Engagement

Definition : "Children are deeply absorbed in the literacy lesson/task."

Engagement is related to the teacher's ability to motivate children and use a variety of teaching strategies.

Engagement, like attention, involves keeping children on task, but for engagement the aim is to ensure that children are deeply absorbed in the activity.

While gaining attention might involve little more than compliance, engagement involves the child seeing the relevance of the task and wanting to learn. In the case of literacy teaching it also means deep engagement in attempting to construct meaning as part of the task.

The more effective teachers in this study, attempted to move their classes beyond the attentive state. These teachers focused attention so that children could have maximum opportunity to gain from the planned activity. At times this simply involved building a bridge between a child's prior knowledge and the content of a task, for example, a text to be read.