What is student engagement and why does it matter? In this episode, Vanessa, Ellen, Lisa, and Bronwen interrogate what it means to be engaged in learning. The five questions guiding this topic are: 

1. [01:40] What is student engagement? 
2. [06:22] How do you measure student engagement?
3. [15:18] Why does student engagement matter?
4. [27:17] How are we tying student engagement to school improvement?
5. [29:12] What does student engagement have to do with NEXTschool?

For more info about our team and this podcast, jump to [33:30]. A transcript of each podcast, citations, and additional information accompany each podcast and are also available on our website at nextschoolquebec.com. Music is by Neal Read, he's at nealread.ca. 

Hello and welcome to ChangEd, a podcast that lifts the curtain on educational change and brings you into the room with the people doing it. My name is Vanessa, and joining me in the studio are Lisa, Bronwen, and Ellen. We've got two new voices on the podcast, Ellen you've heard from before in the design thinking recording, today to talk about student engagement, we've got Dr. Bronwen Low and Dr. Lisa Starr, all part of our team, and they're just going to tell you a little bit about themselves. Let's start with Lisa.

Yo, yo, yo! All right. So, as you know, my name's Lisa Starr. I'm one of the lead researchers in the project. Specialization is sometimes hard to define cause if I say educational change, that makes sense cuz of the podcast, but really my background is in schooling. I was a teacher for 15 years and so that underpins the lens in which I look through and at a lot of things. And so I think specializing, I guess for the purpose of this in teacher education is probably the most accurate.

Hi, I'm Bronwen Low and I'm also a member of this research team, and I'm really interested in how we can transform schools and communities to better serve socially marginalized young people. And some of that research has looked at informal education settings like community centres for youth and the kinds of cultural production happening there. And some of it has looked at transforming schools so that they're more centred around young people's skills and interests and talents.

All right, so today we are going to be talking about student engagement. So I'll start us off and the first question is, what is student engagement?

To me, the bottom line is do kids wanna be there? You know, are they actually interested in what's happening in their classrooms or the content that's happening? And then, you know, not only is it gauge their interest, but then how does that interest then feed into the learning? So if they're not interested, and some people aren't, like, I don't have a particular affinity towards Canadian history, so does that mean I'm disengaged? Maybe. But if the content is delivered in such a way that it becomes more engaging, or I have an opportunity to talk to people and learn from each other, then that level of engagement increases. And so it's really the opportunity to dig in to what the learning is supposed to be in a way that's motivating so that students want to learn more.

One tricky thing about engagement is that it's easy to tell in yourself. Like you're into it, you're excited about what you learn, and you want to, you want to hear more, you're willing to commit time to it. But it can be very hard as a teacher to identify those who are engaged or not. There are ways of performing engagement and good students learn how to look like they're engaged. Um, but the students who are, who don't have those skills or don't feel like it's something they want to do, they might still be engaged in the subject, but they're not showing it. And it's thought that engagement is cognitive, emotional, and behavioural. And uh, sometimes as a teacher, it can be hard to read which one of those is at play.

Student engagement is difficult to measure because it requires you to engage with people, ask students, and not every teacher wants to do that because it can be seen as a reflection on their own inability or lack of success as a teacher. When I'm teaching classes, I always ask people if they've seen the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which most people have, so it's a pretty good reference. There's a moment where Ben Stein is the teacher. He's the most boring teacher ever. It cuts to the kids. One kid's got drool coming outta their mouth. Other kids are sleeping. Other kids are just so clearly disengaged with what's happening as he's taking attendance. And that's what I tell students to look for (our student teachers), when you see that glassed-over look, they are not paying attention to you. And it doesn't matter if you say, does anyone have any questions? And no one says yes, and therefore you assume that they're paying attention. They're not. And you can tell by the look on their face that they're disengaged. And it often comes from those more kind of traditional ways that we deliver education when we stand and talk at students instead of really learning with them. And I think that's the pivotal piece. And all of those then feed into what Bronwen said about, you know, if you differentiate engagement through cognitive, behavioural, emotional, academic, however you want to differentiate them, they all have an interconnecting role with one another. So, you can have someone who's very academically motivated, but behaviourally disengaged, which creates a problem. And so, you have to look at the combinations of those different factors to really think through engagement, which is time consuming. And so, people don't have the time to do it, so they, again, they revert back to the markers in saying, well our graduation rates are great, so we don't have a problem when in fact students are bored. They're disengaged. They've just become really good at the game of school.

It's a more personal kind of task to be able to figure out whether or not a student is engaged, but because of the way that we are assessing and grading students, that like quantitative feature of assessment, I think we forget that it's arbitrary, that we have these ideas of, because it's a number, somehow we've quantified something into something that is measurable and understandable. Whereas the qualitative data of talking with the student about whether or not they feel engaged, along whatever dimensions it is you are deciding is engagement, will give you a lot more information about them as a learner. And winds up being a lot less arbitrary than a number that has assessed…something.

Completion. Yeah.

Yeah. Or rote learning or…

Attendance?

Mm-hmm.

A lot of the teaching we do in the university is in fairly big classes, and that's where engagement can be particularly tricky. And one of the things I appreciated about online teaching, one of the very few things, was the chat in, in a Zoom room. The people who were much more comfortable participating textually but would never speak up in class or in small groups. And so, you can try to support different strategies of engagement in person, but it's the... Online teaching has asked me to think about what are ways to, to chart engagement, which don't rely the courage to speak up in a class of 60 people.

That's a good point.

Yeah. Question number two, how do you measure student engagement?

There's the million-dollar question right there. Should we frame this a little bit?

Yeah.

You know, just to contextualize? Most of what we're talking about, I think is more relevant to a high school setting. People fail to look at the relationship between success and engagement. Again, cause success is easy to measure, and engagement isn't. So I think the very first thing goes back to student voice. So in a typical school structure where there's, I would say a fairly entrenched hierarchy, students are always at the bottom. And so, they are spoken at or to but not with, and I think that's a real key piece. If you want to find out if people are engaged, you have to engage them in conversation and talk to them. And the way that our system is structured, we don't have a lot of opportunity to do that. So, if you think about notions of formative assessment, formative assessment lends itself really well to measuring student engagement. But how do you build that into a 45 or a 60-minute class? How do you actually talk to 32 kids in your class in a given period? It's impossible. And so, then it becomes a much more complex task to kind of have to check in and do it with intentionality to be able to find out where students are at. And it requires people to also be, as teachers, deeply reflexive and vulnerable. Because that means the feedback that they're getting from students who are disengaged means that... it's not necessarily a reflection on them as an individual teacher, but I think it is a powerful reflection on how they're approaching teaching. And so, what tools and skills are we giving to teachers that allow them to develop their own, um, pedagogy? With student engagement in mind as opposed to student success, and you're really challenging a system that has a difficult time tipping that on its head.

Well, and I think sometimes not taking it personally when a student isn't engaged. Not every time is everything that you're hoping to teach, going to be personally engaging for every student. You can do your best, but when you have a class full of 60 people, that not all 60 are going to be engaged every time and being okay with that in terms of developing a lesson.

But the goal is balance.

Mm-hmm.

It's not a hundred percent every time. And so, I think this is the other shortfall of the way that we approach teacher education is that we don't remind people to consider the bigger picture. So, what's the end result? So, they think about what I'm doing in my class in this moment, and that's the whole purpose of lesson planning.

Mm-hmm.

Right. What am I doing right now? But the idea of unit planning, okay, what am I doing in a larger picture, but what am I trying to do to the end of the year? That's something that you start to develop your skills in when you're in the classroom. But it's, it's almost unfair because students are the ones that are kind of the victims of your trial-and-error period. And so, we don't do a very good job of communicating to the wider public that your intention is not to become experts at the end of a four-year bachelor of education degree. We're starting the process. We're planting the seed, but then it has to continue. But then the system doesn't always allow for the degree of development. So, imagine as a new teacher, if you could start out with a partial workload so that you could spend the rest of that time continuing to develop your own practice. But that's not cost effective. So then we don't do that.

It seems to me that a close cousin of engagement is motivation.

Mm-hmm.

And what we know about motivation is that choice, support, balance between some support and some freedom are, are integral to having people want to become engaged in what's happening in school. But it can be very difficult if you have a class of say, 32 students to try to create spaces for people to be selecting, self-determining if you're working within traditional school frameworks.

Mm-hmm.

And that's where looking at new models is so crucial. Project-based learning being one that comes up a lot.

When we start to really think about student engagement, you know, it's like a ripple effect. The stone hits the water and it ripples out to things like, oh, how do we use space? How do we allocate resources? How do we allocate subject areas? How do, when do we actually ask, how do we use assessment? Like, it just is a, a becomes an overwhelming task to try and think about. You know, we talk about this notion of a lost generation as a result of Covid, which I think, you know, there, there may be some truth to that, but I actually think it started way before then. It had nothing to do with not being able to actually be in person. It, it's happening because we're not thinking about how people learn. We're thinking about how to organize learning in a way that makes sense for the adults in the building.

As can be assessed as easily as possible.

Mm-hmm. I think if we're going to redefine success along the lines of student engagement, then we also have to do some scaffolding in terms of teaching students what engagement looks like.

Yep.

So that they can have some agency in their own levels of engagement. Because it can't be uniquely the teacher's responsibility to figure out all the student's interests and how to best align the curriculum with those interests.

That's a good point.

There has to be some autonomy and direction on part of the students who are in those classrooms.

I can't remember who said it, but that every classroom should be organized like a kindergarten classroom.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I wish we had lab spaces like that so we could actually have students navigating space and the organization of that space, uh, because I think that would get people thinking about why we do the things we do with greater intentionality so that a question about engagement starts to make more sense. So they start to recognize that, you know, that people complain, well the desks are all in rows and it makes it really boring cause you can't talk to anyone. There's actually a really good purpose to having students working individually in rows and that that absolutely, there's no problem with that. Depending on the nature of the learning that's taking place. It is not difficult to move desks around or reorganize classrooms, but we have to think about it with intentionality to make sure that we have the equipment necessary to be able to do that. You can't just all of a sudden say, okay, we're going to take out all the desks and we're going to replace them with bouncy chairs.

Mm-hmm.

Like, that's not going to happen. That's not practical. So there's also a level of discussion that's required and how do we work with the resources that we have to make this space the most effective learning environment possible.

Yeah. And taking that one step further, asking kids what they would like or involving them in the process of figuring out the space together.

Yeah.

I think a lot about my kids' experience in an alternative elementary school where the whole curriculum was project-based and what was interesting is how much time was spent equipping kids with the skills to be autonomous, to explore what they're interested in, to move from an idea to a project. And so, you don't want to underestimate the amount of work and scaffolding that supporting autonomous learning can involve. Um, so it's not as if you can step back and say, okay, kids, you know, we want you to be as engaged as possible. Go for it. Study, explore what you want. I mean, there were, takes a lot of careful scaffolding.

…and I was just going to say that breaking the mentality of how teachers learned in schools, and then were trained to teach, and then have taught for years and saying, okay, this is how you support student engagement. Within the framing of that mentality... It's really hard. It's like a huge learning curve.

Schools are a testament to the power of indoctrination. Right? Like you can't get around it. And so even when we have students coming in and, and testing their own skills and setting them up in a, an envir… or in a situation where, okay, you're going to teach this group of people. As soon as a stressor hits, where someone's not paying attention or something's not going the way they want, a lot of new teachers will revert back to lecturing because it's what they have seen, it's what they're familiar with, and it's usually the most recent experience they've had because they're coming out of a university system and then they can’t understand, well, I'm talking about history and I love history, so why aren't they listening to me? Like, that's such an easy question to answer.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but they don't see it. And so, it's, it's like you were saying, it's, you have to retrain yourself away from what has so powerfully become entrenched in your own psyche about what it means to teach and learn. That- that in itself, if we could do that in four years, yeah, we're done. We're we're good.

Yeah.

Also, recognizing that you're going to have to provide that same kind of re-learning for the students in your classroom. That they've also been through this same system and they've gotten used to playing the game of how to succeed. And if you are telling them that we're redefining the lines of what success means, then there's going to have to be some kind of scaffolding in terms of making them comfortable to be autonomous learners or to be responsible for their own learning in the classroom too.

Question three, why does student engagement matter?

I'll use an example of the English school system here because our graduation rates are very good, so success rates are good, transition to university is good. So on the surface, you know, why fix what's not broken? You get questions like that. But then when I talk to my own kid who is a product of that system, what did you do at school today? Literally sat for six and a half straight hours, fell asleep in one class, maybe got a chance to talk to their peers a couple times. So, all the privilege that comes with the positioning that she has allows her to kind of transition through that system successfully. So she knows the game of schooling and she's got all the tools that she needs. However, what about all the other kids who don't have that, who don't have those tools, who don't have that background, who don't have that success, and they're still in the same system? So we focus on the 88% of students graduate because that's the nice number that attracts a lot of attention. But what we really should be thinking about A, is the other 12%, and B, what was their experience during that time? Because being good at school doesn't mean you're a good learner. And being a good learner is what's going to get you through life.

And being good at school doesn't necessarily tell you what you want to keep learning either.

Mm-hmm.

And so, I think if we graduate without any passions for learning, it makes it much harder to figure out what you're going to do next. And you know, we all know that situation, either as parents or as learners ourselves or as teachers, that you have these students who've performed excellently and then they seem a bit lost. They haven't connected with what is exciting to them. And it's those, the things that are exciting to us which are the building blocks for our, what comes next.

It's the fulfillment.

That's where I think Covid has probably shone a light on the most. Is you have the kids who, they can do school and they can do it pretty well, they can get through it. But when you took away what they were so familiar with and so good at, and radically changed that, then a huge number of students started to flounder and arguably are starting to get lost. So the students who finished those last couple years of high school in the peak of Covid, where are they now in the education system?

Well, and I think the other thing that I'm starting to think about in terms of defining success is graduation rates and moving onto post-secondary institutions. To me, that's just such an archaic way of thinking about what success means and if your interest is in working at Walmart and that brings you self-fulfillment, then I absolutely want you to do that. And in redefining student success as engagement, and as interest in whatever it is that you're doing, then we allow for more of those spaces and less of a stigma associated with choosing whatever it is that you feel like you are good at, and that makes you happy and fulfilled. The fact of the matter is, we don't need a bunch of university graduates in the world in order for it to work and keep on chugging on.

Yeah, and I mean, I'm all for post-secondary education being free. And I also think that schooling should be, when we talk about lifelong learning, literally lifelong learning. If you didn't complete whatever maths you needed in grade eight, go to a math class anywhere where you are and then go learn that.

Yeah. But now we're into like, anti-capitalist chronicles of like dismantling the new liberal institution. That is…

That might, that might be another episode.

That's a total different episode.

I'm sorry, it's just where my brain goes.

But, but, but going back to that engagement question, I, I think what can we do within the existing structure? Cause it's probably not wise or, or realistic to think we're going to just blow up the whole thing. Because some people are going to make an argument that it serves a wide number of people and they're going to have enough evidence to support their argument. I might not agree with the evidence they're drawing on, but they're going to make the case. So, if we have the system the way that it is, which is also tied to funding and taxes and everything else.

Yes.

What can we do within the system? To create a more engaged learning environment for students. And then I think it's a manageable task. Then we start to build towards questions like what you're asking is, do we need this structure at all? But until we start asking the small questions about what we're doing on the ground in the moment, like the kid who's sitting in their math class right now, we’ve got to ask those questions and follow through on them.

Yeah.

I have another thought about passion. It's, it takes us in a slightly different direction though.

Yeah. Do it.

We started the conversation like, how do you know, what does, how do you know engagement is happening? And um, one of the things that can look like not engagement or the opposite of engagement is student resistance. And you know, the, the student who says, this is boring, I don't want to do it. These kind of active pushing back against the curriculum. And I've been really interested in theorists over their last few years who've actually been looking at how some forms of resistance can actually be themselves a type of engagement in having school be otherwise. That there can be a critical component to resistance that we really need to take seriously in order to create more engaging spaces for everyone. So, the theorists speak about kind of transformative resistance.

Well, that's a skill in and of itself too. Being able to encounter something that you're not very interested in and still find a way to become engaged with something that you don't actually want to do. That is a skill that will serve you in the long run over time. Because we're not always going to get to do the things that we want to do whenever we want to do them.

It's another skill, I think, on a teacher's part to be able to recognize the resistance and then use that in order to support engagement instead of taking it personally or thinking negatively of yourself. So how do you turn this resistance into something productive, I think is also really important.

And what is the root of that resistance? Is it because they think that they're going to do badly? And that's a, to me, that's a product of the system where we ask them to shoot for grades and then they're afraid to fail because they'll do poorly on some kind of assessment. So finding out the root of that resistance in order to shift it and capitalize on it in a way that builds future engagement.

Mm-hmm.

Do you think there's a way to create measures that are less subject or content specific in terms of a mastery of content or mastery of skill that would incorporate engagement as a key marker? So, you think about report cards, there is a place on report cards usually for comments, and that's where things like engagement get weighed in on. And I, I would question the validity of the evidence that gets included on there. In my own experience as a teacher, uh, that report cards were, here's a list of 220 comments, and those are the ones you can use.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So, you can't actually say anything personal. You can just choose from these 20 comments. And as a teacher who's got a million and twelve things to do, and I was coaching and everything else, you pretty much, you create a cheat sheet of about 10.

Yep.

You know, a pleasure to teach, a pleasure to teach. You know, 72, 72, 72. And then you have the ones where you, you say, satisfactory progress, which is kind of the most negative thing you can say within reason. Right, because, because these report cards are a currency.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They really, really are. And so how do we then balance that to, to provide the kind of currency that someone needs. So, if you get a C, for example, which in many people's minds is a really bad thing, and it doesn't have to be, how do you balance that with, you know, this is a C because of this. But let's give the kid credit where credit is due and start to think about all the things they bring to the table. And the barriers that they face that may impede them from getting past the limitations that have landed them on a C. No room for that whatsoever.

So what if report cards in high school also had a place for student self-assessment?

Oh, that'd be great!

So again, looking back at, you know, this elementary school experience, my daughters started self-assessing in kindergarten. And you know, you, again, it's something you need to learn to do. And I think the worry is that, oh, everybody will just give themselves A's, but in fact, if you, if you structure that carefully, I don't think, I think people are much more honest about that. And that can be a real marker of what engagement looks like.

Especially if you trust them to do the process and you take the process seriously. And then it's something that they do consistently. I mean, that's just building reflexivity into their...

Teach them how to do it. Yeah.

Yeah. I saw someone's elementary school report card recently and it was in every subject, the evaluation was just a sad face, a like medium face or a smiley face. And then it was a whole page of handwritten notes about the student, uh, like as a five/six-year-old. And I thought, wow. Like one super time consuming for sure, where you have a bunch of students and you're writing a whole page of handwritten notes. But also, the information was much more rich and informative about the person that this person was going to become actually...

Than, 72 satisfactory progress made.

Exactly.

It was a pleasure to teach actually.

Yeah. 72, a pleasure to teach.

In order to do that well requires time. It takes time to actually learn how to do that, which we can provide, right? But then time to actually do it and that's what's not available. So, I think in terms of the barriers to actually finding out and learning enough about a student in a high school class where you're teaching, let's say seven different classes, even if they are the same subjects. You've got seven groups of kids, on average of that sort of, you're teaching over 200 kids.

Yep.

How on earth are we ever going to get to that point? And I think that's when, when people listen to something like this, you know, and I've been in that spot where you nod your head and you're completely in agreement, but how do we do it? Because if it was an easy solution, we would've done it differently. And I think where our project is starting to look at what are some of the structural elements that are going to allow for the greater likelihood of that. Because I think if you don't start to break down the structure, you're not, you're just kind of spinning your wheels and, and recreating, uh, the same problem.

You touched on something too that I was just thinking about. A lot of people hold certain values, but what they actually do is very different from what they value in the education system. So, here's their value that students should be assessed as a whole person, not just a grade. But then you take that value and you confront it with the structure where there isn't that time to be able to sit down and do that for all 200 students. So, you hold the value, you're confronted with the structure and you're like, well, I guess I can't do it.

So, when you think about project-based or inquiry-based learning, which would possibly allow some space for that, but allowing for some choice for students to pursue areas of learning that are of interest to them and asking them how it ties back to curricular objectives, I would be shocked if that in itself didn't dramatically improve student engagement. That simple endeavor - where you're creating one block of time in the schedule somehow to give them a chance to pursue something of interest to them. If we could find a way to do that, it's much more manageable. But it takes, you know, a certain type of leadership and vision to be able to push the system in order to do that, because you still have to sell it. You still have to justify, and again, you're going back to the comparison of those student success numbers. Why do we have to fix it? It's not broken. But if you ask students, it's very, very broken.

Question four. How are we tying student engagement to school improvement?

I think in the project right now, the active work that we're doing with teachers, so through workshops and they've been generous enough to share their PD (professional development) days of which, uh, in Quebec, they're fairly generous in the number. They've allowed us to come in and help to facilitate that, but at the same time, I think we're building a relationship where they can start to ask questions. And what we're trying to do is give them the tools and the information they need to make those decisions. They know the students, they know the schools, they know their content. I, I, I'm an outsider to all of that in many degrees. So, what they need more than ever is for people like us to come in and say, have you thought about doing it this way? What do you think it would look like? Like this? Well, here's some research about this, or here's an example that shows it this way. The reason that I think we're experiencing some success right now is that they're making space for that. And so there's a collective will that recognizes we could do better, but we don't know how. And so, they've made space for us to help give them some tools to understand how, but also to make some decision for themselves. That is pivotal. How you do that on a larger scale, I think once we have a real good example and have people who can attest to it, that's when you start to build from there. It's, it's like you’ve got to start somewhere. So now here's where we're starting and here's what we want to show people. And once we have something, that is contextually relevant for people... cause one of the criticisms we've got is, oh, well that's a private school or that school's in New Zealand, it's not like ours. I would argue that schools really don't vary that much from space, place to place, but that's okay. Like I get it. But if we have a more local example where they can say, can I talk to the teachers there? And you're like, absolutely email them right now, then I think you start to develop that momentum and that ripple effect that potentially is going to yield the kind of change that we're hoping for.

Question five. What does student engagement have to do with NEXTschool?

Yeah, we, we've said right from the beginning of the project that student engagement is the marker that we're most interested in. Student success numbers on the surface don't support the need for any kind of change, but student experience does. I'm more concerned about the grade nine kid who's sitting in their class for the hundredth day in a row of pretty much doing the same thing, who has repeatedly asked, oh, you're in grade nine, you're going to graduate in two years, what are you going to do next? And the constantly being asked, what's your future? What's your future? What's your future? When there has been no spark or catalyst lit for them at all. What we're trying to do is change the structure enough that allows for more space for students to frame learning at the centre of it and less about the content. So that's one thing. And I think the other thing is really getting teachers to think with intentionality about how we are teaching students for the purpose of learning, not for the purpose of evaluation, and those are kind of two key points within NEXTschool school.

I think that moving forward, if schools are really to centre student engagement as their top priority, as their benchmark for success, it means rethinking how we do schools in some pretty fundamental ways. And I see NEXT as an opportunity for teachers and students and administrators to try to think outside the business of usual of schooling. An opportunity to kind of revisit and decide, hey, you know, this particular schedule is not really working in the interest of student engagement. What else might we do?

Yeah, and having the opportunity to try and fail to be involved in the trial and error of all of that. Like teachers saying, okay, this isn't working out. Let's try it this way. Kids, what do you think? Admin? What do you think? Can we have support? Let's go ahead and let's do it. Parents? How about community members? You know?

The idea of building in failure into the system is such a strange feeling for a lot of people. The idea that, like, we can try this and it won't necessarily automatically succeed, is going to be foreign to the teachers, the admin and the students, in that kind of space.

One of, one of my favourite phrases about that is failing forward. So the whole purpose is to really think about, okay, what didn't work the way we wanted and what are we learning from it? And you know, we, we, it drives me crazy there, there's these, um, phrases that we use in education all the time and that failure is okay or we learn from failure. Yeah, sure. You know, like that is so inaccurate when it comes to education because a kid can't afford to fail. Cause if they do, the door closes, cause again, those marks are the currency. And as soon as the door closes, then they're prevented from yet another way to engage with those sparks or those passions that they have.

Or imagining a future.

Exactly. So, you know, we think about how we do high school privileges writing so often, and we have to start to think about how do young people represent their learning, just even the representation of it. And so, can they build something? Can they create something? Can they perform something? That is a simple conversation to have, but one that is so incredibly vital when we're talking about student engagement. And so, I think what we're leading towards is trying to facilitate those types of conversations in the NEXTschool project and the teachers who are interested in it, is getting them to really think through some of those questions, with the safety net of having us as a research team, being able to support them, to give them the information that they need in order to say, okay, I see what you're saying. I can see a situation where that might work. I can see a situation where it wouldn't. So, we're empowering them with knowledge or the, the, like I said, the safety net to ask those types of questions and get the information they need to make the right decision.

All right. Well thank you everybody for joining today. I really, really was looking forward to this conversation and I'm so happy you enjoyed it and I hope that you come back and we keep having these conversations. Thank you Ellen, for co-hosting and uh, yeah, have a nice day. Those were the not so fast five questions for today's podcast on student engagement. Next time we'll talk about student success. Tune in to ChangEd every third Friday of the month for more content on educational change.

You've been listening to ChangEd. My name is Vanessa Gold and I'm your host. I'm a PhD candidate and part of a research team at McGill University interested in educational change. Each of us brings diverse experiences and expertise to an ongoing investigation of this topic within a current school change initiative being piloted in Quebec called NEXTschool. You can find more information about this initiative and the work our research team has done on our website at www.nextschoolquebec.com. Part of our goal in producing this podcast is to share what we're doing and involve you, our listeners in the research process, speaking with members of our team, other academics, experts, and practitioners amongst others, each episode explores one of many complex facets of educational change. You can expect topics like how to lead change, getting past inertia, the politics of change, and people's lived experiences of school change as it happens all within, but not exclusive to the NEXTschool context.

Spearheading the initiative is Noel Burke. Dr. Lisa Starr is the principal investigator of McGill's Research Team and Dr. Joseph Levitan, Dr. Lynn Butler-Kisber, and Dr. Bronwyn Low are co-investigators. Five graduate students round out the research team, including myself, Ellen MacCannell, Aron Rosenberg, Anna Villalta, and Natalie Malka. You'll be hearing from all of us as we explore the tricky and important work of making schools better for everyone.

This podcast and our research about NEXTschool is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Changed is produced by Vanessa Gold. Music is by Neal Read he's at nealread.ca. A transcript of today's podcast, citations and additional information are on our website, www.nextschoolquebec.com. Thanks for tuning in. We're looking forward to engaging with you.