“Student engagement” is a commonly used term and a goal shared across all education levels. With so many variables involved, it can be challenging to prioritize the most important factors of what cultivates students to be engaged as often as possible in our classrooms. In an attempt to prioritize, we might wonder what factors need to be held as “best friends” to student engagement versus other factors that might be viewed as an “acquaintance” that you only think about occasionally in its relevance to this goal. The Ignite Engagement program lives in constant reflection around this question of friendship.  

Redefining Student Engagement

In its first year in 2019, Ignite Engagement centered its student engagement strategies around Ellin Oliver Keene’s work in Engaging Children. As members dove deep into redefining engagement with this lens and applying Keene’s four pillars of engagement, many “friends” showed up as crucial factors to student engagement, including environment, climate, and teacher practices. As the work continued, it became undeniable that “school belonging and engagement are intricately linked and may even be considered to be symbiotic, requiring each other to exist.” (Allen & Boyle, 2022)

Cultivating a Culture of Belonging

To support this necessary friendship, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s work in Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy became crucial to integrate into the Ignite Engagement program’s content. Dr. Muhammad’s five pursuits within her framework provide insight into what it looks like to create a culture of belonging for our students. The pursuit layers include the development of identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy.

“When these five learning pursuits are taught together, the learning becomes humanizing and more complete.”

(Muhammad, 2020)

Schools must engage students in more than just content. Students need to develop the ability to celebrate and advocate for themselves and others as they learn to navigate the world they will encounter outside of the school walls. Students are much more likely to experience all or any subset of the pillars of engagement when exposed to the rich and rigorous experiences that occur as a product of planning through the lens of the pursuits. The Ignite Engagement program continues to enhance how this endeavor is brought to life, from the program content to how the implementation is supported through learning labs and coaching. 

In addition to using her five-pursuit framework, Muhammad notes, “Before educators begin to teach students to know themselves and others, teachers must first do their own self-work. This work involves teachers deeply unpacking their own histories, identities, biases, assumptions, and tensions with racism and other oppressions they have learned, experienced, and practiced.” To support the needed “self-work,” the Ignite Engagement program continues to enhance ways its members reflect on the perspectives they hold and how this impacts the way we as educators show up in the classroom for our students. 

Prioritizing Belonging and Student Engagement

Without question, “the concepts of belonging and student engagement can be considered two best friends–needed for one another and essential for students in educational contexts.”(Allen & Boyle, 2022) Regarding student engagement, we must foster a sense of belonging within our schools. Our top priority should be to cultivate a sense of belonging, treating it as we would a best friend that we cannot imagine living without. To achieve this, we need to prioritize relationships. 

We are now accepting applications for our 2023-2024 Elementary Apprentice Cohort. We would love for you to be a part of it! Interested? You can learn more about this program by reviewing a recent blog post or viewing a video that features the perspectives of current program teachers, coaches, principals, and students.

For more information about the transformational experience of Kent ISD’s Ignite Engagement program, contact Brenna Fraser. 

This blog post was written by Brenna Fraser, Early Literacy Consultant for Kent ISD and edited by Amanda Walma, Professional Learning Coordinator for Kent ISD.