Propelling Students Beyond ‘Doing School’

Many students aren’t very engaged in their learning, according to a recent survey of nearly 300,000 high schoolers—and close to half say they’re merely “doing school,” but not finding it particularly enjoyable or valuable.  

“These kids turn up. They do their homework. They get good-enough grades. They comply, which in academic terms means they’re behaviorally engaged,” write journalist Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, the Brookings Institution’s global education expert, in the 2025 book The Disengaged Teen. “But they’re not investing in what they’re learning, nor are they that interested in trying to make sense of it.”

To break the passivity habit, students need opportunities to “claim ownership of their learning,” writes eighth-grade language arts teacher James Salsich. In classrooms focused on active learning, work is frequently student-driven and collaborative, requiring teachers to “give some portion of the authority that has traditionally been theirs over to students,” Salsich says. “Students, on the other hand, take increased ownership for the direction and progress of their learning.”

Shifting classrooms toward a more student-centered model doesn’t require rewriting the entire script, experts argue. In fact, even minor tweaks in everyday teacher language, for example, can have a significant impact on student buy-in, according to psychologist and motivation researcher Johnmarshall Reeve. “When students are allowed some opportunity to take their own initiative, they are more engaged in class and better able to master new skills, they have better grades and fewer problems with peers—and they are happier, too,” wrote Anderson and Winthrop earlier this year in the New York Times. 

Still, allowing students more agency doesn’t mean “letting them do whatever they want,” Anderson and Winthrop caution. “It doesn’t mean lowering expectations, turning education into entertainment or allowing children to choose their own adventure.” Instead, it involves a concerted effort to challenge kids to set and pursue goals, while “helping them build strategies to reach those goals, assessing their progress and guiding them to course-correct when they fall short.”

A Foundation for Agency

Cultivating student independence “honors their capacity to surprise us with their insights, resilience, and creativity,” writes educational consultant Lainie Rowell. The goal isn’t to step away, instead, it involves “shifting how we support, moving from rescuing to empowering.”

Position experts: High school English teacher Marcus Luther begins each school year by asking students to articulate their values and preferences via a short index card survey. The exercise positions kids as active experts on themselves whose input will shape the classroom. This same principle applies when creating classroom norms, writes lead innovation designer Amy Adams. Involving students in establishing the expectations they’ll learn and work by creates a sense of ownership for kids from the start. 

Set expectations: Becoming active learners isn’t necessarily something students know how to do. Asking them to co-create and sign learning contracts—a document that “outlines actions the learner promises to take in a course to achieve academic success”—can clarify how they might take charge of their learning, writes Todd Finley, a professor of English education at East Carolina University. For example: “I will contribute at least one comment to every in-class discussion.” 

Shift responsibility: Rather than be the sole judge of who is actively learning, Luther turns the mirror toward students, regularly asking them to assess their own engagement. On a scale of one to five, with five being super active, “How active a learner are you at this point?,” he asks. “It’s okay if you want that to change!” 

Similarly, students often view the work of tracking their academic progress as the teacher’s role, but shifting some of this responsibility back to the learner can empower students to take the reins. Middle school social studies teacher Erin Merrill has her students independently track their own progress using kid-friendly language in data notebooks. “My students tell me they really like seeing what they have to learn, which isn’t something they’re given in a lot of classes, and they like having that visual of how they’re doing, especially growing over the course of the year,” she tells EdWeek.

Tapping Student Expertise

Some students find it challenging to recognize the skills they already possess, particularly those who’ve struggled consistently in academic settings. “If you’ve never felt successful at something, how do you know it’s possible?” asks instructional coach Tyler Rablin in his recent book, Hacking Student Motivation. 

Celebrate small wins: Helping students see and celebrate their small wins—like mastering a specific skill or grasping a difficult concept—can build confidence and demonstrate expertise, even if it’s emerging. When high school English teacher Cathleen Beachboard sees students progressing, she writes a quick Hope Note to leave on their desk. “It might say something like, ‘I see how hard you’re working—it’s paying off! Keep going,’” she explains.

Keep track: Ask students to select a work sample each week that represents a milestone in their learning and keep it in a folder. A student who struggles in math may discover through this portfolio reflection—reviewing collected work to identify patterns of strength and growth—that they have a clear grasp of adding and subtracting fractions, for example, which builds confidence. 

Ask your neighbor: “When the teacher is the only one in the room with the knowledge, there is a bottleneck,” explains Peter Johnston, a former elementary teacher and author of Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning. Often, when students encounter a roadblock, they don’t actually need the teacher’s perspective, says second grade teacher Angela Coleman. With the Ask 3 Before Me strategy, students must seek help from three peers before approaching the teacher. Stepping back shows students they’re “capable of answering their own questions and knowing what to do if they can’t instead of always relying on an adult,” Coleman says. 

Encourage peer review: In elementary math specialist Louisa Connaughton’s classroom, when students are done solving math problems, they check their answers with each other, not her. “Because students are less reliant on me and more reliant on each other, I am freed up to work with more focus with students who really need my support,” she explains. If students find their answers are different, they are motivated to pool their expertise and work together to figure out how or why they got different responses.

Language Shifts That Pack a Punch

Language used with students doesn’t just convey information, it shapes the learning dynamic, Johnston writes. “We cannot persistently ask questions of children without becoming one-who-asks-questions and placing children in the position of the one-who-answers-questions.” Language, when used intentionally, can both describe and shape the role students play in the classroom—while positioning them as competent, valuable contributors and legitimate sources of insight who will drive their learning forward.

Confer competence: Elementary school teacher Laurie McCarthy notices when students help each other, for example, “which they do automatically (without awareness) when they are engaged,” Johnston says. But rather than let these moments pass, she highlights their value to the learning community. This “builds students’ sense of agency, and makes available the language they will need to explain it,” Johnston notes. Then McCarthy invites the student to teach the strategy to the class, a quick and simple act that “confers an enormous sense of competence while distributing the knowledge and establishing classmates as bona fide sources of information.” Small shifts like this can accumulate over time into something powerful: a ripple effect in how students see themselves and their role in the learning process. 

Speak, think, and write like a…: It’s not enough to simply label students scientists, or mathematicians, Johnston notes. Students must actively inhabit these identities, understanding “what scientists (or mathematicians or authors) do, how they talk and act.” High school history teacher Benjamin Barbour challenges his students to choose a modern-day artifact and adopt a historian’s mindset, for example, imagining what future historians might infer about our society from this object centuries from now. This engages students in the actual work of historians as they “make hypotheses about a society from its material culture and weigh how different interpretations of historical objects can shape our understanding of the past.” 

In the science classroom, educational consultant Eric Rhoades has moved away from the I Do, We Do, You Do model in favor of more iterative processes that mirror “how scientists develop theories.” Thinking routines like See, Think, Wonder challenge students to occupy the role of researchers as they analyze, observe, interpret, and question scientific phenomena. “If and when they get stuck during a thinking routine,” Rhoades says, remind them that persisting through uncertainty is exactly what real scientists do and that breakthroughs come from working through that confusion, not avoiding it.