Meaningful and relevant: engaging learners in the age of distraction

• Rebellion – Actively resisting or pushing back against expectations.
• Retreatism (or apathy) – Disengagement, where students are physically present but mentally absent.
• Ritual compliance – Doing the bare minimum to meet expectations without genuine interest.
• Strategic compliance – Meeting expectations with a focus on achieving a reward or avoiding a consequence.
• True engagement – The highest level, where students exhibit both high attention and high commitment.

True engagement happens when students are fully invested—attentive and committed. The key is understanding that if we focus solely on grabbing attention, we’ll never win against platforms like TikTok.

However, if we focus on creating meaningful and relevant learning experiences that foster collaboration, a sense of belonging, and genuine commitment, we can succeed.

Yes, I recommend that system too—I love it. It makes everything so explicit for students. It communicates that AI isn’t inherently bad or forbidden, but that it has a specific time and place. Over time, students can start to ask themselves, Where should this assignment fall on the scale?

They might consider questions like: Could AI be a brainstorming partner for me? Could it be helpful? Or would it end up doing the learning for me? This system helps students think more intentionally about their choices: Why am I using AI? What am I getting out of this? What is the purpose of this assignment? What am I supposed to be learning? It brings the focus back to the why behind their work.

This approach is so valuable. That intentional, metacognitive piece is huge—especially for us as educators.

Too many changes in too little time: what lasts?

Now, this is a bit of a side note, but I’m thinking about the teacher who’s listening and saying, Okay, so now I need to change even more about how I teach? I feel like we’ve had so many hinge points in history—I’ve lived through too many of them. I’m tired. I’ve had to adjust my teaching so many times, and I just don’t know if I can keep doing this.

I completely understand. It feels like these hinge points in history are happening faster and faster, and that exponential pace can be overwhelming. What I would say to that teacher is this: in a world dominated by all this technology, human connection is more important than ever.

And you know why are concert tickets higher priced now than ever before? We can listen to any song we want at any point in time, but people want that human connection. You know why sporting events are at higher tickets? I’m trying to get tickets to my Eagles game. It’s it’s impossible, right? But it’s it’s because we want that human connection. And a lot of people talk about how AI tutors are going to replace teachers, and they’re going to change everything. And to that teacher, I would ask the question, Sure, it’d be great if every kid could have a tutor. But would that kid want to be tutored?

It’s great that they could have the opportunity. Do they want to be tutored? Do they want to talk to a bot? Or do they want to talk to you if you built that relationship with them? And so of course, we are going to have to continue to evolve as educators. But you know there’s four areas I always talk about as always being important throughout the history of time in education. If you want to create an engaged learning experience, it needs to meet at least three of the following criteria:

• Human – Focused on personal connections, emotions, and relationships.
• Social – Involving collaboration, discussion, or interaction with others.
• Meaning-centered – Rooted in purpose and relevance, connecting to students’ lives or interests.
• Language-based – Encouraging expression, dialogue, and the use of language to explore and learn.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re in Socrates and Aristotle’s time or our time right now or the 1980s, it has to be at least three of those four things.

Now, do they look a little bit different in today’s world? Of course, they do. But they’re still what engaged kids. They’re still the principles and foundation of great learning experiences. And I think that teacher who’s overwhelmed should say, Alright, in this world all of all this change and everything, what’s going to stay the same?

What’s the human need that’s going to stay the same? And if they realize that it is the fact that they need to be human and social and meaning-centered and language-based, those are the types of experiences, not technology, they’re going to engage kids. Hopefully, it’ll give them a little bit of calm. And I call these four things, the sharks of education. They’ve been through everything and they’re not going away.

And I feel like hopefully I can give them some grounding of saying, you know, I do really have a place in this moving forward. And my kids are going to need that connection with me more than ever surrounded by all this technology.

Addressing FOMO and the need for belonging

Yeah, that’s a really lovely way to look at it. It ties back to what you said earlier about kids’ so-called “addiction” to phones being more about belonging and connection. That study, where people were willing to pay to have everyone they know stay off social media for a while, really underscores how deeply this is tied to the sense of belonging and FOMO—the fear of missing out. If everyone else is online, kids feel like they’re missing out on things that are happening.

If we know kids have this need for belonging, and we’re asking them to put their phones away in the classroom—whether it’s just for a lesson, a day, or even the entire school day—we have to acknowledge what’s happening on a deeper level. I love the idea of having phones gone for the entire day because it prevents kids from checking between classes or worrying about what’s being said about them at lunch. But even then, we can’t ignore their underlying need for connection and belonging.

I’ve felt this personally when I’ve put my own phone away for a while. That urge to check isn’t really about the phone—it’s about wanting to know what else is happening in the world and feeling connected to the people I care about. Kids feel the same way. So, if we’re not letting them check their texts in class, the question becomes: How do we give them that sense of belonging in the classroom? How do we meet that need?

And how do we address their very human fear of missing out? These might seem like separate questions, but they’re deeply interrelated.

This is such a big issue for me because it forces us to think differently about what our instructional process looks like.

You’ve probably heard of the gradual release of responsibility model—it’s the classic I do, we do, you do, with some collaboration sprinkled in along the way. When we think about removing technology from the classroom, we often assume that kids will suddenly start paying attention to the I do portion again, as if the problem was just the tech. But that’s not really the case. Kids might’ve been scribbling, daydreaming, or zoning out long before phones became an issue.

In fact, when we were teaching on Zoom during the pandemic, most kids had their cameras off and weren’t paying attention. That was a wake-up call for a lot of us—realizing just how disengaged they were.

So, while there will always be a time and place for direct instruction, we need to shift toward we do and you do much more often. Sometimes, the process might even start there, with direct instruction woven in as needed. Other times, we’ll need to step back and become the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage.

If we’re banning phones in the classroom but just using that time to stand at the front, click through PowerPoints, and give tests, we’re not actually solving anything. All we’re doing is making things easier for ourselves without addressing the real issue.

Oof, that’s a tough one to swallow, isn’t it? I need to let that sink in there for a minute. If we’re getting rid of phones in order to just stand at the front of the classroom and have kids quote undivided attention as they listen to us talk, it’s not, we’re not solving the root problem.

We’re solving our problem, not the kids’ problem. We all know that kids should talk more in class—there should be more student talk and less teacher talk, more creating and less consuming. But the reality is that it’s difficult to achieve within the current system.

Our curriculum is bloated. We have 1,100 math standards and endless things we’re required to cover. We have state tests—whether it’s the Regents in New York, the PSSAs in Pennsylvania, or the Iowa assessments. These are pressures we can’t escape. So, I’m not faulting teachers at all—I’m empathetic toward the system we’re working within.

That said, I think some of us believe that simply removing phones will fix the engagement problem. But I don’t think it will. What solves the problem is implementing meaningful and relevant instructional practices.

To me, that’s the big shift we need to make in our teaching: running everything through the lens of, How can I make this meaningful to kids? How can I make it relevant?

And the exciting thing is that there are more resources and tools available to help us do that than ever before. That’s what makes me feel like, despite the challenges, it’s an exciting time to be a teacher.

Rigor doesn’t always translate to retention

Your new book is about making learning meaningful and relevant in an age of distractions. I wonder if you’re like me in this sense: when I’m writing a book, I often don’t know what I fully think or believe until I start writing. The process itself helps me uncover my thoughts and organize the loose ideas in my head. It’s not that I wait until I know it all and then write—I learn as I write.

I’m curious if you experience something similar. What did you discover about your own thinking while writing this book? What did you learn in the process that might have surprised you?

Yeah, this book has taken many twists and turns for me, but it really started with the idea of me struggling with eliminating these distractions and eliminating technology. And does that solve our problem? And the more and more research and studies I read, it didn’t solve many problems.

And I even see that there’s a lot of pushback on Haidt’s work for neurodiverse and learners with disabilities that need this technology and need some of the assistive technology that phones and other devices take place. And so I started just having a little bit bigger and broader view, but what it came down to that I think was the big aha moment for me is we are now entering a kind of phase in education where kids can do anything at home faster than ever before and it doesn’t ever have to be their own. So how do we create a system of learning that is mostly done in class that connects the kids’ interests and also covers our our standards and that type of thing? And the one thing that kept on popping up over and over again, when I was looking at the research and all that kind of stuff that just kept on jumping out to me over and over again is most folks think that rigor prepares kids for their future.

And I think in some cases it does. But what we found is a lot of the practices that we’re doing have no effect on transfer. So this is a big study they did at Morristown and a bunch of other schools where they took all their kids that took a final. And these were high-performance students for the most part. I think the average final school was like a B minus, which is pretty good for a final.

The kids took it in June, then they all took the final again in September. What do you think the average s score was? Same final, same kids.

They went all the way down to an F. And there was not one kid that got an A. I mean, there were plenty of kids that got 100 and all that kind of stuff.

And so like that that, to me, started this process of, well, what’s our goal? Is it to see if the kids know something right now in this very moment, or is it for kids to develop knowledge, understanding, and skills that can transfer in the future?

If that’s our goal, then a lot of our current practices aren’t really practical. We can give kids challenging tests and all this kind of stuff, and maybe some get A’s and some get F’s, but if three months later, every kid’s gonna get an F, even our highest performing ones, what have we done?

What has that all been for? And so that really came out of a lot of the research I was looking at and really made me think differently, especially about assessment and how to craft performance tasks that are both meaningful and relevant, but then also lead to transfer.

And that was one of the biggest a-has for me. I thought it was going to be a lot about instruction and getting kids’ attention, but a lot of it ended up being about transfer and how we can do a better job of creating performance tasks that lead to transfer.

That really addresses a question I’ve been mulling over for a while: the issue of rigor. It feels to me like we’re asking students to do more and more compared to what we asked of them decades ago. You know, people often say things like, “Kindergarten is the new first grade,” and I think that’s true—we’re expecting a lot.

Of course, there are segments of people who argue that we’re actually dumbing things down and making it too easy for kids. But when you compare what schools expected of students in the 1950s or even the 1980s to now, it’s clear that we’re trying to address a much broader diversity of needs. We’re really attempting to do more.

And that’s where the word rigor becomes such a loaded term. There’s this push to make things challenging, but somehow it doesn’t feel like the answer. What you’re saying here really hits on why that is.

Yeah, especially I think the way we define rigor, right? So um when we talk about teaching kids how to read, we use the term ah zone of proximal development a lot.

For some reason that falls off after like second or third grade. But that should be always what we’re looking at when we’re creating learning experiences.

Because if I was learning how to play tennis, it wouldn’t help me to play Serena Williams because that’s a much higher level than I’m at. It also wouldn’t help me to play my 10-year-old son because it would be on a much lower level. I need to find someone who’s a little bit better than me or at the same level in order to kind of grow. And we know this in sports and music and all these other areas. For some reason, in school and learning work, we need to develop more of those zones of proximal learning rigor is just a term for.

Having kids struggle just a bad thing think there’s a place in time for it, but what’s your struggle looks very different than my struggle. And so a lot of kids that end up labeling themselves and the achievement gap kind of goes through and through. And even our highest performing learners are kids that are getting A’s.

They’re the ones in most of the research that came out that are struggling with so much mental health, diet, depression, all those different types of things.

And it’s from a lot of times that rigor. So if we look at it from a whole child perspective and a transfer perspective, really, where’s the rigor helping us? Who’s that helping? What problems is that solving? I think it does a lot more harm than good, but we’re just doing it for the sake of creating that struggle.

The role of self-regulation skills for students

I’m a big advocate for teaching students how to monitor and meet their own needs in the classroom so that the responsibility isn’t entirely on teachers to differentiate and personalize everything for every student. I’m curious if that’s something you address in your work, and if you have strategies to help students develop skills like focus, self-management, self-advocacy, and self-regulation.

Yeah, this is such an important topic. Depending on kids’ backgrounds, upbringing, and other factors, their abilities in these areas can vary widely. In the book Empower that John Spencer and I wrote, we start with a key question: What decisions am I making for kids that they could be making for themselves? That’s the starting point.

Once we identify those decisions, the next step is scaffolding. We can’t just throw kids into the deep end—we need to provide structure and guidance. What does that look like? Are we breaking tasks into manageable chunks? Are we doing regular check-ins? Are we holding different types of conferences?

John Spencer outlines three types of conferences that I love:

1. Feedback Conferences – The student asks questions, and the teacher provides feedback.
2. Reflection Conferences – The teacher asks questions, and the student reflects on their learning process.
3. Mastery Conferences – A back-and-forth conversation where both the teacher and student discuss progress and proficiency.

You have to scaffold students to work their way up to that mastery-level conference. As teachers, we need to ask ourselves: What protocols, structures, and strategies are we using to help kids develop these skills? That’s why I love tools like the scientific method, the inquiry process, the engineering design cycle, or design thinking. These provide students with a clear process to follow, which helps them self-regulate much more effectively than just telling them, “Figure it out on your own.”

When kids have a process and structure, they’re much better equipped to develop self-regulation and independence in a meaningful way.

Building engagement without gimmicks

What advice do you have for teachers who want to build long-term habits of engagement instead of relying on short-term tactics or gimmicks?

When I wrote this book, I initially set out to create a straightforward guide—like an IKEA manual—with strategies: Do this, then this, then this. But as I dug into the research, I realized I was approaching it all wrong.

IKEA-style solutions just don’t work in classrooms. There are too many variables—your class is different from mine, the ages and subjects are different, the school environment is different, and the individual students are different. It’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all solution.

Instead, I now think of it like building a childhood fort. When you build a fort, you work with the materials and environment you have. If you’re outside, you might use a tree. If you’re inside, you might use couch cushions and blankets. The fort grows out of its environment, and no two forts are the same.

The same is true for engagement. You try things. Some things will work and stick, and others won’t. But over time, you figure out what works for your unique classroom environment.

I think this process—of experimenting, adapting, and learning from what works—is a much better way to approach engagement than trying to follow a rigid, step-by-step formula.

The value of education is a harder sell for kids today, but we can change that

I love that. I love that analogy. I think it’s perfect. I want to close out the show with a takeaway truth. What is something that you wish that every teacher understood about engaging learners at an age of distraction?

When I saw this question, I thought, Wow, this is a lot of pressure! But I think the big takeaway truth is this: our learners are different because their lived experiences are different.

When I was growing up, the only glimpse I had into the lifestyles of the rich and famous was through shows like MTV Cribs. That’s how I saw the mansions, the fancy cars, and even the stocked fridges and pantries. I grew up in a small town, and I only had two friends I’d consider “rich.” One’s parents were doctors, and they had an in-ground pool (which we rarely got to use, but it felt amazing). Another friend’s dad was a lawyer, and he always had the latest gaming system, like the new Nintendo or Sega.

When my parents told me, Go to school, pay attention, do your homework every night, get good grades, go to college, and you’ll have a good life, I believed them. I didn’t always follow their advice, but me and most of my friends bought into that story. It was the blueprint for success.

Fast-forward to today, and when we tell kids the same story, it’s a much harder sell. They’re looking at their phones—the ones we’re paying for, by the way—and seeing thousands of people on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat making hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. They see people earning money by putting on makeup, playing video games, or doing dances—not even good dances!

This is a monumental shift. Kids are looking at the world and saying, I can do anything and make money doing it. There’s never been a time in history where that’s been so accessible. It’s completely changed how we think about the future, success, and especially school. School was once viewed as the bridge to a better life if you followed the “right” path. But now, many kids are asking, Why should I do your assignments, take your assessments, or buy into your idea of a school-based future—unless I care about the learning or see value in what I’m doing?

This is why it’s more important than ever to help kids care. We need to make learning meaningful and relevant, or we risk losing their attention and their commitment. The traditional “game of school” doesn’t work in a world where kids have endless options and access to everything at their fingertips.

So, how do we adjust? That’s the big question for the next decade. How does education evolve? Can we stop telling the same old story? And let’s be honest: that story never worked for everyone in the first place. There have always been people left behind by that narrative.

What’s the new story for education going to look like? What will it look like in your classroom? How will you motivate your students and help them achieve? How will you make even the dull parts of the curriculum meaningful and engaging?

These are the challenges we face as we navigate this hinge point in history. We’re dealing with a generation of kids who have more options than ever before. Add to that the rise of artificial intelligence on top of all the distractions they’re already facing, and it’s clear we’re in uncharted territory.

For all of us, the question is this: How can we be human, empathetic to our students and their circumstances, and create meaningful, relevant learning experiences? Because when we do, teaching becomes fun again. When kids are engaged and empowered, the work we do as educators becomes deeply fulfilling.