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Good teacher mechanics take care of a high percentage of challenges in the classroom. Being prepared each day with well thought out lessons, which include good instructional and management strategies, will ensure that most of your students stay engaged. A good net, however, won鈥檛 ensure that you catch every fish in the pond.

Relationships are another piece of the puzzle. How well do you know the student who is not engaging? What鈥檚 her story? How does she see the world? Understanding and connecting with a child at a deeper level changes the teacher-student dynamic. With all other factors being equal, a student will perform more for the teacher she feels a connection with.

One way to accomplish this is by doing walk-and-talk鈥檚 during your prep period. Walking side-by-side with another person is an extremely powerful rapport-building exercise. It gives you an opportunity to connect with the student in a way that you wouldn鈥檛 be able to in the classroom. I鈥檝e posted detailed instructions on how to set up and execute a walk-and-talk, as well as the psychological reasons for its effectiveness, at

During the walk-and talk, you and the student agree upon an area of focus. If the student has done nothing in your class up to this point, discussing everything he needs to do to earn an A can be overwhelming. Staying on task during an entire five-minute assignment, in a class where he normally does nothing, though not your ultimate performance goal, should be recognized and validated as a success. Success breeds success. Highly-motivated students are a product of more successes than failures, which leads to a self-image, at some level, of their being successful.

Walk-and-talk鈥檚 provide an opportunity to help the student begin to create this image. The yet-to-be-successful student is not, by himself, going to plant the seed in his own mind that he can be successful. He needs your help. Trying to establish this idea with a recalcitrant student, however, can be like throwing the seed onto hardpan. When you establish a relationship with this student, you plow through the hardpan, allowing the seed to take root. We are more easily influenced by those we trust and feel we resonate with.

Walk-and-talk鈥檚 allow you to not only build a positive relationships but give you the opportunity to guide your students in painting, stroke by stroke, a picture of themselves as being successful. The dual motivators of a personal relationship and a budding sense of self-efficacy are a powerful combination that can kick-start even the most unmotivated student.

Of all of the different challenging behaviors that children exhibit, I find disengagement the most frustrating. After working so hard to create lessons and units that will help students learn, I feel like a failure when students don鈥檛 try. Here are a few ideas we might consider when challenged with a student who won鈥檛 engage.

Make sure work is purposeful: 鈥淲hy do we have to learn this?鈥� groans Mark, staring at his worksheet of fraction problems. In my experience, we most dread this question when we don鈥檛 have a good answer (like 鈥渂ecause it鈥檚 on the state test鈥� or 鈥渂ecause you鈥檙e getting a grade for this鈥�). What if we challenge our students to ask us this question more often? It might force us to make sure that work is meaningful from students鈥� perspectives. For example, we might create a class bulletin board of cool fractional designs. The work students do with fractions can be about creating an amazing display in the hallway--much more purposeful than practicing a skill for a state test.

Make work more collaborative: People learn more together than they do apart. We鈥檙e a social species and we鈥檙e hardwired to collaborate. So why do we so often require kids to work alone in school? I know that I鈥檓 more engaged with my work when I鈥檓 collaborating with colleagues. Partner chats, games to practice skills, and allowing students to work on an assignment together are simple ways we can leverage students鈥� need to work together.

Offer choices about how or what students learn: When students have more power and control over their learning, they are more engaged. Even the simple choice between using dice or cards when playing a math game can make a difference.

Make sure learning is fun: Put yourself in your students鈥� shoes. If you were a student doing the work you were assigning, would you like it? Would it be interesting? Would it be fun? Try building lessons and activities from the perspectives of your students. You might find yourself inventing games, creating class debates, or making music videos with your students.

Most of all, we need to not give up. Students want to learn. They want to engage. Students who put up the fa莽ade of boredom or apathy are usually disengaging for good reasons, so it鈥檚 up to us to keep working with them to find ways to get them fired up and excited about learning.