Few words are as pervasive in educational discourse as ‘engagement’. Teachers are asked to ‘engage’ learners, policymakers call for more ‘engaging’ lessons and pupils themselves often describe whether or not they felt ‘engaged’. 

In my own classroom, I design activities to foster initial engagement rather than passive participation. In a recent Year 10 lesson on secularisation in the UK, I used a brief ‘walkabout bingo’ where pupils asked classmates questions such as ‘Have you been to a place of worship in the last month?’ The first to fill a grid with twelve names won. The task revealed the class’s religiosity and prompted discussion about whether they might be considered religious, secular or representative of wider society. We then examined national statistics and evaluated our findings in a short written task. The five-minute activity generated lively discussion, though it may be less effective in smaller or more homogeneous classes. For me, it illustrates one form of engagement—though some might view it as superficial.

The problem with engagement

Over the past ten to fifteen years, the very idea of engagement has come under sustained criticism—particularly from researchers focused on the cognitive processes of knowledge acquisition, retention and retrieval. These commentators—often working within the paradigm of cognitive science—warn that talk of engagement risks prioritising surface-level attention, entertainment or behavioural compliance over genuine learning (Hendrick & Heal, 2020). Daniel Willingham (2009), for instance, argues that learning depends less on whether a student appears engaged and more on whether they are thinking deeply about the right things. Rob Coe (2013) sharpened this critique in his influential list of ‘poor proxies for learning’, pointing out that visible participation, enthusiasm or apparent busyness are not reliable indicators that pupils are actually learning.

Beyond the proxies

These arguments are not without merit: they expose the danger of collapsing learning into performance or affect. However, they also risk narrowing the meaning of engagement to what can be verified within a cognitive framework alone. 

As a result, the criticisms can be unintentionally disingenuous about what engagement has signified in broader research traditions. For decades, educational scholarship has conceptualised engagement in more holistic terms, encompassing behavioural participation, cognitive investment and emotional or affective connection (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). Beyond that, philosophers and pedagogues such as Biesta (2010), Alexander (2008) and Dewey (1938/1997) have argued that education is never reducible to the acquisition of knowledge alone: it is also relational, ethical, cultural and political.

An older tradition

The idea of engagement in learning has a much longer and richer history than contemporary debates sometimes acknowledge. Ancient pedagogues recognised that education was never simply a matter of depositing knowledge but of drawing learners into active participation. Socrates’ dialogues, for example, turned on the principle that understanding emerges through questioning, exchanging ideas and opinions and the learner’s own intellectual investment, which emphasizes pro-active—and arguably constructivist—participation, experiential interaction and debate as opposed to the passive accumulation of knowledge (Plato, trans. 2003). Similarly, Marcus Fabius Quintilian, writing in the first century CE, emphasised the importance of delight in study, arguing that students of all ages learn more effectively when instruction awakens curiosity and active—perhaps ‘busy’—interest (Quintilian, trans. 2001). 

Later humanist traditions, such as the philosophy of John Amos Comenius, also framed education as an endeavour to sustain attention, foster intrinsic motivation and connect knowledge with lived experience (Comenius, trans 1910). Modern accounts, such as John Dewey’s (1938/1997) philosophy of experience, stand in continuity with this lineage, positioning engagement not as a superficial add-on but as a constitutive element of education itself: the condition under which thinking, participation and meaning coalesce. Wider and more contemporary discussions on these and related issues can be found within the broader philosophy of education (see, for example, Curren, 2025).

I am aware, however, that some of the writers mentioned above have in recent years been dismissed as ineffective or even as purveyors of so-called ‘edu-myths’ by popular education commentators, particularly those aligned with contemporary discourses of ‘what works’ in education. Such criticisms are, in my view, perfectly sound – so long as, as already suggested above, we understand education narrowly as a largely scientific endeavour concerned with the acquisition of knowledge and little else.

Semantic confusions

That said, some of the cognitive scientists and commentators mentioned at the beginning of this piece would no doubt object to this dichotomy and argue that I have misunderstood their point. Many of the strategies and interventions they promote do, after all, foster motivation, persistence and positive classroom climates. For instance, Adam Boxer (2021) warns against activities that generate energy or enjoyment but fail to sustain thought on the core concepts to be learned, yet he also acknowledges that engagement remains a relevant and valuable term—so long as learners are engaged in learning that is purposeful and efficient.

It could be suggested, then, that the issue lies not with engagement itself but with how the term is used and interpreted. For some, engagement evokes the ‘all-singing, all-dancing’ lessons of yesteryear, when teachers were expected to entertain rather than instruct. Yet this is arguably a matter of semantics: engagement need not imply performance or distraction. The excesses of past practice should not be used to dismiss the value of enjoyment, curiosity and participation in learning—nor the broader role of engagement in cultivating a participatory culture of active inquiry, creativity and innovation both in and beyond the classroom.

Wider interpretations of empirical research

Additionally, recent empirical work—including a number of studies by cognitive scientists—adds further complexity. Some studies suggest that engagement is often a precondition for deep learning and is associated with motivation, persistence and school completion (Skinner, 2016; Wang & Fredricks, 2014). Some evidence also links engagement to long-term outcomes, particularly in vocational subjects (Abbott-Chapman et al., 2014). More contemporary research also highlights the role of teacher support and classroom climate, showing that pupils who perceive stronger support are more likely to report sustained engagement (Li et al., 2023; Prananto et al., 2025). Teachers will recognise both the variation in pupil engagement and the difficulty of fostering it while simultaneously teaching subject content and maintaining classroom management (Quin, 2017). If engagement is indeed multidimensional—behavioural, cognitive and emotional—should it be treated as an outcome in its own right, or merely as a means to improved attainment.

Rethinking the critique

From this perspective, the strength of the cognitive science critique outlined earlier is also its limitation. It identifies the risks of mistaking surface features for learning, but only by assuming that teaching and learning are reducible to the ‘science of learning’ understood—by and large—as knowledge acquisition. In doing so, it discounts the long history of pedagogical thought that has sought to situate teaching within a wider humanistic and democratic project. Engagement, in this broader sense, is not a distraction from learning but a condition for it: the process through which pupils are drawn into shared attention, sustained inquiry and meaningful participation in knowledge, culture and community.

Thus, to defend engagement is not to dismiss the insights of cognitive science—pupils will always need to acquire knowledge, pass examinations and secure the associated life chances that result – but rather to place those insights within a wider frame. Engagement matters not because it serves as a proxy for retention, but because it speaks to the dialogic, relational and moral dimensions of pedagogy. As Gert Biesta (2010) reminds us, education is not only about qualification but also about socialisation and subjectification. To dismiss engagement as a poor proxy is therefore to miss the point: it was never intended to be a proxy at all, but a way of naming the rich and multifaceted experience of being called into the educational encounter.

References

Abbott-Chapman, J., Martin, K., Ollington, N., Venn, A., Dwyer, T. & Gall, S. (2014). The longitudinal association of childhood school engagement with adult educational and occupational achievement: findings from an australian national study. British Educational Research Journal 40 (1): 102–120. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3031 

Alexander, R. (2008). Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking classroom talk (4th ed.). Dialogos.

Biesta, G. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy. Routledge.

Boxer, A. (2021, August 4). Engagement is not a dirty word [Blog]. A Chemical Orthodoxy. https://achemicalorthodoxy.co.uk/2021/08/04/engagement-is-not-a-dirty-word/

Coe, R. (2013). Improving education: A triumph of hope over experience. Inaugural lecture, Durham University. www.cem.org/attachments/publications/ImprovingEducation2013.pdf 

Comenius, J. A. (1910). The great didactic (M. W. Keatinge, Trans.). Russell & Russell. (Original work published 1657). https://monoskop.org/images/7/7e/Comenius_John_Amos_The_Great_Didactic_1967.pdf 

Curren, R. (2025, February 11). Philosophy of education. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/education-philosophy/

Dewey, J. (1997). Experience and education. Touchstone. (Original work published 1938). 

Fredricks, J. A., Blumenfeld, P. C., & Paris, A. H. (2004). School engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74(1), 59–109. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059

Hendrick, C., & Heal, J. (2020). Just because they’re engaged, it doesn’t mean they’re learning. Impact: Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching. https://my.chartered.college/impact_article/just-because-theyre-engaged-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-learning/ 

Li, W., Zhang, H., & Liu, Y. (2023). A study on the relationship between students’ learning engagement and higher-order thinking skills in programming learning. Thinking and Creativity, 49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2023.101369 

Prananto, K., Cahyadi, S., Lubis, F.Y. et al. (2025). Perceived teacher support and student engagement among higher education students – a systematic literature review. BMC Psychol 13, 112. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-025-02412-w 

Plato. (2003). The Republic (D. Lee, Trans., 2nd ed.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published ca. 380 BCE)

Quin, D. (2017). Longitudinal and contextual associations between teacher–student relationships and student engagement. Review of Educational Research 87 (2): 345–387. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654316669434 

Quintilian. (2001). Institutio oratoria (D. A. Russell, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published ca. 95 CE)

Skinner, E. (2016). Engagement and disaffection as central to processes of motivational resilience and development. In Handbook of Motivation at School, K. R. Wentzel and D. B. Miele (Eds). Routledge Handbooks Online.

Wang, M., & Fredricks, J. (2014). The reciprocal links between school engagement, youth problem behaviors, and school dropout during adolescence. Child Development 85 (2): 722–737. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12138 Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. Jossey-Bass.

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