When a class goes flat, the usual fix is more energy from the front of the room: a louder voice, a quicker pace, a game. On the latest episode of A Work of Heart, Dr. Ilana Nankin and Beth Schreiber make a different case. Students stay engaged when the work connects to what they want for themselves.
The three student engagement strategies below do that. Each one puts students’ own purpose at the center of the day: a hopes and dreams wall, a daily intention, and student-written affirmations. They work best together as one connected system. The wall is the north star, the intention is the daily check-in, and the affirmation is a note each student writes to themselves.
Three Student Engagement Strategies, Starting Tomorrow
You don’t need a new unit to begin. Here’s one way to layer them in:
- Tomorrow, one question (2 minutes). Open class with “How do you want to be today?” and let a few students answer out loud.
- Later this week, the Post-its (5 minutes). Pass around sticky notes and invite each student to write one message to themselves for their desk.
- Sometime this month, the wall (one class period). Give students time to picture and represent their hopes and dreams, then post them where everyone can see.
Build a Hopes and Dreams Wall Students Can See From Their Seats
The hopes and dreams practice invites students to name where they want to go and who they want to be. Beth Schreiber, a former second-grade teacher, made it a family project for her young students: a collage of pictures, drawings, and words put together at home. As Dr. Ilana Nankin, co-founder and co-CEO of Breathe for Change, put it, “the families invested in their hopes and dreams.” With older students, try a short guided visualization. They can write the dream down and give it some visual form before it goes up.
Build the wall in the first month of school, then come back to it whenever the room goes flat. That’s when Beth would tie a dull task back to the dreams: “How does this stone that we have right here fit into the path…”
There’s research behind the instinct. Across four studies with more than 2,000 adolescents and young adults, students with a purpose for learning that reached beyond themselves persisted longer on a boring task (Yeager et al., 2014). Those studies involved older students and a narrower, prosocial kind of purpose. So think of the wall as teacher practice informed by that research. It hasn’t been tested as an intervention in its own right.
Ask “How Do You Want to Be Today?” Every Morning
A daily intention asks how students want to be, not what they want to do. Playful, calm, focused, collaborative: each answer gives a student a way of showing up that serves the dream on the wall.
In elementary classrooms, it fits naturally into your morning circle routine. In middle and high school, the first two minutes of each period work well. And when a student answers “tired,” take it seriously. They may be describing what their body is carrying that morning, which is one reason the quiet kids may be in freeze.
Doing it every day matters. Dr. Ilana is clear that hopes and dreams “slowly diminish if we don’t continue to come back to them every day.” Research on “possible selves” backs her up. A school-based program that linked students’ imagined futures to concrete daily strategies improved grades and behavior. The authors also found that picturing a future self wasn’t enough on its own (Oyserman et al., 2006). That was a structured middle school program, which is a lot more than a morning question. Still, the core idea carries over: tie the dream to something students do today.
Hand Students the Pen on Affirmations
Beth kept a big crate of colored Post-it notes. Students picked one, wrote their own affirmation (“I am learning. I am growing,” “I have friends,” “I am lovable.”) and stuck it on their desk. In Beth’s words, “it doesn’t have to be for anyone else.” The messages changed as the kids did. Affirmation posters make a good printable companion for students who want a starting phrase.
Offer it before a test, after a hard moment, or any time a student’s inner story starts to sound like “I can’t do this.”
What ties this together is students putting what matters to them into their own words. Related research on self-affirmation found that brief classroom writing about a personally important value narrowed the racial achievement gap by about 40 percent in the year it was given (Cohen et al., 2006). That exercise was different from a Post-it affirmation, and its effects varied widely by school. A district-wide follow-up found larger effects when students engaged more deeply with the writing (Borman et al., 2018).
And the skill stays with them. When Beth told her class about her cancer diagnosis, her students chose to offer affirmations back to her. Dr. Ilana’s read was simple: “they had made it their own.”
Questions Teachers Ask About These Student Engagement Strategies
What are purpose-based student engagement strategies? They’re classroom routines that connect daily work to something students care about. There are three here. A hopes and dreams wall holds the long-term goal, a daily intention sets how to show up today, and a student-written affirmation gives each kid a personal message to come back to.
How do you re-engage a class that has gone flat? Point back to the wall. Ask students how today’s task fits the path toward the dream they posted, then invite them to reset their intention for the rest of the period.
Do these strategies work in middle and high school? Yes, with a few changes. Swap the family collage for a short guided visualization and a written goal. Then move the daily intention out of morning circle and into the first two minutes of each period.
From Flat Room to North Star
On a flat afternoon, students now have three places to look: the dream they posted on the wall, the way they said they wanted to be that morning, and the Post-it on their desk.
These practices land best when educators live them first. The William Jewell College Master’s of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Transformative Teaching & Learning, in partnership with Breathe for Change, helps educators develop universal intelligence in themselves before teaching it. That’s the purpose layer of the Human Intelligence (HI) framework. Explore the M.S.Ed. here.
Want to go deeper? Listen to the full conversation between Dr. Ilana Nankin and Beth Schreiber on A Work of Heart, the Breathe for Change podcast. They cover all three practices, plus the day Beth’s students turned their affirmations back to her.
