Updating Our Mental Models of What ‘Engagement’ Is
Moving from visible signs to actual learning
When we talk about engagement, we may picture different things. Some of those pictures come from experience. Some come from what we were taught. A lot of the time, they’re shaped by what looks good or feels good in the moment. That’s where our mental models come from. And those models guide what we notice, what we value, and what we plan for.
Here are two examples. Neither one is wrong. In fact, both might be part of a great lesson. But if we’re not thinking carefully, they can become proxies. They can stand in for learning without actually showing us what students are thinking about or remembering.
Mental Model 1
Students are sitting in groups. There’s a buzz in the room. They’re collaborating, glue, and highlighters are being used to create posters. There’s movement, colour, and chatter. They’re laughing, smiling and helping each other. The teacher is moving around the room, checking in. Everyone looks busy.
It feels like a good lesson. Students are having fun. They’re engaged. They must be learning.
Mental Model 2
Students are sitting in rows. The teacher is explaining how appositives can add detail to a sentence. She unpacks an example and models a similar one on the board. Students turn and talk to discuss what she just showed them. A few hands go up. The room is quiet and focused. Everyone is doing what they’re asked.
It feels like a good lesson. Students are attentive. The content is being covered. They must be learning.
What I’m Starting to See
This isn’t about throwing away everything we’ve ever done. It’s about noticing the difference between what feels good in a lesson and what actually helps students learn. Engagement still matters. But we need to ask, engagement with what?
For a long time, my mental model of engagement was enjoyment. If the room was buzzing, kids were smiling, there was colour and energy and noise, I felt like the lesson was landing. But real engagement in a learning sense often doesn’t look like that. It’s students thinking hard. Like pausing to work out how to structure a sentence. Or changing their mind after a partner share. It’s full participation. Tracking the speaker. Responding together. Explaining an answer out loud. It’s sticking with something even when it doesn’t click straight away. It’s effort you can’t always see straight away, but you can hear it in their reasoning and see it in their progress.
That’s cognitive engagement. That’s where the learning sticks. Like Willingham says, memory is the residue of thought. What students think about is what they remember.
This shift doesn’t mean we stop caring about enjoyment. Enjoyment still matters. But we can start to see that it can come from success. From nailing a concept. From feeling capable. It doesn’t always have to come from the task itself.
Dylan Wiliam says you can’t see learning, only performance. That line really helped me step back and ask myself what I was actually looking for. Was I noticing performance, or was I chasing the feeling that things looked good?
All of this became clearer when I came across Jamie Clark’s one-pager from Teaching One Pagers about poor proxies for learning. In it, he unpacks the work of Professor Rob Coe, who lists things like busyness, engagement, calmness, good behaviour, and task completion. These are the things we’re used to noticing. But they’re not reliable signs of learning.
I’ve used every one of those in my own classroom.
Busy students
In spelling, students would be doing a word sort for the /ay/ phoneme. I’d have students sort words into columns. It felt like a good use of time. But I wasn’t always thinking about whether they were actually thinking about sounds, patterns, or meaning.
Engaged readers
During independent reading, a student might look totally immersed. They’d be sitting at their table or tucked into a reading corner with a pile of ‘just right books’. I’d say to myself, “They’re reading, everything’s all good.” But I wasn’t always checking for understanding. Looking like a reader and thinking like a reader aren’t the same thing.
Explaining things clearly
There were times I thought I’d given a really solid explanation, but students still couldn’t do the task. I was focused on what I said, not on whether they were processing it. Teaching is about what they think about, not what I say.
Quiet classrooms
A silent class used to feel like a win. But sometimes they were just copying or following steps without understanding. Calm can hide confusion.
Correct answers
I’ve marked neat, correct work and assumed they’d nailed it. But later, they couldn’t explain it or apply it anywhere else. You know the scenario, you teach a spelling rule one day, and the very next day it’s like it never happened. It was surface-level. They did the task, but the learning didn’t stick.
Jamie Clark has also written about this too. He talked about how we often take positive feedback, or a fun vibe in the room, as evidence that learning happened. I’m seeing that in myself too. It’s not that I wasn’t trying to do the right thing. I just hadn’t updated my mental model yet.
What Are They Actually Thinking About?
This is the part that hit me hardest. Sometimes the task itself becomes the thing students think about most. Not the learning.
You give them scissors and glue. Ask them to match things, sort things, colour things in. All of a sudden they’re focused on getting it done, not thinking deeply about the content. As Carl Hendrick says, “The more time and energy spent on the mechanics of a task, the more likely that’s what the student will think about — and therefore learn.”
If students are spending their brainpower on matching words based on the colour of the cards they are printed on, or the picture that illustrates the word that’s what they’ll remember. Not the concept. Not the thinking. Just the doing.
This doesn’t mean we throw out everything that’s visual or creative. It just means we have to be clearer about what the thinking is, and whether the task supports it.
What We’re Learning as a School
This shift feels especially important now that we’ve moved towards structured literacy, explicit instruction, and what Tom Sherrington would call Mode A teaching.
It’s something we’ve all noticed in different ways. This approach can feel like a lot at first. The content is more explicit and more layered. It’s a shift from what many of us were used to, especially if our idea of engagement was built on novelty, energy or student choice. This kind of teaching feels different. And that’s not a bad thing. It just takes some getting used to.
We’re no longer planning lessons around what we think students will enjoy most. We’re planning around what we want them to learn. That doesn’t mean enjoyment disappears. It just shows up differently: through success, through progress, through the feeling of getting something they couldn’t do before.
And I’m realising that we need new mental models for enjoyment too. It’s not just about laughter or noise or buzz. It’s about students feeling proud that they’ve learned something. That they’re getting better. That they can think hard and succeed.
Fun and creativity can still exist. But they come through the content. Through understanding. Through thinking. That’s where the good stuff lives.
What I’m Trying to Ask Myself More Often
I’m trying to be more critical of every task I give. Not in a negative way, but with curiosity.
What do I want students to think about?
How do I know they’re thinking about that?
What could get in the way?
Because cognitive engagement doesn’t always look how we expect it to. It’s not always bright or bubbly. But when I see a student pause before responding, or change their mind after a partner share, or explain something more clearly than they did yesterday, that’s the stuff I trust.
That’s why we’re using EDI engagement norms. Why we use turn and talk, choral response, cold calling. Not to control students, but to help us all stay in the thinking. Zach Groshell talks about high interaction and brisk pacing not just as tools for pace, but for focus. I’ve found that helpful.
Still a Work in Progress
I’m not there yet. I still catch myself using old cues. Still catch myself thinking, that lesson felt good, without asking if the learning stuck.
But this is part of the shift. If I want students to think hard and remember more, I have to keep reflecting on the tools I use and the assumptions I make.
It’s not always perfect (can teaching ever be perfect?!). But it’s worth sitting in the mess of it. Because when we design for real thinking, the kind that’s effortful and sticky, that’s where the learning happens.
And honestly, that’s where the joy lives too.