Encouraging Student Engagement: 3 Creative Ideas for Schools
Students, just like adults, can easily get lost in their thoughts and mentally check out of their day-to-day responsibilities, including schoolwork. After all, your students often have busy lives after hours—from participating in team sports to volunteering at local nonprofits to beef up their college scholarship applications. So, how can you reengage your students and get them excited to be in school?
You need the right engagement tactics! You know your students best, so framing fun activities, challenges, and projects to their interests can help bring their minds back to the classroom and keep motivation high. To get the ball rolling, it can be helpful to reference some tried and true engagement strategies that your students will likely love!
In this article, we’ll go over the following best practices to upgrade your learning environment and drive high engagement levels among students of all ages:
Involve your students in fundraising
Connect lessons with the real world
Encourage students to celebrate each other’s accomplishments
By making every day of the school week an exciting learning experience, you can impart invaluable skills and knowledge to your students that will help them during this school year and beyond. Let’s begin!
Involve students in school fundraising
Classroom fundraisers are a great way for students to play a role in the longevity of their school while cultivating teamwork and leadership skills. Whether you’re an elementary school or high school professional, you can get students of all ages involved in fundraising. For example, you might host:
An eCard fundraiser: Everyone loves a good greeting card, from a happy holidays note to birthday wishes on their special day. Why not convert this opportunity into a fundraiser that your school can benefit from year-round? eCardWidget’s guide to charity eCards explains that, in exchange for a donation, your school can enable community members to send personalized digital cards to friends and family members for any occasion. Ask your students to help design these eCards so you can involve them in the fundraising process and make them feel more connected to your institution.
A product fundraiser: A product fundraiser hands over the fundraising reins to your students. Put simply, your students will be tasked with selling products like chocolate bars or gourmet popcorn to support your school. To incentivize students to work hard, host a contest where the student who raises the most money wins a special prize, such as branded school merchandise or free school lunch for a week. You can also have your students work together in teams with their classes to foster a greater sense of community and shared purpose.
A peer-to-peer walkathon: If your school hasn’t hosted a walkathon in the past, you’re missing out on a big engagement and fundraising opportunity! These events get students up and moving for a great cause during school hours, helping to promote physical wellness and better focus in school. Plus, the peer-to-peer fundraising element challenges students to raise as much money as possible from friends and family before the big event, allowing students to cultivate strong communication skills and foster resilience and determination in pursuit of their goals.
You can also mix and match fundraising ideas to better meet your students and community’s interests. For instance, you might host a peer-to-peer eCard fundraiser where students create personal fundraising pages. Then, parents and community members donate, and they can then send an eCard to anyone in their networks.
No matter what school fundraising idea you use, you’ll need the right technology to streamline your operations and make fundraising a positive and rewarding experience for students.
The OneCause guide to school fundraising platforms recommends investing in a solution with event management tools, online giving capabilities, and peer-to-peer fundraising functionality so students can easily build out personal fundraising pages and share them with their networks.
Connect lessons with the real world
One of the biggest complaints that you’ve more than likely heard your students say in the classroom is: “How is this going to help us in the real world?”
When students don’t understand the tangible connection between what they’re learning and how it will help them outside the classroom, they’re more likely to clock out of your lessons and disregard their schoolwork. Conversely, establishing how lessons across every subject provide value to students will foster greater engagement and curiosity.
Add a component to all of your teachings that explains how what your students are learning will translate in the real world. Let’s take a look at how you can do this for the following subject areas:
Math: Create simulations that show math principles in action. For example, an elementary school might distribute pretend dollars to students and then ask them to go “shop” for available items, like erasers or school merchandise. Students will then be tasked with budgeting their money, helping them to practice basic math skills like adding and subtracting in a real-life setting.
Science: Conduct experiments that show the real-life impact of scientific principles. For example, a middle school science teacher explaining osmosis might dunk potato slices into a glass of salt water and a glass of water. Then, students would be tasked with observing the effects of the different water solutions on the potatoes, showing the process of osmosis in action. Get creative with your experiments, but make sure students have the right lab equipment (e.g., goggles, gloves, lab coats, etc.) for higher-level experiments to promote safety!
Reading: Your students might wonder why they should read fictitious books. After all, these people didn’t exist, so there’s no value in reading about their adventures, right? Wrong! You might explain the many ways famous stories have helped to influence popular culture, political leaders, various art forms like film, and more. Or, break down a story into its different plot points to help explain narrative structure so students can hone their writing abilities.
Get creative with teaching students how to apply what they learn. Your students will be much more receptive to your lessons when they’re attention-grabbing and make the subject matter come to life.
Encourage students to celebrate each other’s accomplishments
Peer-to-peer recognition is a great way to foster collaboration in the classroom and create strong connections between students. After all, when students have solid friendships and peer-to-peer relationships, they’ll be more excited about coming to school each day and working together in pursuit of their mutual academic goals.
Foster peer-to-peer recognition by having your students:
Send each other recognition eCards
Fundraising isn’t the only use case for eCards! Just like employees in many business settings send peer-to-peer eCards congratulating each other on a job well done, students can do the same. You can brand your eCards according to the character traits your school values, such as honesty, respect, or good citizenship, and then have students send eCards to their peers when they see them exhibit these traits.
Make sure to work with a fully customizable online greeting card platform so you can easily design greeting cards that align with your school’s branding. Customization tools will also come in handy for your school’s fundraising campaigns. For instance, you can theme your eCards to different holidays, allowing you to step up your New Year’s, Halloween, or Valentine’s Day fundraising strategy!
Vote for a student of the week or month
Have students nominate candidates each week or month when they see a peer doing something great. Then, all the students in your classroom can vote on who they feel deserves the title of student of the week or month! Consider giving the winning student a special prize, such as a certificate or free school supplies.
Share compliments in a compliment jar
Assign students someone each week that they have to compliment. They’ll write it down and add it to the compliment jar. At the end of the month, you can read these compliments aloud to the class, helping each student feel special and valued!
To encourage students to practice recognizing their peers regularly, you might offer fun incentives. For example, consider giving the student who sends the most eCards throughout the year free branded merchandise or a special badge. Make sure to give your students clear instructions on how to celebrate their peers so everyone is on the same page.
Wrapping Up
Driving engagement in the classroom is easy when you have the right strategies! Leverage and customize these creative ideas to fit your school’s unique students for the best results. Make sure to collect feedback from students and parents so you can adjust your strategies as needed to keep your students tapped in.