As we stumble and explore better methods for student collaboration and discussion, let us keep in mind how important this work is if we want to make schools better and advance student learning. Among all the methods we find in the research, student engagement fueled by meaningful discussion may be the most critical. Even so, we don't always agree on our definitions and evidences of engagement nor discussion, along with related terms like "relevancy” and “agency.” At least we all know what we don’t want. We don’t want ritual engagement. We don’t want the teacher doing all the thinking. We don’t want students just staring for hours on end like the kids in those black-and-white classroom photos.

We can probably agree that student engagement by any definition requires students to be “doing something” or “thinking something” that makes their brains hurt a little, as well as some form of genuine interest in the topic. As a mental model, you might picture students taking part in some hands-on activity like a STEM project, along with a few complex questions that drive deep cognition and not just busy-work.

Of course, some cautions are provided at this point:

This is where the debate about engagement comes in, both by its definition and within its observed practices. Why? Because we must agree on what we expect to hear and see from true engagement, because student talk is a critical ingredient for increasing learning, because cognition is the whole ballgame.

In fact, the real question we should be asking is whether it is even possible to be engaged in learning if we are not talking with someone. Let’s let that rattle around for a moment before we respond too quickly.

In fact, I think it is fair to ask if there has ever been a level of true engagement that has not involved discussion or debate. To put it another way, we have to wonder if someone can be engaged and be alone at the same time. Why? Because learning is rarely a solo act.

As educators, we must wrestle with this conundrum. If there really are things that we can learn on our own (let’s say from reading a book), then why are we teaching those things in school? And that brings us right back to the question about what we should be teaching and learning if most answers can be found through AI anyway. That’s a blog post for another day, I assume.

Intellectual maturity requires mastery of things that we cannot learn alone

I say school should be designed around those key competencies that you simply cannot learn on your own. If we did, then school would be designed around collaboration, discussion, interpretation, and debate. We would collectively wrestle with complex and life-changing concepts that are the true game-changers on our way to intellectual maturity and self-actualization.

Here are a few for our consideration:

Complex Academic Competencies

Complex Life and Workplace Competencies

In the simplest of terms, being engaged in learning requires student voice (discussion, debate) and some version of self-expression (creating, designing). Because here is the key question: What is really the point of students knowing how to think if they don’t know how to articulate what they are thinking? Yes, self-expression is one form of self-actualization.

The key to learning is authentic engagement, and that requires high-cognitive skills like analysis and synthesis and, at some point, a meaningful expression of our understanding of that which we have just learned. The process of learning comes full circle when we hear and see students expressing the learned content that we have provided them as teachers, as well as their interpretations of that content.

Without that, we may hear a lot of student voices but, in the end, it is all just noise.