statements to another group, who has to guess which one is the lie.

Quick round questions: The teacher asks fast-paced questions related to the topic (e.g., vocabulary definitions, dates of key events, formulas) while students respond by raising their hand, calling out, or writing their answer on a small whiteboard. Keep the pace lively and engaging, and encourage students to celebrate correct answers with a quick clap or cheer.

Crossword puzzle: Students engage in a part of a crossword puzzle and repeatedly work to solve it over several days.

Bingo/search: Give students a list of things they need to find (e.g., "Find someone who can explain photosynthesis," "Find someone who knows the capital of Luxembourg," "Find someone who can give an example of a metaphor"). They have three to five minutes to walk around the room and ask classmates to fill in the blanks.

Mind maps: Students are given three minutes to create a mind map of key concepts from the lesson, starting with one central idea and branching out to related terms or ideas. Afterward, they can compare their mind maps with those of a partner or small group to see if they captured the same key points.

ABC game: The teacher starts with a vocabulary word from the current lesson, and students must quickly come up with a related word that begins with the last letter of the previous word (e.g., Ecosystem → Mammal → Leaf → Food chain). The chain continues for three minutes, with students taking turns contributing.

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Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Engagement Strategies That Work

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Teachers can use a mix of approaches to overcome students' attention span limits so they stay engaged in learning.

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What is student engagement: Strategies for meaningful learning outcomes

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Discover the importance of student engagement in the classroom and how it enhances the learning process.

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A look at how teachers can cultivate and sustain relational, intellectual, and emotional engagement among students.

As educators, we're in the business of relationships, and relationships are everything in school communities. One thing the pandemic and its ripple effects has taught us is that many students lost their sense of how to cultivate relationships and how to remain engaged with their learning, their peers, and even themselves. Returning to in-person learning required us to rethink how we engage with students and how we can create opportunities for them to interact with the curriculum, as well as the world around them.

Engagement is built on sustainment-the ability to connect with and create direct interaction with someone or something over an extended period of time. Consider these three approaches to sustained engagement in your classroom settings.

1. Relational engagement

Building relationships means empowering student minds, encouraging curiosity and risk, swapping stories, and exploring connections that are dependent on interactions with other human beings. This is a process that requires community circles, storytelling, sharing of artifacts, and, most important, authentic time that's grounded in human beings being present, learning about one another and what holds meaning for them in their lives.

Engagement in action: Begin the journey of origin-building with your students where they create a space of their own that becomes a canvas, an "Origin Wall" for them to share the story of who they are. As they are ever-evolving persons, their space can be added to and changed over time, presenting new chances to sustain their personal storytelling and allowing them to listen to and learn more about other students-who they are, what has changed or remained the same, and where they come from, to name a few ideas.

Modeling makes learning visible, creates opportunities for questions, and builds trust. You need to be able to do what you ask of them, and so modeling aspects of your personal story gets added to the class Origin Wall as well.

2. Intellectual engagement

Students need to be in spaces where learning flows around them, not at them. Teachers need to empower students to be accountable and build the mental stamina to share and debate ideas, challenge one another to pull apart questions, productively struggle with differing opinions, and connect their personal experiences to the universe around them. In a world of global thinking, students need to learn how to stretch their critical thinking skills, while learning how to flex their technology muscles.

Engagement in action: Pick an aspect of your curriculum, and translate it into a visual medium with students through artificial intelligence (AI). So much of teaching is the "sage on the stage," and being talked at becomes the overwhelming method of interaction-that's not engagement.

Bring students into AI with Scratch, a coding platform that allows users to join the interactive community and intersect curriculum and computer technology in a way that meets them where they are with interests in virtual spaces, builds their digital tech skills, and brings the content to virtual life.

3. Emotional engagement

Hard to understand, but often easy to see, emotions are cues, sending signals out to everyone nearby. It's important that we create a space and mechanisms to support those emotions because 11- to 18-year-olds have a lot of big feelings, big thoughts, and frequently a lot of larger-than-life ways to show when they're not engaged and feeling a certain kind of way about it.

Our role in this, through relationships and imaginative lesson planning, is to create the trauma-sensitive space and strategies to support them when their amygdala is hijacked. Keep in mind, emotions and their corresponding behaviors are communication, and we want to listen.

Engagement in action: Every class discusses rules and expectations, but the students understand compliance and following directions; sometimes they just choose not to, and that's a form of communication, too. Let's flip that script with them and focus instead on everything they know about making school impactful. Have them open the floor to design a plan for creating a classroom that meets their needs emotionally, that makes learning a discovery, that's responsive to their adolescence and their emotional ups and downs, while keeping learning at the forefront of the social and emotional landscape-something inclusive, culturally responsive, and safe.

From the heart: Offer students the opportunity to write a message of love for the entranceway using their name, preferred pronouns, and native language (e.g., "Hola. Me alegra que estés aquí! Mi nombre es Valeria, mis pronombres son ella/ella; bienvenido a nuestra clase de Matemáticas." (Hi. I'm glad you're here. My name is Valeria, my pronouns are she/her; welcome to our Math class.)

Getting social: Have students draw a cell phone with a kind message written on the screen for visitors, or have them create an avatar that goes along with a 140-character tweet box.

Operation Inspire: Challenge students to research an inspirational quote or to create their own that they write out and illustrate, supporting the classroom mission.

Connection of care: Have students provide an image of something that holds value or meaning to them that they're comfortable sharing. They can make a copy of that image and superimpose a brief message on it with their name; then they can put it at the entrance to motivate them every time they enter and to share a connection of care with others.

Start with your classroom or office door/door frame as the perfect place to post, thereby elevating the entrance to an engaging, safe space:

For a few last ideas to turn up the volume on your class engagement, consider student-designed podcasts in social studies, civics, or English; merge physics, biology, and math by challenging students to develop a cipher-unlocking algorithm to save the planet from a global warming-induced weather event, or tackle earth science with a comic book AI storyboard program on the life cycle with your favorite insect as the narrator.

Mastering your content area while developing your teaching style is only as intentional as the connections you form with students and the manner in which you seek to build them. "You should probably invest as much time in understanding who you teach as you do in understanding what you teach," shared author and speaker Manny Scott, an original Freedom Writer. His statement elevates the truth that student engagement is as much about pedagogy as it is about people; they don't exist apart from one another.

When you understand your students, you can understand yourself that much better; serving their true academic and emotional needs from that place then becomes second nature. You'll see and feel the difference in your spaces, and your students' hearts and minds will thank you for it.

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A look at how teachers can cultivate and sustain relational, intellectual, and emotional engagement among students. As educators, we're in the business of relationships, and relationships are everything in school communities. One thing the pandemic and its ripple effects has taught us is that many students lost their sense of how to cultivate relationships and how to remain engaged with their learning, their peers, and even themselves.

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7 Student Engagement Strategies for Improved Learning

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Student engagement is the key to fostering lifelong learners.

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EduProtocols: 1st Grade - Seesaw Activity Collection

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Unlock student engagement with EduProtocols-versatile lesson frames that foster critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity. Transform your teaching across subjects and grade levels! EduProtocols & Seesaw: Daily Routines that Work Webinar Registration seesaw.academy/eduprotocols.

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Opinion | ‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’

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Students are already using A.I. to learn and write. The education policy expert Rebecca Winthrop explores the big questions emerging for educators and parents.

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Hexagonal Thinking - Directions and Template

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Are you in search of a discussion strategy that can save you from the creaking silence of a class full of non-talkers?

Enter hexagonal thinking. While this strategy is also wonderful in the physical classroom, it's a great digital option for unlocking discussion in this very moment. Below you'll find background on the topic and then some strategies for how you might implement hexagonal thinking in the classroom.

What is hexagonal thinking?

Hexagonal thinking is a classroom strategy borrowed from the business world. Concepts are placed on hexagons, and then moved around to build a web of connected ideas. The most interesting part comes in the debate about where to connect what, and why. In the classroom, students can build hexagonal webs in groups or alone, online or off. No two webs will ever look the same, and neither will the explanations of the connections students have made, whether given in writing or aloud.

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How you might structure hexagonal thinking in the classroom.

1. Begin by choosing key ideas from a reading or unit and adding them to your hexagons. From there, branch out into related concepts from other disciplines, the news, or modern culture. Now you have an idea deck.

2. To create your hexagons, you can use this free online generator or pick up a free digital toolkit with tons of templates and examples here.

3. Share your deck with students in groups. You can hand them a set of printed cards or direct them to their own copies of your digital deck on Google Slides.

4. Ask them to connect the concepts by lining up the sides of different hexagons with related ideas. Each card can connect to up to six others, but might only connect to one. They want to make the strongest connections they can. This will lead to a lot of debate. Remind them that there's no right answer for how to connect the cards, and that they should push themselves to provide evidence for the strength of their ideas as they argue productively (and kindly) within their group.

5. Finally, students will have a web of strong connections laid out. Have them write about several of their most interesting intersection points-why they've connected several hexagons in this way. At this point they can share their thinking back to the class. In the physical classroom, students can present aloud and gallery walk to see each other's work. Online, you can have students save their webs and drop them into a collaborative gallery on Google Slides, report back on Zoom, and/or record a video about their web on Screencastify or Flipgrid.

Examples of hexagonal thinking in the classroom

Now let's take a peek at some of the wonderful ways hexagonal thinking is taking place around the world. Sit back, relax, and enjoy.

1. As a wrap-up activity for an identity unit

7th grade students of Genevieve Chavez, Spain

2. Connecting "The Lottery" and "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas"

Students of Ruth Anne Flowers, Airport High School, South Carolina

3. A conversation about The House on Mango Street

Students of Tabatha Rose, Strath Haven High School, Pennsylvania

4. Connecting poetry

Students of Megan Elizabeth

5. Discussing The Great Gatsby

Students of Sharon Ma, Shanghai SMIC Private School, China

6. Vocabulary thinking maps

Students of April Egal, Burgettstown Middle High School, Pennsylvania

7. Brainstorming for a TED Talk

Students of Rachel Barbe

8. Diving deep into Born a Crime

Students of Cheri Hayden, Colegio Americano, Ecuador

9. Summative assessment for The Kite Runner

Students of Caitlyn Farrow, Central Hardin High School

10. In conversation about The Crucible

Students of Jenna Jewell

11. Themes in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing

Students of Taylor Sullivan, Boston Prep, Massachusetts

12. Hexagonal one-pagers for A Long Way Down and The Outsiders

Example created by Betsy Potash

13. Connecting characters and terms for Pride and Prejudice

Students of Jo LittleHorn, Velika Gorica Grammar School, Croatia

Have you used hexagonal thinking? We'd love to hear about your experiences in the comments. For more teaching tips and strategies, be sure to subscribe to our newsletters.

Plus, how to use one-pagers in the classroom.

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What Is Hexagonal Thinking? Plus, 13 Examples To Inspire You

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What is hexagonal thinking and how can you use it in the classroom? Check out these ideas and photos of hexagonal thinking in action.

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Hexagonal thinking: Creating connections in the classroom

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If you’re looking for a way to get your students to make meaningful connections and have deep, thoughtful discussions, then hexagonal thinking might just

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Unlocking Student Engagement with Josh Hall - The Extraordinary Educators Podcast

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Discover the secret sauce to sparking a fervor for learning as we chat with Josh Hall, National Director, Content and Implementation at Curriculum Associates. Freshly inspired after the winter break doldrums, educators often scratch their heads wo…

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Three Ways You May Be Cognitively Overloading Your Students | Cult of Pedagogy

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When we make certain choices, often without even realizing it, we can turn a teaching moment from one that should be clear into one that’s confusing.

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We're tackling one of the biggest challenges educators face today: keeping students engaged in a world full of distractions.

AJ Juliani joins me to explore how to create meaningful and relevant learning experiences that resonate with today's learners, even in the age of TikTok, smartphones, and endless notifications.

He's an educator, author, and speaker who serves as an instructor for the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (PLN). AJ has worked towards innovative learning experiences as the Director of Learning and Innovation for Centennial School District, as Curriculum Coordinator, as Tech Director, English teacher, football coach, and K-12 Instructional Coach. His favorite role is being dad to five kids. You might know AJ from his books Adaptable, Empower, Launch, or The PBL Playbook.
Here's what you'll learn:

Why simply removing phones or distractions won't solve the engagement problem.

How to balance direct instruction with collaborative, student-centered learning.

Why meaningful, relevant tasks are more effective than "rigorous" assignments for long-term learning.

The "traffic light" system for integrating technology and AI into classroom activities.

How to help students develop focus, self-regulation, and intrinsic motivation.

Strategies for using choice and ownership to foster deeper learning experiences.

The surprising truths about rigor, assessment, and knowledge transfer.

How to create performance tasks that build real-world skills and make learning stick.

Why human connection and relationships are more vital than ever in education.

Practical advice for building long-term habits of engagement that go beyond quick fixes.

AJ also shares insights from his latest book and offers actionable strategies for educators who want to make their teaching meaningful and impactful in a rapidly changing world. Continue reading, or listen to our conversation using the podcast player below.

Listen to episode 321 below,
or subscribe in your podcast app

The growing challenge of student attention
ANGELA: So, the ability to focus one's attention has been a growing challenge for students, especially over recent years. Can you talk about what you're seeing and hearing in classrooms and the factors that seem to be contributing to these issues?
AJ: Yeah, this is a perfect storm, isn't it? It's a perfect storm of a lot of things happening. We had all these one-to-one initiatives, everybody getting devices. Then a pandemic comes. Now everybody's really asked to have devices. We put everything online, learning management systems, and not to mention the phones in everybody's pockets and everywhere.

But we're seeing in a lot of classrooms right now, teachers talking about kids being distracted, apathy, and there's an actual famous researcher and consultant by the name of Linda Stone that coined a term, a phrase for what we're all feeling, which is continuous partial attention. It's the easiest way to sum up what's happening in our classrooms and really just in our world, which is we're not just dividing our attention. We are giving attention to so many things at once.

Because of notifications and just our general need to check in and see what's going on, it's becoming a really big struggle. I always do activities with folks talking about how hard it is to learn when you multitask. Now think about your mind going 25 different directions, kind of like the tabs that you have open. I'm looking at my computer right now-I've got about 15 tabs open. Or if I swiped up on my phone, I could imagine I'd have another 15 apps that are open. Think about your brain like that. It just makes it very difficult to pay attention. What people are feeling is very real, and it's not just the kids. It's also the adults who are feeling this because we're living in this world too.

A vision for evolving education
A lot of people think the situation is hopeless. It seems to be getting worse every year, and phones are taking over our lives more and more. They also tend to feel like there's not a lot that teachers can do about it because this is not a school-specific or student-specific thing. But you are imagining something better. What is your vision for how education can evolve to better meet the needs of learners in a world that is full of distractions and continuous partial attention?
There are a lot of different avenues we can go down, and it looks different for different ages. I was turned on to the work of Dr. Mark D. Esposito, and he works at the Berkeley Brain Imaging Center. His research is fascinating. He basically says we have two competing networks happening in our brain. One is the task-positive network, and the other is the default mode network. You can imagine the task-positive network is when we're getting things done, making progress, and able to focus. The default mode network is kind of what has happened through evolution and throughout history, where we are scanning for threats and new information.

The issue we're having right now is every time we get a notification, it puts us into that default mode network. Unlike people thinking, "Oh, right brain and left brain," these networks cannot operate simultaneously. It's like a neural seesaw: task-positive goes up, default goes down; default goes up, task-positive goes down. He has five steps that can really help us think about how to design our lessons, classrooms, and spaces.

The first one he talks about is the 25-5 rule. It's kind of like a Pomodoro timer type of thing. We can only live in that task-positive network for about 20-25 minutes. For younger kids, it's a much shorter period of time. You have to give yourself time to let that default mode run. In a classroom, that could mean brain breaks or other activities. You have to give the brain time to allow for scanning if you want to get back to that task-positive state. It doesn't help if we go from one task-positive activity straight to another without reflection or metacognitive time. That time is huge.

Another piece is creating a threat-free zone. This means eliminating distractions, like getting cell phones out of the classroom or snoozing laptops. It's about actually having focus time. He also talks about scheduling scanning time just as we schedule threat-free time. But I think the most impactful step for teachers is to create focus-use triggers. This could be a playlist kids are used to or a specific location or ritual that signals focus time. Something like that helps kids get into the task-positive network.

As we think about how educators can move forward, we really need to look at the science and acknowledge that powering through lesson after lesson doesn't work. Giving time to let the default mode process is a big piece of the puzzle.

Competing with TikTok for students' attention
One of the things teachers feel is that they're having to compete with TikTok and other really engaging platforms. A challenging lesson that requires students to focus and exert sustained attention is never going to have the same appeal as passively consuming something designed for entertainment in 10-second bursts. What are your thoughts on the idea that teachers can't compete with TikTok? How can we design lessons that naturally capture students' attention?
It's very tough to compete with TikTok and similar platforms. They're really good at grabbing attention. But I think sometimes we misunderstand why TikTok is so engaging. It's not just about entertainment.

A study shared on the Freakonomics podcast asked how much students would have to be paid to give up social media for a month. The results were fascinating. Students said they'd pay to have their friends and family give it up too. This highlights the importance of belonging. It's not just the tech itself-it's the connections it facilitates.

Rethinking cell phones in the classroom
Technology, especially cell phones, presents significant challenges in the classroom. Since the release of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, many schools have moved to ban cell phones altogether.
Early on, some viewed phones as a way to engage students, but opinions are shifting. Phones are undeniably a big distraction. For example, even in places where phones are banned, like in France, students still bring them and hide them. Removing distractions doesn't necessarily solve engagement problems.

The real issue is how we structure learning. Engagement isn't just about eliminating distractions; it's about fostering achievement and motivation. Without moments of achievement, it's hard for students to stay motivated.

A famous story highlights this: a struggling student scored 1480 on the SAT and believed he was smart, transforming his outlook and future success. Later, it turned out the score was a mistake. What changed his life wasn't the actual score but believing he was capable of achieving. These "1480 moments" are crucial in helping students feel successful and motivated.
How do we get more of those 1480 moments? What do we need to restructure to do that?
The big thing for me is that we're often just assessing the final product, the final task, instead of the learning process and the energy or output that kids put into it. Think about a kid in elementary school working on a diorama project. He's putting in a lot of effort, but he doesn't have two parents at home helping him. Maybe the teacher helped him a little, but he comes to school on the day the project is due, proud of his work. Then he looks around and sees another kid's project that looks better, or another student's project that's clearly been helped along by family members. He starts feeling down about himself.

Imagine being that student and being graded solely on the final product. He's not being recognized for his guts, resiliency, integrity, or tenacity. I think we need to reframe how we assess, especially to allow for more of those 1480 moments that aren't tied exclusively to the final product. It's about recognizing effort, process, and growth in addition to the outcome.

Grading effort vs. reimagining assessment
Is that grading on effort, or do you see it differently?
There's a lot of talk about this. The San Francisco College Track, for example, created a "grit rubric," which includes:

Guts - The courage to take risks and persevere through challenges.

Resiliency - The ability to bounce back from setbacks and keep moving forward.

Integrity - Staying true to one's values and demonstrating honesty.

Tenacity - Demonstrating determination and persistence in achieving goals.

Jen Gonzalez also talks about single-point rubrics, which I love. The focus shifts to assessing specific areas-whether it's creativity, independence, collaboration, or something else. It's not about ranking kids against each other based on their final product. Instead, it's about rewarding the time and energy they invested in the process.

If a student has paid attention, shown commitment, and put in the effort, that's worth celebrating. Maybe their final product doesn't compare to others, but they still went through the process and showed growth. We need to keep that momentum going instead of dampening their motivation with a low grade for not meeting every little rubric requirement. In today's world of distractions, it's so easy for kids to become disheartened and disengage from "the game of school."

One way to approach this is by rethinking how we structure assignments and projects. For example, we could do something Hemingway-style, where students write their essay in front of us, turning it in as a rough draft or a work-in-progress. Or, we could try project-based sprints, where students tackle something typically designed as a six-week project but complete it in two or three class periods, using technology strategically to speed up certain processes.

There are also approaches like guided discussions, where students defend their learning and reasoning, or even hybrid methods that incorporate both technology and traditional approaches. When you think about this in terms of a Venn diagram, you have "tech-compatible" on one side and "tech-resistant" on the other, with a crucial middle ground in between.

That middle ground includes things like project-based learning and performance tasks, where you can pick and choose when to use technology. This balance becomes key-not leaning too far into one extreme or the other but finding a way to make learning meaningful, efficient, and engaging.

You know coming out of the pandemic, it was like, Alright, now we use tech for everything. We have our learning management system where we're reading everything. It became an overload, right? Even the kids don't want it. And I think that's part of where we have to reflect as educators and be like, Alright, let's take a step back. What's our learning goal? Does the technology serve a purpose?

We're just using it as a teenage or student pacifier, just to kind of keep them busy and they can be on their technology. And those are the questions that we have to come up with. But it's not like tech is all bad. There are amazing things we can create with it if it's part of that purpose, especially if it's for real-time collaboration, editing feedback, creating all those types of things. It's a fantastic tool When kids have an authentic purpose and authentic audience that they're creating and making meaningful work.

Navigating AI doing the work for students
I think that's a great answer and I'm glad that you brought up the AI piece because that's one of the questions that teachers are talking about a lot in my AI program, the 40-hour AI, we're talking about streamlining teacher workloads with AI as so many of the secondary, particularly ELA teachers and others who have kids do a lot of writing are saying, "I'm having to completely change everything about the way that I teach. It's a total overhaul. Nothing that I used to do works anymore, because the kids are like, 'I can just use ChatGPT. I don't need to be able to write. I don't need to be able to do this." And they're experiencing a lot of frustration with that. What would you say to folks who are um trying to manage that situation?
Yeah, I think first take a step back-don't freak out, because I freak out a little bit, right? Working with college students and everybody. And I want people to think about how we have changed our practice so many times. Every time there is what I call a hinge of history-historians really call it that, but I stole the term because I love it-every time there's a hinge of history, we change our practice.

So, the printing press: hinge of history. We had to change what education looked like when that came around. You could go telegraph, radio, and television. Most of us, and most of the people listening to this, went through a world where the only technology we used in classrooms was Oregon Trail. If you think about it, back when we were using Oregon Trail, it was awesome. It was a lot of fun. It was a learning tool. But most of us thought about technology as a toy back then.

Now, all of a sudden, think about all the different types of things that we use it for: learning, work, everything else. The same thing happened with the internet-it completely transformed what we do, from Google and Wikipedia to all the tasks we do online. AI is going to be another one.

The issue I think so many people are freaking out about, me included, is that people at least used to have to work a little bit hard to go to Google, find sources, write, copy, paste, and cite things. Now, they can just say, "Write this for me," or "Do this math problem," or all those different types of things.

I saw a talk where this woman was saying, it's almost like we have to sometimes, with AI, reverse Bloom's Taxonomy. Start with creation. Work our way down. Evaluate the creation, then synthesize: What do we need to add to this from human knowledge and our human intelligence? Then go down to analyzing that and looking at others.

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Truth For Teachers - Meaningful and relevant: engaging learners in the age of distraction

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We're tackling one of the biggest challenges educators face today: keeping students engaged in a world full of distractions. AJ Juliani joins me to explore how to create meaningful and relevant learning experiences that resonate with today's learners, even in the age of TikTok, smartphones, and endless notifications.

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The Psychology Behind Student Engagement: Flow and Productive Struggle

The epitome of student engagement is when students experience what is known in psychological research as flow: "joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life" (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008, p. xi).

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi-the psychologist who discovered the concept of flow and spent decades studying how people experience it-the combination of both high challenge and high skill is what creates flow. Csikszentmihalyi wrote:

"The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...The best moments usually occur if a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile" (2008, p. 3).

Flow is similar to the concept of productive struggle, where teachers create structures for students to actively discover new and deeper understandings instead of passively giving students information through direct instruction. The definition of productive struggle is:

"Students grapple with and solve a question or problem that is just beyond their current level of understanding and that requires them to examine multiple avenues of thought. Students wrestle with ideas yet persevere and come up with solutions themselves" (Toth & Sousa, 2019, p. 12).

Like flow, productive struggle relies on a combination of challenge (a rigorous academic task) and skill (which is developed when students have full autonomy to take on active roles and responsibilities). See figure 3.

Both flow and productive struggle make clear why student engagement is important in the classroom. When students experience the joy of accomplishing a worthy academic challenge, they are motivated to work harder. As students continue to work harder, they build persistence, critical reasoning, and the ability to apply their learning.

Figure 3. The conditions that create flow and productive struggle lead to a learning environment where students are highly engaged. Based in part on Csikszentmihalyi's flow research and diagram (1997), along with our original research and thought leadership incorporated.

Complexity:

Using a taxonomy framework like Marzano's helps ensure tasks match the cognitive complexity level of the standard, or even exceed it. For instance, if the standard asks for Analysis, tasks should align with this level of complexity or ideally go beyond it to Knowledge Utilization.

Teachers must avoid over-scaffolding or "watering down" the material, which may inadvertently lower the cognitive challenge for students. Weakening the complexity of tasks does not serve students' best interests.
Autonomy:

Autonomy arises when students are motivated to engage with a task and have the structures to do so without needing the teacher's direct support. Tasks should be designed to stimulate student interest and ownership.

Effective tasks allow students to work in interdependent teams, engage in collaborative thinking, and utilize roles and shared responsibilities. This empowers students to take charge of their learning process.

A lack of autonomy occurs when the teacher dominates or controls the entire process, limiting student involvement and decision-making in their learning journey.

Michael D. Toth

Michael D. Toth is founder and CEO of Instructional Empowerment (IE) and leads IE's Applied Research Center. He is also the author of the multi-award-winning book The Power of Student Teams with David Sousa; author of Who Moved My Standards; and co-author with Robert Marzano of multiple books. Most recently, he co-authored peer-reviewed research articles published in academic journals in collaboration with researchers Dr. Basileo, Dr. Lyons, Dr. Otto, and Dr. Vannini.

Michael is a keynote speaker at conferences and coaches and mentors superintendents on creating a bold instructional vision, designing and launching a high-functioning cabinet team, transforming Tier 1 core instruction, and leading systems-based school advancement.
Learn more about Michael: https://instructionalempowerment.com/ie-founder-michael-d-toth/

Michelle Fitzgerald

Michelle Fitzgerald, Ed.D., serves as the Executive Director of Advocacy and Networking for Instructional Empowerment. She has been an educator for more than 30 years and has served as an area superintendent - principal supervisor, assistant superintendent, director of curriculum, building administrator, and middle school teacher. Michelle has built instructional leadership in principals and assistant principals capitalizing on her extensive experience in curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Abbott-Chapman, J., Martin, K., Ollington, N., Venn, A., Dwyer, T., & Gall, S. (2014). The longitudinal association of childhood school engagement with adult educational and occupational achievement: Findings from an Australian national study. British Educational Research Journal. 40(1) 102-120. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3031

Becoming a School Where All Students Thrive. (2019). https://instructionalempowerment.com/library/moseley-elementary-leverages-student-led-team-learning-to-success/

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Finding flow: The psychology of engagement with everyday life. Basic Books.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Dyer, K. (2015, September 17). Research proof points: Better student engagement improves student learning. NWEA. https://www.nwea.org/ blog/2015/research-proof-points-better-student-engagement-improves-student-learning/

EdWeek Research Center. (2021). Data snapshot: What teacher and student morale looks like right now. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/data-snapshot-what-teacher-and-student-morale-looks-like-right-now/2021/01

García, E. & Weiss, E. (2020, September 10). COVID-19 and student performance, equity, and U.S. education policy. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/the-consequences-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-for-education-performance-and-equity-in-the-united-states-what-can-we-learn-from-pre-pandemic-research-to-inform-relief-recovery-and-rebuilding/

Lei, H., Cui, Y., & Zhou, W. (2018). Relationships between student engagement and academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 46(3), 517-528. https://doi.org/10.2224/sbp.7054

Maamin, M., Maat, S. M., Iksan, Z. H. (2022). The influence of student engagement on mathematical achievement among secondary school students. Mathematics, 10(1), 41. https://doi.org/10.3390/math10010041

Marzano, R. J., & Kendall, J. S. (2007). The new taxonomy of educational objectives (2nd ed.). Corwin Press.

Mete, G. (2020). The impact of the reading engagement model on the 6th graders' reading comprehension achievement. African Educational Research Journal, 8(3), 499-510. https://doi.org/10.30918/AERJ.83.20.104

Reckmeyer, M. (2019, October 30). Focus on student engagement for better academic outcomes. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/education/267521/ focus-student-engagement-better-academic-outcomes.aspx

Sousa, D. A. (2016). Engaging the rewired brain.

Toth, M. D. & Sousa, D. A. (2019). The power of student teams: Achieving social, emotional, and cognitive learning in every classroom through academic teaming.

Vegas, E. & Winthrop, R. (2020, September 8). Beyond reopening schools: How education can emerge stronger than before COVID-19. Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/research/ beyond-reopening-schools-how-education-can-emerge-stronger-than-before-covid-19/

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