Reflectiveness, Adaptivity, and Support: How Teacher Agency Promotes Student Engagement

We examine how teachers whom students identified as being relatively more or less engaging spoke differently about how they use information on student engagement to inform their teaching. Using 3 years of data from teacher focus groups in which 21 teachers discussed their perceptions of student engagement and reactions to annual student surveys, we found that highly engaging and less engaging teachers differed along dimensions of reflectiveness, adaptivity, and support. Together, these orientations revealed a sense of agency over student engagement that was more evident in the comments of more engaging teachers. The differences in how the two groups conceptualized engagement and used information on engagement to change their practice have important implications for efforts to increase student engagement.