Education: Stop measuring engagement, when you don’t design for it.

New research from Discovery Education reveals a deep disconnect:
✅ 99% of superintendents believe they have systems for measuring engagement.
✅ Only 60% of teachers agree those systems actually exist.
✅ 63% of students say they’re highly engaged.
✅ But only 45% of teachers see that same engagement in their classrooms.
✅ And just 42% of students perceive their peers as engaged.

Here’s where I stand:
We’re not just measuring engagement wrong—we’re measuring the wrong things entirely.

The problem? We’ve confused compliance with engagement. Test scores with curiosity. Participation with passion.

And the research confirms it: 72% of teachers see asking thoughtful questions as the strongest indicator of engagement. Yet 54% of superintendents point to performance on assessments—nearly twice as high as teachers, who rank tests among the lowest indicators.

That’s not engagement. That’s compliance.

Real engagement isn’t a checkbox on an assessment rubric—it’s the light in a student’s eyes when they connect learning to something that matters to them.

It isn’t something you measure after the fact. It’s something you feel in the moment. The electricity in the room when students discover something that matters to them. The questions they ask, not the answers they give. The way they lean in, not how they perform.

👉 Ask "What made you curious today?" instead of "Did you meet the learning objective?" Curiosity is the heartbeat of engagement—and students know when it’s beating.

👉 Give students agency over their learning path. When they help shape what and how they learn, engagement shifts from something we hope for to something they own.

The schools that truly thrive don’t track engagement scores. They create conditions where engagement can’t help but emerge.

What’s one way you could shift from measuring engagement to designing for it this week?