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There are a myriad of reasons students disengage from their learning and school. Our new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better (out January 7 2025), shares new evidence on the powerful strategies teachers can use to support struggling students. Teachers play an essential role in inspiring and engaging students. Some are obvious such as introducing new ideas and core content. But they also have the chance to encourage sticking with work when things get hard, and helping young people find their spark and passions. Teachers of course cannot do this all alone: Parents and caregivers play an essential role too.

We focus on helping educators and caregivers boost adolescents’ engagement with school and learning. We found that the vast majority of students start kindergarten loving school but by third grade that has fallen to 75% and by 10th grade only 25% of students say they love school. The three strategies below can be used in primary and secondary schools alike.

#1 Identify student engagement with the 4 Modes

Our research found that students disengage from school slowly over time and the signs can often be hard to see. Sometimes students look like they are engaged—following directions, not disrupting the class—but are actually beginning to disconnect from their learning in school. We found children engage in school through four main modes: Explorer, Achiever, Passenger, Resister. Using this framework can help teachers, and parents, see disengagement more easily, and act to make sure students don’t get stuck in one mode.

Explorer Mode: Students are driven by internal curiosity, investigate questions that matter to them, and persist in achieving their goals. These students develop resilience and skills that help them thrive and often do very well in school.

Achiever Mode: These high-achieving students are engaged in their learning but there can be a downside because they often tie their self-worth to their performance, leading to a fear of failure and potential mental health challenges. They need support in taking on new challenges and encouragement to value themselves beyond their achievements.

Passenger Mode: These students may look engaged but they are coasting along, doing the bare minimum to required. They need help connecting school to their interests, skills, and learning needs.

Resister Mode: These students are the most visibly disengaged and often struggle silently with feelings of inadequacy or invisibility, expressing their disengagement through behaviors like ignoring homework, feigning illness, skipping class, or acting out.

The modes are not fixed identities and students can be in one mode in their extracurricular club activities and another mode in school. We found students can switch between modes fairly quickly depending on the environment they are in. When you see a student getting stuck in one, try the second strategy below, especially for children mainly operating in Resister and Passenger mode.

#2 Deploy small shifts in language and approach to boost engagement

There are several small shifts teachers can make to give students more opportunities to be in Explorer mode. These are shifts in style, not approach, and have been tested across the globe from Peru to the U.S. to Korea. In other words, teachers can maintain their approach to classroom management, to discipline, and to instruction while employing these shifts. The academic Johnmarshall Reeve and his colleagues have rigorously tested these approaches comparing student engagement levels between classrooms in the same school where some teachers use the autonomy-supportive style and others don’t. These shifts include such things as: ^[1]

• Provide explanatory rationales. When teachers add a short explanation to the reasons behind their rules, requests, and procedures it helps students see the purpose and boosts their engagement. This even goes for assigning uninteresting or routine practice work. When teachers explain why they want students to do it, it helps motive them.
• Use invitational language. When teachers shift slightly how they give directions, from a “command and control” style to more invitational, students are more likely to engage. This subtle shift in language, both words and body language, can include rephrasing instructions from “you have to”, “you should”, “If you don’t, then…” to “you may”, “may I suggest”, “maybe you can try”. For the student, the command-and-control language is often received as a push to comply whereas the invitational language is seen as an encouragement to engage.
• Offer choice, where possible. When teachers integrate manageable choices for students to make in their classrooms, it requires students to self-reflect on what they would prefer. This very act naturally engages students more in the task at hand. Manageable choices could be giving students a choice of picking one of three different assignments to do for homework or offering a short list of topics for them to choose from for a writing assignment, or selecting how they want to do their work (e.g. alone, with a friend).
• Solicit students’ perspectives. This can be difficult to do for teachers with large class sizes, but one approach is to give students at the end of class an index card, a sticky note, or an electronic exit ticket and ask them ‘What is one remaining question about the lesson they would like to clarify or learn more about?’ When teachers take that feedback and adapt their next lesson to incorporate their students’ questions, students feel they have a say in the flow of instruction. That motivates and engages them.

#3 Partner with parents and caregivers

Evidence from around the globe shows how important it is for caregivers to model the thrill of learning at home. In the U.S., research found that how caregivers interact with their children at home is two-times more predictive of student motivation and achievement than socio-economic status. In other words, everyone can help foster children’s love of learning regardless of their financial resources.

Building strong, trusting relationships with your students’ families can help identify barriers to engagement that they may be facing outside the classroom and discuss possible solutions. ^[2] Teachers can also use the four modes of engagement as an easy-to-understand framework for discussing students’ motivation and interest in their learning at school. While family members are not teachers, they can be excellent motivators for their children to engage in school.