Want Students to Engage? Start With Their Future

The first days of school are filled with rules, routines, schedules, expectations and plenty of reminders about those expectations! All of this is important.

But before students truly engage, there’s something else they need. They need to be invited into creating the year they’re about to experience. They need a chance to tell us how they hope things will be.

When students have a say in their future, they are more interested in helping create it. That’s why I like to begin the new school year with a simple solution focused question:

“When this year is going well for you, how will you know?”

Think about how different that is from trying to cheerlead students into being excited about school. Instead of telling them what a “good year” should look like, we ask them to describe it through their eyes. And when they do, they give us wonderful clues about what matters to them and how we might encourage them. The ideas are theirs.

You might hear:

“I’m actually getting my work done.”

“I can be with my friends more.”

“My teacher likes me.”

“I want to come to school.”

“I pass math!”

There is the beginning of their preferred future. And now we get to be curious:

“Wow! How will you get that to happen?”

“What else will you be doing?”

“Who might notice first?”

Suddenly, we're not trying to convince students to have a good year.

They tell us what they want, and we just ask what they need to do to achieve it.

This week, find a teacher in your school who is willing to do an experiment with you and her students. With the teacher in the classroom, ask the students:

“Suppose a few weeks from now, you notice that school is going well for you. What will be happening?”

Write their answers on the board.

Then ask:

“What will YOU be doing that helps make that happen?”

“What can your teacher do to help that to happen?”

That's it.

It's quick. It's hopeful. Its student led.

That’s the Solution Focused Difference.

After you try this little classroom experiment, consider sharing this exercise with all your teachers and invite them to try the question themselves during the first week.

They may discover that it works for more than the beginning of the year too.

When a class gets off track, instead of another lecture about what's going wrong, imagine the teacher asking:

“Okay, suppose today, this class goes better than yesterday. What will be happening so we can all learn together?”

Then listen.

Students often know much more about creating a successful classroom than we think. Sometimes, we just need to ask.

Have a wonderful September!