Originally published February 2012
Any student can disengage from the school experience. Some students see school as the place that identifies them as being not quite “as good as” their classmates. For other students, their academic success and resulting acknowledgements are not enough to maintain a sense of engagement. And some students fly under the radar, while waiting for the school year to be over: they are present, assignments are completed and they pass the grade. Here are three ways to re-engage students.
Link a student’s interest to the curriculum
If the student is interested in a wide range of sports, connect sports with different school subjects. With a junior high student, integrate performance statistics and probability when teaching math. For history, look at sports in early civilizations or their development over the years. For art, consider portraying physical movement through the arts. And for media, critically analyze the coverage of doping scandals.
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