If you were teaching a seminar on engagement, what topics would you cover?

What would I tell a teacher – of course I would want the teacher to know each students’ sense of engagement; what turns them on etc. but the major message would be to find ways to make the student the centre of engaging – how do we get the student to be part (not resistant) to our learning goals. Share the assessments (in our jargon make them assessment capable students), share the criteria of success (and not hide as we so often do in summative testing), share the progress from where they are to where we want them to be, and give appropriate feedback to help them reduce this gap between here and the goals. More attention to doing this well is the most optimal way to engage students. Sometimes students turn off if they think there is no point investing thinking if they are not going to get there; too often they give up as we do not provide feedback about how close they are too the goals; too often we say and ‘now do more’ so there are no realisable goals” (John Hattie, personal communication, January 23, 2016).