Delivering, modifying or collaborating? Examining three teacher conceptions of how to facilitate student engagement

Abstract

Across Australia, recent policy initiatives have focused on student engagement in school and in learning. Although teachers play a significant role in the implementation of these policy reforms, little research has looked at student engagement from teachers’ perspectives or sought to identify and understand the strategies teachers report using to promote engagement in their classrooms. The study reported in this paper utilised a phenomenographic approach to investigate teacher conceptions of how to facilitate student engagement. Semi‐structured interviews were used to gather data and a phenomenographic process of analysis was employed to identify qualitative differences between participant understandings. The data from this qualitative study indicated that teachers hold diverse understandings about how to facilitate student engagement; three categories described teachers’ ways of engaging students. In the first category, teachers conceptualised delivering set activities and discipline to students to promote engagement. In the second category, teachers suggested that they must modify curriculum and class activities. In the third category, teachers proposed that genuine collaboration with students was necessary to truly engage them in learning; in this category, teachers reported the deepest levels of student engagement. Teacher self‐reports of success when using a collaborative approach suggest that more research should be conducted using a range of approaches to investigate the fruitfulness of this strategy.

Keywords:

• student engagement
• teacher attitudes
• teacher behaviour
• teacher–student interaction
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Colin Lankshear, Christina Davidson, and Richard Smith for their feedback on the research that has been published in this article. This research was assisted financially through an Australian Postgraduate Award from Central Queensland University. I would also like to thank the colleagues who gave feedback on the first draft of this paper, presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education Conference in Adelaide in 2006.

Notes

1. A version of this paper was presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education Conference in Adelaide, November 2006.