A teacher-focused intervention to enhance students’ classroom engagement

Engagement includes a range of activity (behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and agentic) whose purpose is to help students make academic progress, satisfy their motivations, and create motivationally supportive learning environments for themselves, while disengagement includes a range of activity whose purpose is to avoid academic progress, neglect one’s motivations, and create motivationally indifferent learning environments. Recognizing the benefits of engagement and the costs of disengagement, we focus on how teachers’ autonomy-supportive versus controlling motivating styles support versus thwart students’ classroom engagement–disengagement. This focus has led to our intervention-based program of research. We developed and implemented a teacher-focused, theory-based, experimentally and longitudinally designed intervention to help teachers upgrade the quality of their classroom motivating style by becoming more autonomy-supportive and less controlling toward students. We describe the intervention and summarize our key findings. Specifically, we find that students of teachers who participate in the autonomy-supportive intervention program, compared to students of teachers who do not, show greater engagement and lesser disengagement, and also that teachers themselves show significant postintervention gains in their teaching efficacy to boost students’ engagement during instruction. We explain why the intervention works as well as it does and then conclude by suggesting three avenues of future research.