Student engagement is harder than it used to be, but the answer is not more control or better entertainment. It is helping students move from compliance to true ownership, where they have voice, choice, and responsibility for their learning. This post explores what happens when students own their learning, the fears teachers often face along the way, and practical ways to move toward deeper student empowerment.

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Moving Toward Student Empowerment

It’s no surprise that student engagement has been a challenging lately. For well over a decade, we have seen the proliferation of social media leading to a short term dopamine cycle (that I addressed in my last article and podcast) where students want instant gratification.

This has accelerated post-Pandemic, and it is not because kids suddenly stopped caring. We have asked them to learn in a world that is louder, faster, and more distracting than ever. It’s a space where their phones are designed to steal attention. It’s no surprise when teachers feel like they have to compete with a culture of constant amusement. Add in the social and academic aftershocks of the pandemic, rising anxiety, and a constant sense of uncertainty, and it makes sense that students show up more guarded, more tired, and quicker to check out.

To be clear, this isn’t always the case. When I visit classrooms, I see so many glimmers of hope. I students sparking deeper, authentic learning through design challenges, inquiry-based activities, problem-solving, and Socratic Seminars. I see deep discussions that give me hope for the future. But I also realize it’s an uphill battle. I hear this from some of the best teachers I know. It takes twice the effort to get students to be fully committed and focused in class.

Even when students want to engage, they are often working with less focus stamina and less patience for anything that feels irrelevant. So engagement now is less about hype and more about helping students rebuild attention, trust, and a reason to lean in. So, how do we improve student engagement?

Philip Schlechty defined engagement as being both attention and commitment. So, we can use deeper learning strategies that improve student focus while also drawing them into a deeper commitment level.

But we can also help students take more ownership of their learning. Here, they move from compliance (teacher-directed) to engagement (teacher-directed with increased student buy-in) to empowerment (full student ownership). Note that all three of these approaches are important but in an unpredictable world, we need students to hit a place of deeper empowerment.

 

I Wanted to Empower My Students But I Was Afraid

It was my first year of teaching and this was supposed to be my greatest lesson of the school year. I had planned it for hours, revising every element until it looked flawless. On paper. But now, in the third period of the day, the reality sunk in. My lesson sucked. Students weren’t engaged. They didn’t want to create Civil War newspapers. They didn’t want to follow scripted directions. They didn’t want to follow the prompts I had written.

A few students looked engaged on the surface. They were listening, answering discussion questions, and participating. A few of them even got excited about drawing Civil War political cartoons. Still, I knew something was missing.

My students didn’t own the learning.

At the time, I viewed teaching as a content delivery system. I worked tirelessly to create content that would be meaningful, fun, and challenging. When students seemed disinterested, I would try and dress it up with more humor or a pop culture twist. But still, it was always my content and I was always the person delivering it.

Looking back on it, I was a tour guide leading my students through the content. I mistakenly mistook entertainment for engagement. Each lesson was a carefully packaged presentation, where I would entertain my students and point out areas of interest. A few students might ask questions and, on a good day, we would have a discussion.

But we never left the tour bus. We stuck tightly to the route spelled out by the curriculum map, stopping every few days to take on a new standard and tackle a new objective.

When students were bored, I doubled down on the entertainment factor. When they were confused, I simplified my explanations. But we were all going in the same direction at the same pace in the same way. And I was the one driving instruction.

Although I believed in student empowerment, I was afraid at first. It felt like the status quo (that wasn’t necessarily working) was safer than trying something new. Truth be told, I was afraid.

Even though I wanted my students to have creative control, I was afraid. Questions swirled around my mind: What if they don’t choose the right thing? What if they check out and don’t care? What happens if they make too many decisions? Will I be a weak teacher? What will this look like for classroom management? What will the principal think of too many people are doing things differently from each other? Won’t students get lazy and selfish if they get to choose? How will I even know what’s going on? What about the ones who don’t know how to handle choice? What about the test? Will I be allowed to do this? What if I don’t have the right materials? What about the curriculum map?

I eventually attempted a small student documentary project during testing week. Over time, I gradually added more voice and choice by asking the question, “What am I doing for students that they could be doing for themselves?”

Along the way, I began to tackle the fears that once plagued me. So, I’d like to explore some of these fears a little more in-depth.

 

Fear #1: Classroom Management Might Suffer

I was terrified that students would turn their freedom into anarchy. Would the emphasis on empowering students lead to misbehavior? Would they challenge the classroom rules and go crazy? Or would the lack of emphasis on grades mean simply refuse to work? I had been in classrooms that felt wild and chaotic; where teachers said, “this is controlled chaos,” but for me, it felt terrifying. Was this simply a cost of student ownership?

Reality:

Classroom management turned out to be easier when I emphasized student ownership. Don’t get me wrong. I had to go over expectations about volume, movement, and safety. We negotiated the procedures together with the class-wide procedure grid. However, I failed to anticipate the positive aspects of ownership. Students acted more responsible when I entrusted them with more responsibility. They worked harder and stayed focused because they cared more about their work.

At the same time, I learned that student empowerment needs to include structure and clear expectations. Here are a few things that I incorporated to help with this challenge:

Setting Clear Expectations

• Using a Rituals Grid
• Empowering students to co-design the norms
• Incorporating group contracts
• Designating time and space for silence

Reducing Extraneous Cognitive Load

• Taking a gradual release of responsibility
• Breaking projects up
• Doing a UX Design audit for my projects

Providing Scaffolds and Supports

• Designing PBL with clear expecations
• Empowering students to self-select the scaffolds and supports
• Using a UDL framework

It was never a utopia. I still had certain students who didn’t finish their projects. Students occasionally argued with their group members. However, there was a preventative aspect to student ownership. By empowering students to own the learning, they were then better able to own their actions.

 

Fear #2: Students Wouldn’t Pass the Test If They Are Choosing the Topics in Projects

I remember being terrified that students would fail the test if they were working in a student-centered, choice-driven environment. It seemed like it wouldn’t transfer, going from collaboration, choice, creativity to a standardized, irrelevant, solitary, one-size-fits-all test.

Reality:

The reality is mixed here. Often, when I empowered students to own the learning, I was able to “teach above the test.” Simple areas of student choice paid off on standardized tests. For example, they had developed a really long reading endurance because of choice-driven silent reading (which took 40 minutes a day). They knew how to think through hard questions because they had been asking hard questions.

I began to incorporate multiple levels of choice menus:

This allowed me to incorporate compacting. Essential, students could skip material they already know (based on a pre-test) and focus on more challenging content. The process involves pre-assessing students to identify what they have already mastered, eliminating repetition of known material, and providing alternative learning experiences that are more complex or enriching. This approach not only prevented boredom and disengagement but it also freed students up to have more time focused on mastering the standards where they were struggling.

However, it didn’t always work. Although our class remained in the top 10% of the district average, I had one quarter when my students’ scores plummeted to the bottom quarter of the district average. The test simply didn’t fit what students had learned. This is why I’m sympathetic to the fear. I hated being in a high-stakes environment, wondering what might happen if we had another quarter where my students didn’t perform well.

At the same time, educators have to be bold enough to let students own their learning, even if it means facing our fears of low test scores. It is difficult. There is no guarantee of success. But ultimately, it sends a powerful message when teachers say, “I’m worried about the test scores but I’m more worried about who you will become if you never get the chance to own the learning.” This is a chance to model courage. Students are watching and when they see that kind of courage, they never forget you.

Fear #3: We won’t cover everything on the curriculum map

I remember looking at the curriculum map and thinking, “This is so crowded as it is. If I try to do things like Genius Hour or project-based learning, we’ll never get through it all.” I didn’t have the time or the space to add something new. Don’t get me wrong. I knew that I could combine a few standards when they worked on a project. But what would happen when they chose a topic and never chose the topic from a specific standard? What would I do if they chose a strategy but never learned one of the skills in our standards? I worried, too, that students would be working at their own pace and some of them would simply never get to every standard they need to master.

Reality:

At first, I viewed design thinking, project-based learning, and inquiry-based learning as additions to a packed curriculum. Then I realized they were all frameworks; a new way to organize the content so that students could dive deeper into the subject and engage in creative thinking. I realized that student ownership could actually free up the time because I spent less time on direct instruction and testing.

This didn’t always work perfectly. I often used PBL but I learned the hard way that my approach to project-based learning needed to align more closely with the standards.

I noticed, too, that many of the standards were content-neutral, meaning students could master the standards while choosing their own topics. As they worked through projects, they could practice specific skill-based standards in areas where they still needed intervention. So, they actually had more time to master certain standards because they weren’t wasting time practicing skills they already knew. We also layered standards, so that students could work on multiple standards while engaging in a specific task.

This wasn’t always easy. It took me a few years to figure out the logistics and design a system where students could self-select skills, topics, and standards while they worked on their projects. We still had moments of direct instruction or even review. But as student ownership increased, we actually felt less rushed compared to the traditional approach I had been using before.

Fear #4: Students won’t know what to do if they own their learning

I knew that if I said, “Hey class, you choose the content, the strategies, and the assessment,” students would be lost. Students needed some type of structure and system in order for student choice and ownership to work. Although I wanted to empower students, I knew they needed a toolset to own their learning.

Reality:

This fear turned out to be valid. I made the mistake of trying a failed Genius Hour, where they treated the time as a study hall instead of using it to pursue passion projects. At that point, I made a few corrections. Here are a few things I incorporated:

• Taking a Gradual Release of Responsibility approach to student voice
• Designing specific systems for self-assessment and peer assessment
• Using a project-based learning and a design thinking framework to structure the creative process
• Conferencing with students to help them self-reflect and monitor their own progress
• Creating structures for project management and project design
• Doing an onboarding process for student choice and ownership

Each summer, I did an “ownership audit” of my classroom, where I looked at all the systems and asked, “What am I doing for my students that they could do on their own?” From there, I worked on designing self-explanatory systems that students could modify and adjust to fit their needs.

Even then, I realized that students sometimes struggled with so much student ownership. This is why I created a scope and sequence of how I would introduce additional ownership throughout the school year. This was essentially a gradual release process, where students started with student ownership of the topics and themes and eventually moved into full ownership of the assessment, intervention, and enrichment processes. This allowed me to introduce strategies and structures that students could add to their toolbelt.

Fear #5: I was worried that my leaders would view student ownership as teacher laziness

What would the principal think if she saw students working individually, in pairs, and in groups at the same time? Would she think I had given them free time if so many students were working on different tasks at a different pace? Would I look ineffective and weak?

Reality: 

Most of the principals I worked for embraced the idea of student ownership. They loved the fact that I had embedded intervention into the lessons and that students were so aware of their progress toward the standards. Instead of viewing it as chaotic, they saw students who were focused and they valued the differentiation going on.

For a few things, I had to pitch the idea and say, “I would like to pilot this and if it doesn’t work, I’ll scrap it completely.” Fortunately, I had some forward-thinking principals who embraced experimentation.

The Journey Toward Empowering Students

I was afraid of student ownership. However, I was more afraid of what would happen to students if they never owned their learning. So, I took the leap into the uncertainty.

And it worked.

Sometimes.

Okay, the truth is I made tons of mistakes along the way. I had moments of crushing self-doubt when I wondered if I was crazy for believing students could own their learning. I sometimes provided too much student ownership without enough structure and then I would stifle student agency by designing rigid systems.

But I also saw the transformation that happens when students own the learning. I watched them fall in love with learning as they chased their geeky interests and asked hard questions. I saw them embrace a maker mindset, which is why, for all mistakes I made, I am convinced of this: There is power in student ownership.

Empower Your Students with Voice and Choice

Want to get started with student ownership? Check out this page with free articles, videos, and resources. Also, check out the Empower Blueprint and Toolkit below.