In a competency-based classroom, engagement is not a luxury. It is part of the learning system. Students may be working on different tasks, at different levels of a proficiency scale, and with different forms of support. Some learners may be strengthening score 2.0 vocabulary and basic processes. Others may be working toward score 3.0 proficiency. Still others may be ready for score 4.0 applications. In that kind of classroom, the teacher cannot assume that everyone is engaged simply because the room is quiet or because students appear busy.

This is why Dr. Marzano identifies “noticing and reacting when students are not engaged” as an important element within Design Area VI: Engagement. In the Element VIa folio, Marzano explains that monitoring attention is especially important in a competency-based classroom because students are often working on varied tasks at the same time. Teachers must learn to look for evidence that students are attending, use self-reported engagement strategies, redirect students’ attention, and respond to the overall climate of the classroom (Marzano, 2021).

The key phrase is “notice and react.” It is not enough to notice disengagement. Teachers must respond in ways that help students re-enter the learning. Likewise, it is not enough to react randomly with more energy, a louder voice, or a new activity. The reaction should be tied to evidence. What is happening? Is the student confused? Bored? Distracted? Overwhelmed? Finished early? Unsure what to do next? Each cause calls for a different instructional response.

Engagement Is More Than Compliance

One reason this element matters is that engagement is often misunderstood. Engagement is not the same as doing what one is asked. A student can sit quietly, look at the teacher, and still be doing very little cognitive work. Another student may be talking with a peer, sketching an idea, or looking away for a moment and still be deeply engaged in the task.

Educational researchers often describe engagement as having behavioral, emotional, and cognitive dimensions. Behavioral engagement includes participation, attention, and effort. Emotional engagement includes interest, belonging, and positive connection to learning. Cognitive engagement includes the mental investment students make as they process, organize, explain, apply, or monitor their learning (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). This matters because a teacher who only looks for compliance may miss the deeper question: Are students actually thinking?

Cognitive science reinforces this point. Learning requires students to attend to information, process it in working memory, connect it to prior knowledge, and eventually store it in long-term memory. If students are not attending to the task, the learning process is weakened at the very beginning. “Attention is the gateway to the mind and, thus, to learning” (Geary et al., 2008, p. 4-4). Without their attention, you do not have their thinking machinery. Also, Cognitive load theory reminds us that working memory is limited. When students are distracted, confused, or overloaded, in other words, attending to something else, their mental resources are no longer fully available for the learning task (Sweller, Ayres, & Kalyuga, 2011).

In plain language, students cannot learn what they do not mentally touch.

Attention Is the Doorway to Learning

Teachers do not control learning directly. They design conditions that make learning more likely. Attention is one of those conditions. When students attend to content, they are more likely to process it. When they process it, they are more likely to make meaning. When they make meaning, they are more likely to remember and use the learning later. This is why engagement is not just a classroom management concern. It is a learning concern.

Chi and Wylie’s ICAP framework helps clarify this idea. They describe different levels of cognitive engagement, ranging from passive to active to constructive to interactive. In general, students learn more deeply when they are not merely receiving information, but actively doing something meaningful with it, such as generating an explanation, asking questions, making connections, or interacting with others around the content (Chi & Wylie, 2014). You can think of the strategies associated with Element IIIb – Processing. Those are part of what keep cognitive engagement alive in your classroom. For more, see our earlier blogs on CPR – Chunking, Processing, and Recording.

This connects directly to Marzano’s emphasis on noticing. When students disengage, the teacher is not simply losing their attention. The teacher may be losing the opportunity for students to process, rehearse, question, retrieve, apply, or connect the content. That is why noticing matters. It gives the teacher a chance to intervene before disengagement becomes lost learning.

Reacting Is Responsive Teaching

Noticing disengagement is a form of evidence gathering. Reacting is a form of responsive instruction.

This aligns with the larger logic of formative assessment. Black and Wiliam’s review of formative assessment emphasizes that learning improves when evidence is used to adjust teaching and learning activities (Black & Wiliam, 1998). In other words, evidence only becomes powerful when it changes what happens next.

The same principle applies to engagement. A teacher might notice that several students are not attending during whole-class instruction. That evidence might lead the teacher to pause and ask students to process with a partner. A teacher might notice that a group has drifted off task. That evidence might lead to a brief check for understanding, a clarification of the task, or a shift in grouping. A teacher might notice that one student has stopped working independently. That evidence might lead to a quiet conference, a prompt, a question, or a temporary scaffold.

The point is not to blame students for being disengaged. The point is to treat disengagement as information.

Sometimes disengagement tells us the task is unclear. Sometimes it tells us the content is too easy or too difficult. Sometimes it tells us the lesson has gone on too long without a chance to process. Sometimes it tells us students need movement, novelty, relevance, humor, or a stronger connection to purpose. Sometimes it tells us that one student needs personal support.

Marzano’s Element VIa folio captures this responsive logic by identifying strategies such as looking for evidence that students are attending, asking students to report their engagement, redirecting attention, and responding to the overall energy and climate of the classroom (Marzano, 2021).

Engagement and Interest Can Be Developed

A second reason this element matters is that engagement is not fixed. It is easy to think some students “are engaged” and others “are not engaged.” That kind of thinking turns engagement into a trait. The more useful view is that engagement is influenced by the learning environment.

Fredricks and colleagues note that engagement is malleable and responsive to context (Fredricks et al., 2004). Hidi and Renninger’s work on interest development also suggests that interest can be triggered and supported over time through conditions in the environment (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). This does not mean every lesson must entertain students. It means teachers can design and adjust instruction in ways that help students find a point of entry into the learning.

This distinction is important. The goal is not entertainment. The goal is meaningful attention. A teacher might increase engagement by adding a puzzling question, connecting content to a real problem, asking students to defend a claim, using a brief academic game, inviting students to compare ideas, or shifting the energy in the room. These strategies are valuable when they help students return to the learning with more focus, curiosity, and effort.

In a competency-based classroom, this becomes even more important because different students may need different reasons to engage. One student may need clarity about the task. Another may need to see how the activity connects to the proficiency scale. Another may need a more challenging extension. Another may need a peer conversation before working independently. The teacher’s role is to notice those differences and respond.

Self-Reported Engagement Builds Agency

One of the most powerful ideas in the Element VIa folio is asking students to signal or report their own level of engagement. This matters because it moves engagement from something the teacher monitors to something students learn to monitor as well.

When students self-report engagement, they begin to pay attention to their own attention. They learn to recognize when they are focused, when they are drifting, when they are confused, and when they need a strategy to re-engage. That is a small but important step toward agency.

This connects with the broader goals of competency-based education. Students are not simply completing assignments. They are learning to understand themselves as learners. They are learning to track progress, interpret evidence, ask for support, and make decisions about what they need next. Self-reported engagement fits naturally inside that larger developmental aim.

Dunlosky and colleagues argue that students benefit when they learn to regulate their own learning through effective strategies (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Engagement self-monitoring is not the whole of self-regulated learning, but it is part of the foundation. A student who can say, “I am not focused right now because I do not understand the task,” is in a much better position than a student who simply shuts down.

That is why the teacher’s reaction matters. If students admit they are disengaged and the teacher responds with embarrassment or punishment, students learn to hide the truth. If the teacher responds with curiosity and support, students learn that noticing disengagement is part of learning how to learn.

The Teacher’s Energy Matters, but It Must Serve Learning

Marzano’s folio also emphasizes attending and reacting to the overall climate of the classroom. Sometimes the issue is not one student. Sometimes the room has lost energy. The pace has slowed. The task has become flat. The teacher may need to shift the climate so students can re-engage.

That might mean increasing response rates, adding movement, changing the tone of voice, using a quick sequence of questions, inviting students into a brief discussion, or modifying the task. The purpose is not to perform for students. The purpose is to restore the conditions for attention and learning.

This is where teacher expertise becomes visible. A novice may notice that students are disengaged and simply push harder through the lesson. A more skilled teacher notices the disengagement, interprets the likely cause, and makes a deliberate adjustment. An expert teacher does this while keeping the learning target intact.

What It Looks Like When This Element Is Working

When noticing and reacting are working well, the evidence is visible in both teacher and student behavior. Teachers monitor individual engagement and overall class engagement. They ask students to signal their level of engagement. They redirect attention when needed. They adjust the energy or structure of the lesson when the room begins to fade.

Students also show evidence. They understand that the teacher is paying attention to engagement. They try to increase their engagement when cued. They can describe what the teacher does to help them stay focused and involved. In Marzano’s language, the stronger levels of implementation occur when the teacher’s actions produce the desired effect for students, and when the teacher adapts for students who are not yet benefiting from those actions (Marzano, 2021; Marzano, 2011, 2012; Marzano & Toth, 2013).

This is an important point. The goal is not that the teacher uses an engagement strategy. The goal is that students are re-engaged in learning. A strategy is only effective if it produces the desired effect.

Conclusion

Noticing and reacting when students are not engaged is important because attention is the doorway to learning. Without attention, students are less likely to process content, connect ideas, practice accurately, or apply knowledge in meaningful ways. Engagement is not merely about classroom energy. It is about giving students access to the mental work that learning requires.

Dr. Marzano’s Element VIa reminds us that engagement must be monitored and supported, especially in a competency-based classroom where students may be working on different tasks at different levels of proficiency. The teacher must watch, listen, ask, interpret, and respond. In the end, this element asks a simple but powerful question: When students begin to drift away from the learning, what will I do to bring them back?

To continue building your understanding of Design Area VI and the full Marzano Academies instructional model, become a member of the Learning Lab. Members can access Dr. Marzano’s research folios, professional learning resources, and practical tools designed to help teachers make competency-based practices work in real classrooms. 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 notice disengagement, gather quick evidence from students, and respond in ways that bring learners back into the work.

References

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1), 7–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969595980050102

Chi, M. T. H., & Wylie, R. (2014). The ICAP framework: Linking cognitive engagement to active learning outcomes. Educational Psychologist, 49(4), 219–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2014.965823

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

Fredricks, J. A., Blumenfeld, P. C., & Paris, A. H. (2004). School engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74(1), 59–109. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059

Geary, D. C., Boykin, A. W., Embretson, S., Reyna, V., Siegler, R., Berch, D. B., & Graban, J. (2008). Chapter 4: Report of the Task Group on Learning Processes. In National Mathematics Advisory Panel, Task group reports of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel. U.S. Department of Education.

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487

Hidi, S., & Renninger, K. A. (2006). The four phase model of interest development. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 111–127. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_4

Marzano, R. J. (2011). Effective supervision: Supporting the art and science of teaching. ASCD.

Marzano, R. J. (2012). Becoming a reflective teacher. Marzano Research.

Marzano, R. J. (2021). Element VIa: Noticing and reacting when students are not engaged in a competency-based classroom. Marzano Academies.

Marzano, R. J., & Toth, M. D. (2013). Teacher evaluation that makes a difference: A new model for teacher growth and student achievement. ASCD.

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Sweller, J., Ayres, P., & Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive load theory. Springer.