Keeping students focused and motivated can be a challenge for any teacher because even the most carefully planned lesson can lose momentum when students are distracted or low on energy. If you’re looking for student engagement activities to combat apathy in your classroom, the good news is that you don’t need complicated lessons or hours of prep. Small shifts in how students interact with the material can dramatically increase participation, focus, and motivation. If you need help with this, read on, because I’m sharing 5 activities to boost student engagement in your classroom, plus a few freebies to help you get started.
These strategies work well in middle school and high school classrooms, especially in English language arts, where discussion, writing, and analysis are key.
What Are Student Engagement Activities?
Student engagement activities are ones that require students to actively participate in learning rather than passively listen. These activities might include discussion challenges, movement-based tasks, quick writing prompts, or collaborative problem-solving. When students are asked to think, talk, or create during a lesson, their attention and motivation increase.
5 Student Engagement Activities You Can Try Tomorrow:
- Quick and easy ways to add movement into your instruction
- Challenges for creating more engaged discussions
- Short (but effective) writing activities
- Real-world connections for character analysis
- Using visuals to teach literary analysis
1. Get Students Moving: Standing Activities That Boost Engagement
Many of the exercises we ask students to do can be done on their feet. When any human sits for long periods of time, the natural inclination to veg kicks in. If you build in opportunities for students to move a bit during class, you will be amazed at how it improves energy and engagement.
Research on active learning shows that short breaks for movement, discussion, or creativity can help students refocus and improve attention during class. Even two or three minutes of movement or collaboration can help reset student attention and increase engagement for the next learning task.
And you don't need to plan something elaborate to make this happen.
The think-pair-share is a well-used engagement strategy in many classrooms: pose a question, give students time to reflect, then have them share with a partner. It's an effective way to get all students thinking. However, when I read the room and see that I may be losing the students, I'll get them to do a stand and share instead. It's exactly the same as the turn-and-talk, they just do it standing up.
And just giving students a few minutes to stand can do wonders for boosting student engagement.
NOTE: The first time you get students to stand to work, you may have to cajole them into it. You aren't teaching physics, but a body at rest does tend to stay at rest. Once you train them, however, your students will get into it. Trust me. I did it every semester with every group of students I had- and it works!
Now on to some other activities you can boost student engagement while they learn.
2. Sentence Stem Challenge for More Engaged Discussions
If you'd like to get students more engaged in the discussions they have in class, try this sentence stem challenge.
This strategy is the perfect way to energize your students because not only will they enjoy the competition of the challenge, but they will also practice their skills for discussion. An added bonus is that it is an activity that can take very little time.
There are two ways you can do this challenge:
Use the quickest and easiest version when your students are studying a text together - a novel, a short story, even a poem. Group them and give them sentence stems for discussing author technique (👉🏻 grab it here). Tell your students that they will be competing to see which group can come up with the most accurate assertions about the text in the time you give them.
Timing will depend on the age of your students and the complexity of the text, so you'll have to be the judge of that. However, I'd probably start with five minutes and then circulate to see how they are getting along. Give them a one-minute warning when it looks like most are getting to the end.
This is a great way to not only build engagement but also have students practice writing analytically.
You can do something similar with discussion stems: assign a topic that you think students will engage with, one that will have multiple points of view. For example, should we have school uniforms? Would a four-day school week work? Should our screen time be limited?
First, start by giving students a handout with some sentence starters or stems. You can access some of mine here. Then, group students and tell them you want them to brainstorm how they feel about the topic. Then, you get reps from each group up to the front of the room to practice debating the issue using the sentence stems. You'll get more detail and direction here.
If your students like this, extend it with an argumentative or persuasive challenge (that's fun to do and easy to grade!)
3. Short Writing Activities That Energize Students
Short, meaningful stories can pack a powerful punch that energizes even the most apathetic student. Most students love to tell their stories, and when you give them a short, focused way to do so, they'll get engaged.
Start with a six-word memoir: Tell the story of this class right now. Give them this example (or one of your own) as a jumping-off point: Students look bored; must change something. Or Bell's ringing soon. Time to dance.
Next, you can move on to more words with sagas, short 50-100-word narratives that focus on point of view and conflict. My students used to have so much fun with these that they often begged to do more. Seriously.
If you want to use short writing assignments to build student engagement, check out my saga lesson here. The New York Times also has lots of ideas and examples for 100-word narratives.
4. Engaging Character Analysis: The Fake TikTok Activity
If your school is ok with students using phones, have them work in small groups or pairs to create a fake TikTok video that captures some aspect of a character in a text you are studying together.
Tell them to pick one characteristic, and that the content of the video needs to illustrate this trait without a) saying who the character is and b) what the trait is. Students will submit the videos to you and guess as a class who and what each group was trying to capture.
Your students will have a hoot - and practice their analytical skills at the same time. If you want a resource that is ready to use for this kind of activity, check this out!
5. Engage in Literary Analysis with Visual Literacy Activities
If you want to build your students' analytical muscles, spend some time analyzing visuals. They find them much less intimidating than text. And, let's face it, many of them spend more time inundated with visuals than with the ideas in the books we give them to read. So it makes sense to devote some time to analyzing them.
To do this, find some interesting visuals and ask your students to analyze what the creator was trying to achieve with it. Your students will enjoy the process and use skills they can transfer to close reading.
You can get more ideas for teaching visual literacy here.
So there are 5 Activities to Boost Student Engagement. Which one might you use with yours?
Want more ways to do a quick energy boost with your students? Check this out!
You might also like these student engagement activities for secondary classrooms.
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