In the Marzano Academies instructional model, Design Area VI focuses on engagement: helping students pay attention and feel energized and intrigued. Within that design area, Elements VIc, VId, and VIe work together as a response to a common classroom problem: students are not necessarily confused, resistant, or uninterested. They are simply running low on energy. The Marzano Academies Implementation Manual groups these three elements under the energy component of engagement: encouraging physical movement, maintaining a lively pace, and displaying intensity and enthusiasm (Marzano Academies, 2018).

This distinction matters. When students become unengaged because they lack energy, the solution is not always more explanation, more accountability, or a longer lecture. Sometimes the teacher needs to change the physical, emotional, or instructional energy in the room. This does not mean turning learning into entertainment. It means recognizing that attention is embodied, emotional, and time-sensitive. Learners think with their brains, but they also learn through bodies that get tired and classroom routines that can either sustain or drain engagement.

Why: Energy Is a Condition for Attention and Learning

A student cannot deeply process content if he or she is mentally present but physically sluggish and just waiting for the next thing to happen. In Marzano’s logic, engagement is not a vague feeling; it is something the teacher can design for, observe, and adjust. The manual describes effective engagement as students paying attention, exhibiting appropriate levels of energy, and showing interest in the content (Marzano Academies, 2018).

This aligns with what cognitive and educational research tells us. Attention is limited and fragile. It is affected by arousal, movement, novelty, emotion, and pacing. The classic Yerkes-Dodson principle suggests that learning and performance are influenced by the level of stimulation or arousal, and that the best level depends on the difficulty of the task (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). Their original work found that the relationship between stimulus strength and learning depends on task difficulty. More stimulation is not always better, especially when the task is complex.

That is an important caution for teachers. The goal is not to create a hyped-up classroom. The goal is to keep students in a productive learning state: alert enough to participate, calm enough to think, and connected enough to keep going. A quick movement break, a brisk transition, or a teacher’s authentic enthusiasm can help students return to that productive state.

Physical movement is one direct way to address low energy. Marzano’s folio for Element VIc identifies movement as a strategy teachers use when energy levels are low, including standing and stretching, using movement as a response strategy, and having students physically represent content (Marzano, 2021a). Research on active school breaks supports this general idea. A systematic review and meta-analysis found some positive effects of active breaks on attentional outcomes such as concentration, inhibition, sustained attention, and especially selective attention, while also noting that the evidence is mixed and not all results were significant (Infantes-Paniagua et al., 2021). In other words, movement is not magic, but it is a reasonable, low-cost strategy for helping students re-enter the work.

Pace also matters. Element VId focuses on maintaining a lively pace, not by rushing students, but by avoiding lulls, slow transitions, and unnecessary interruptions. The folio explains that interruptions, lulls, and slow transitions waste time and make it more difficult for students to stay engaged (Marzano, 2021b). This is supported by classroom research on transition time. Codding and Smyth (2008) found that reducing transition minutes led to corresponding increases in student academic engagement for participating teachers. When a class loses momentum, students often do not choose disengagement; they drift into it.

Finally, teacher intensity and enthusiasm matter because students read the emotional signals of the adult in the room. Marzano’s Element VIe identifies specific teacher behaviors: making direct statements about the importance of content, connecting content to the world outside school, telling personal stories, using humor, and varying volume, tone, emphasis, pauses, and rate of speech (Marzano, 2021c). Research on teacher enthusiasm similarly describes enthusiasm as both an emotional experience and a behavioral display that can influence student motivation, attention, and engagement (Peng, 2021).

The teacher’s energy is not a performance. It is a signal. It tells students, “This matters. Stay with me. There is something here worth learning.”

How: Use the Three Elements as One Energy System

The power of VIc, VId, and VIe is that they operate as a system. Physical movement changes the body’s readiness to learn. Lively pace changes the rhythm of the lesson. Intensity and enthusiasm change the emotional tone of the learning environment. Used together, they help teachers respond when students are physically still, mentally passive, or emotionally detached.

A teacher might begin with pace. If students are fading, the teacher can tighten the transition, move from explanation to response, or shift from whole-group instruction to a short partner task. This aligns with Marzano’s description of lively pace: speeding up or slowing down based on students’ engagement needs, keeping instructional segments brisk but unhurried, and using motivational hooks to spark attention (Marzano, 2021b). Good pacing is not speed for speed’s sake. It is the skill of keeping the lesson moving at the rate students can productively follow.

Then the teacher can add movement. Students might stand to show agreement or disagreement, move to a corner to represent an answer choice, act out a process, create a human continuum, or stretch before returning to a cognitively demanding task. The key is that movement should either restore energy or deepen content. Movement that has no instructional purpose can become a distraction. Movement that helps students think, vote, represent, or reset becomes part of learning.

Teacher enthusiasm then gives the movement and pace meaning. A teacher might say, “This next idea matters because it explains something you have seen outside of school,” or, “Watch how this one small detail changes the whole problem.” The teacher might use a story, a pause, a shift in tone, or a little humor to reframe the moment. As Peng (2021) notes, teacher enthusiasm is often communicated through behaviors such as tone, eye contact, posture, movement, and expressions that increase psychological closeness and help activate student interest.

The best use of these elements is responsive. The teacher notices the energy drop and selects the smallest move likely to restore productive attention. Sometimes that is a thirty-second stretch. Sometimes it is a brisker transition. Sometimes it is slowing down because the pace has become too fast and confusion is beginning to look like disengagement. Sometimes it is a more explicit statement of relevance: “Here is why this matters.”

What: What It Looks Like When It Is Working

When these elements are working, the classroom does not necessarily look loud or highly animated. It looks alive. Students shift from passive compliance to active participation. They respond more quickly. They move with purpose. They transition without losing the thread of the lesson. They can explain how a movement activity, a change in pace, or the teacher’s enthusiasm helped them stay engaged.

Marzano’s evidence charts make this visible. For physical movement, students actively engage in the movement activities, have more energy afterward, and can explain how physical movement keeps their interest and helps them learn (Marzano, 2021a). For intensity and enthusiasm, students increase their attention in response to the teacher’s interest and enthusiasm, can describe the effect on their learning, and recognize that the teacher values the topic (Marzano, 2021c).

For lively pace, the evidence is seen in the rhythm of the room. Students move from one activity to another efficiently. They do not sit through long gaps while materials are found, directions are clarified, or routines are reinvented. They experience enough variety to stay alert and enough structure to know what to do next. When pacing is too slow, students may become bored and disengaged; when it is too fast, students may become lost or discouraged. Effective pacing requires the teacher to manage learning time, engaged time, and the flow of lesson activities.

The deeper “what” is not just better behavior. It is a better learning momentum. Reeve and Lee (2014) found that classroom engagement predicted later changes in students’ motivation and achievement, suggesting that engagement is not merely a result of motivation; it can also help produce motivation. This is why energy matters. When students re-engage, they are not merely complying with the teacher’s request. They are re-entering the learning process.

Bringing the Three Elements Together

Elements VIc, VId, and VIe remind us that engagement has a physical and emotional side. A student may understand the target and still lose energy. A student may be capable of the task and still drift during a slow transition. A student may be willing to learn and still need the teacher to signal that the content is worth attention.

In a competency-based classroom, this becomes especially important because students are often working at different levels, on different tasks, and sometimes with different forms of support. The teacher must monitor not only whether students are progressing through proficiency scales, but also whether they have the energy to stay productively engaged in that progression. This is where physical movement, lively pace, and intensity and enthusiasm become more than classroom management strategies. They become instructional responses.

When learners become unengaged because the energy has dropped, the teacher’s question is not, “How do I get through the lesson?” The better question is, “What does this group need right now so they can re-enter the learning?” Sometimes the answer is movement. Sometimes it is pace. Sometimes it is enthusiasm. Often, it is all three working together.

To continue building your understanding of Design Area VI and the full Marzano Academies Instructional Model, become a member of the Learning Lab today. Members can access Dr. Marzano’s research folios, professional learning resources, and practical tools designed to help teachers develop the practices to make their classrooms competency-based. The Learning Hub also includes Badging Experiences that allow teachers to identify a meaningful professional growth goal, strengthen their classroom routines, and document their growing expertise. Teachers should own their professional learning, and the Learning Hub is built to support that work. You can also sign up for Virtual Office Hours or engage in a CBE Coaching Series with Marzano Academies to deepen your team’s approach to a personalized, competency-based classroom.

In next week’s Use-It-Tomorrow blog, we will share practical strategies teachers can use to re-engage the learners when momentum is lost due to a lack of energy.

References

Codding, R. S., & Smyth, C. A. (2008). Using performance feedback to decrease classroom transition time and examine collateral effects on academic engagement. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 18(4), 325–345. doi:10.1080/10474410802463312

Infantes-Paniagua, Á., Silva, A. F., Ramirez-Campillo, R., Sarmento, H., González-Fernández, F. T., González-Víllora, S., & Clemente, F. M. (2021). Active school breaks and students’ attention: A systematic review with meta-analysis. Brain Sciences, 11(6), 675. doi:10.3390/brainsci11060675

Marzano Academies. (2018). Marzano Academies implementation manual. Marzano Academies.

Marzano, R. J. (2021a). Element VIc (25): Using physical movement in a competency-based classroom. Marzano Academies.

Marzano, R. J. (2021b). Element VId (26): Maintaining a lively pace in a competency-based classroom. Marzano Academies.

Marzano, R. J. (2021c). Element VIe (27): Demonstrating intensity and enthusiasm in a competency-based classroom. Marzano Academies.

Peng, C. (2021). A conceptual review of teacher enthusiasm and students’ success and engagement in Chinese EFL classes. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 742970. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.742970

Reeve, J., & Lee, W. (2014). Students’ classroom engagement produces longitudinal changes in classroom motivation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(2), 527–540. doi:10.1037/a0034934

Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18, 459–482.