HIGH-LEVERAGE PRACTICES IN Self-contained EBD and Alternative Education CLASSROOMS

Tuned In: Helping Students Connect, Care, and Contribute

Episode Description

This episode focuses on strategies to promote active student engagement. Candace and Heather dive into the challenges of working with students who are resistant to academics and highlight the importance of understanding each learner’s motivators, strengths, and barriers. They discuss practical strategies such as adjusting content levels, breaking tasks into manageable steps, incorporating movement or creativity, and offering meaningful rewards.
The conversation emphasizes the need for teachers to remain flexible, pivot when strategies aren’t working, and provide frequent opportunities for students to respond. Ultimately, the hosts underscore that true engagement stems from educators being actively engaged with their students—meeting them where they are, sustaining motivation, and nurturing learning as an ongoing, dynamic process.

Key Points and Takeaways

  • Understanding student motivators, learning styles, and barriers is the first step to addressing disengagement and fostering meaningful participation.
  • Teachers should evaluate whether academic content is too difficult, too easy, or simply uninteresting, then adjust tasks through chunking, scaffolding, or making activities more engaging.
  • Creativity in instruction—such as incorporating movement, collaboration, or technology—can transform otherwise “boring” tasks into opportunities for active learning.
  • Frequent opportunities to respond and ongoing checks for understanding help maintain attention, reveal disengagement early, and keep students accountable.
  • Engagement is sustained by educators remaining flexible, pivoting when strategies fail, and consistently investing in authentic, reciprocal engagement with students.
Podcast Guest

Candace McCoy, RBT

Candace McCoy is a school-based behavior technician and assistant organizational development specialist specializing in social, emotional, and behavioral challenges experienced by preteen and adolescent student populations as well as organizational behavior management. She has been a restaurant manager, travel agent, bartender, and paraprofessional in the private and public sectors. Outside of her professional work, she enjoys traveling and spending time with her family of young men. Candace is a Registered Behavior Technician with college coursework in education and interpretation.
Looking for CEUs? Click "01 | Listen" below!

Project Onward

Build a transformative intensive program with your complex at-risk students.
Join the next cohort to develop your self-contained EBD or alternative education program from design through implementation!
High-Leverage Practice #18:
Use strategies to promote active student engagement.
Teachers use a variety of instructional strategies that result in active student responding. Active student engagement is critical to academic success.  Teachers must initially build positive student–teacher relationships to foster engagement and motivate reluctant learners. They promote engagement by connecting learning to students’ lives (e. g., knowing students’ academic and cultural backgrounds) and using a variety of teacher-led (e.g., choral responding and response cards), peer-assisted (e. g., cooperative learning and peer tutoring), student-regulated (e.g., self-management), and technology-supported strategies shown empirically to increase student engagement. They monitor student engagement and provide positive and constructive feedback to sustain performance.
Empty space, drag to resize
Be ready to make an adjustment if you know what you're trying isn't working.

Candace McCoy

Empty space, drag to resize


Host: Heather Volchko

Guest: Candace McCoy

This week, we're talking about High-Leverage Practice number 18, using strategies to promote active student engagement. And Candace, I know you are constantly working with students whom staff have identified as being fairly resistant to engaging in their academics. I'm curious for you, what does this look like in your practice?

This sometimes is: I have an easier time correcting behavior than getting students to engage. This can be a really tough one. And I do have absolute compassion for teachers who are dealing with this because it can be very tough. I spend a lot of time if I'm targeting a disengaged student, I want to get to know them. I want to figure out what their preferences are, what type of motivators would get them going, and what their learning style is. I'm going to spend a lot of time doing those things.

So I think that step one is to learn your student. Everyone is motivated by something different, and it may be as simple as figuring out their motivators. It may be addressing their self-worth, it may be tackling their confidence. It could be a language barrier, or it could be a content issue. Data will be your best friend on this to figure out exactly what it is that seems to be the roadblock.

Well, I know you do this constantly with different staff who are just frustrated or fed up with ‘this student just won't do their work.’ How do you approach those scenarios? Like, what types of things are your kind of automatic go tos? Not even like those recommendations that you give staff, but when you sit down, and you start working with a student, what are some of those first things that you're trying to figure out as you're trying to understand? Like, where is that lack of engagement coming from?

Generally, I would say that I start with trying to get through at least a piece of the academic material with them to see if it is appropriate. Is it at an appropriate level? Is it too easy, is it too hard? Is there a lot of reading, and they can't read, or is it a lot of writing? Is there a language barrier? I think step one is taking a look at the content and making sure that it's something the student can engage in.

If it is something that they can't engage in, it may be something they don't like. It's students who hate reading. That seems to be a big one. They do not want to read. Well, we all know that's not an option you have to read. So it might be, you read a sentence, I read a sentence, you read a sentence. I read a sentence. Now I've broken it down a little bit smaller for them. I've shown them that they could do it. We do it together, then we break off. You read two sentences, I'll read one sentence. And until we get to. You read the whole paragraph.

So sometimes it's just chunking it down. It's time-consuming. But if they're capable of doing it, and as you're going through that process, you realize if they are or aren't capable of doing it, how many times do you have to help them with a word or explain to them what that means, or help them pronounce it? It may be too difficult for them. Or it may be so easy that they're like, yeah, quick brown fox, you know, whatever.

Well, now we need to take them up a level and make it a little more challenging for them so that they're actually learning something. Or it could be they're completely distracted by something that has nothing to do with school, because outside of that classroom, they have a life going on, a life that we don't know a whole lot about, and they could be very distracted by that. I know when I'm at work, and I'm having an issue with something at home or a bill that I forgot to pay, and it dawns on me at work, I am less productive, I'm less engaged, I'm distracted. So, we might need to get to the root of those distractions if that's the situation and see how we can move past that to continue learning and help the student through it.

Well, so you just called out a whole bunch of different strategies here, right? So one of them you're talking about is just, is it even on level? And I love that you're noticing that it could be too difficult or too easy, because a lot of the educators we work with assume if it's a content issue, the content is too hard. And I know you and I have both worked with many students who are showing up with some big behaviors or big emotional reactions. And they are also highly intelligent. And so the level of work, just because there's a big blowback to engaging in that work, does not mean that it's too hard.

So I love that you're leaving room for both, because I think sometimes in this population, it's sort of assumed that they're just underperformers and the content at level is simply just too hard, when in reality, our population, with this entire season, it is so splintered, like they've got so many skills that are either so much higher or so much lower across the entire map of any way you could break out those skills. So I love that you're leaving room for it could truly go either way.

I think diversifying the instructional approaches is important, too. Each student learns in a different way, and they're going to engage in that material. And honestly, I don't care how you learn, as long as you learn. That's what you're here for. So whatever it may be. And I always go back to a student who would not do his vocab, just would not read it, write it, learn it, didn't care. So incredibly disengaged. So we started taking walks. And while we would take walks, I would read the vocab word, he would tell me the definition, we would spell it, and we would walk around the school for long periods of time until we got through his entire vocab homework, so that he knew those words. It was just a creative solution when we had to diversify. He was not going to sit down and memorize vocabulary words. That wasn't going to happen. But if we were moving, if we were talking, if we were engaged together, then he was engaged.

I understand that that's not a reality in every classroom to do something like that, but it's just an idea of creativity that you have to sometimes employ in order to engage the student with the material. Some stuff's just boring, and you've got to find a way to make it a little less boring, because there are students who will not talk through the boring. They just won't. They won't do that stuff. They might prefer working in groups, and this is an individual activity, or they want to do everything on their computer. And this is on paper. So you gotta spice it up a little bit. Yes, you still have to do it on paper, but we could probably make it slightly more fun and engaging so that you're interested in it. And using multiple modes like collaborative projects or tech tools or gamifying the activities, stuff like that can be options.

The ultimate goal is not that they do it your way. It's that they learn. And remembering that that's the goal. And sometimes I think we get a little wrapped up in, ‘no, this is how we do this,’ but this is not how that student does it. So what we want is the content in their brain. We want them to learn it and know it and be confident in it. And so we need to meet them where they are.

Thank you for that. Because, like, yes, it's we are trying to get them to engage so that they learn. I know I've been in situations where a certain intervention has to be run in a certain way to maintain the fidelity of the intervention. And quite honestly, it's horribly dry and boring. And so there have been times where to facilitate that engagement. I'm just acknowledging the fact, like, yeah, I'm sorry. Like, I wish I could be doing this differently. I wish we could be more creative with those strategies. But this is what it is. We're both stuck, right? Like, we're both stuck with it, can we work together so that we can mutually get through this as quickly as well as possible?

So the learning can happen, the intervention can work. But I'm not going to pretend like this is the best thing ever. Like, sometimes it's just not. And there's nothing that, as an educator that I can do about it. But yes to every other option and opportunity, like, if I am not stuck in that, like, this must be run in this way for this fidelity metric. Creativity to the hilt, right? Like, the goal is learning. The goal is for whatever this is to actually sink into them. Just like you're like so beautifully communicating here. And I think if we can hold that perspective well, then engagement becomes almost secondary to, I'm thinking, staff creativity. Like, can we be open and creative about how we can get them to engage with that content? Well, then engagement will just naturally happen because we're being so creative with how they can access that learning opportunity.

And I think even in those situations where it has to be done in the most boring way possible. And I think a lot about standardized testing in that there's one way to do this, and it's very controlled and it's very specific. If they engage in that, then what comes next? What are we going to do? Like, hey, I know this is horrible, but we're going to sit down, we're going to knock this out, and then you're going to get a 15-minute break, and you can jump on the computer, or you can go outside or shoot baskets, so we can get creative. Even in the really boring stuff, creativity doesn't really stop there.

It just might have to wait a minute, you know, delayed gratification. But we've got something coming for you. I know that I don't make it through a day of work unless I know that there's a paycheck at the end of it. So we're all working for a reward of some sort. There's nothing wrong with that. Just get creative in that area, too. And I think pay attention to their body language, their participation, and emotional tone. You'll get a lot of signals as to how engaged they are just by watching that.

Yeah, no, thank you for challenging me on that. Because in my mind, I'm thinking like an educator, right? Like, what are those engagement strategies that I could be leveraging within this activity to increase that learning? And you're 100% correct in saying that sometimes it's not even just within that activity, it's what's going on around that activity before and after. If we can't touch what's happening during.

And yes, all the reinforcers and motivators and all of those things are absolutely the strategies that we're leveraging to make that happen and actually get through those things that may be activities that have to be done in a certain way, and that we don't maybe have the leverage of creativity that we can leverage during the activity.

And I think being prepared to pivot or adjust if what you're trying isn't working. You know, do quick checks like a thumbs up or an exit ticket, or something like that. Check and see what kind of response you're getting from them, and ask them how are you doing? ‘I'm good’ or ‘I'm not good.’ And they'll tell you, but be ready to make an adjustment if what you're trying isn't working.

I can't even tell you how many things I will try with a student. And I walk into classrooms, and I often have the expectation that I'm going to fix this right now. And the first thing that I'm going to try is going to work. That is not a reality. That's not going to happen. I'm going to try 30 things before I find the thing that works. Because I'm walking cold into a classroom. I don't know this student. And I have a goal in mind. And my goal is to engage them in the academic material and for them to learn. So I got to pivot all the time. Like, well, that didn't work. Let's try again.

Yeah, and I think you're walking in cold knowing that you're walking in cold. I think sometimes, as educators, we think like, ‘well, this has been working for the past couple of months, like, why did it stop working?’ Or like, ‘why is this no longer effective?’ And I think sometimes it can be harder to remember or choose to pivot because it's like, ‘well, but this is working.’ And so now I think sometimes I run into situations with staff where the kid is broken. Like, clearly the strategy was working, so now the kid is the problem.

But I love that you're kind of like, well then it doesn't work. Then pick something else. You know, pick something else. Try another angle, right? Is learning happening? If not, well, then we need to pivot.

And all our students are capable of learning. Every one of them is capable of learning. Doesn't matter the disability or the background, they are all capable of learning. Now, are they all capable of learning what you're trying to teach? Potentially, potentially not. You have to be aware of that. But they're all capable of learning, and they all want to learn. We just have to find the way to teach them and make sure that we're teaching them the appropriate things.

I think one of the biggest ways to gauge that is to give them frequent opportunities to respond. Make sure that you're getting that feedback while you're teaching. Lectures are great as long as there are frequent opportunities to respond within and get feedback as you're going. You could give a 20-minute lecture, and you lost them at minute two. And if you didn't stop and check, you don't know that you lost them at minute two.

So give them frequent opportunities to respond. I watch a classroom, and when I'm just taking data, and when that teacher talks for 20, 30 minutes straight, half the class is asleep. There are glazed-over looks. No one's taking notes. Stop and ask questions. The rooms in which the teachers engage the students throughout that teaching time, so much more effective, so much more engagement in the classroom. Everybody's awake. They're all aware they anyone might get called on. So they're kind of alert for that. So yeah, I think that's really, really important in keeping the classroom engaged.

I think what I'm hearing through this entire conversation is that the best strategy to increase or activate our students' engagement is simply for us to be highly engaged with them. If it's either us being highly aware of, you know, you had talked about interest backgrounds and some of what they're bringing with them into that learning. If it's us being aware of the leveling of the content or the activity that we're asking them to complete. If it's us having a variety of strategies that we can kind of Rolodex through and see what is going to stick or work with that student or if it's simply just us checking in, if it's through body language or the emotional affect of like what's coming back at us or providing those opportunities to respond, all of that is really just staff engagement that this is not a one sided thing. It's not like I do this strategy, and the response to that strategy is that the student engages. It's I am choosing to engage with my students, and the natural outcome of that is that my students engage with me.

I think of it a bit like a campfire. If you don't continue to feed it, the campfire will go out. And it's the same thing with engagement. You have to continue to feed it with intentional strategies in order to keep that burning. You might be engaged in September and not in January, and you have to be intentional and continue to feed it and be creative throughout the school year.

Well, thank you so much. I know, as I said at the top of this conversation, you are almost only ever pulled into working with students because they are not engaging. So thank you so much for sharing with us what you're seeing behind, maybe just what you're walking into. It's really increased that engagement in all the different kinds of ways that you've tried to do so.

Thank you.

Empty space, drag to resize
The ultimate goal is not that they do it your way. It's that they learn.

Candace McCoy

Empty space, drag to resize

Student engagement is crucial for achieving positive academic outcomes. The link between engagement and academic success is robust and well-documented. Engaged students are not just more likely to excel academically; they are also more likely to develop a genuine interest in learning and a sense of autonomy.


Teachers often employ a range of engagement strategies to motivate students and foster personal connections. These might include collaborative activities like peer-assisted learning or individualized approaches such as personalized feedback. Beyond just getting students to participate, effective strategies help students see the relevance of their education and foster a sense of belonging.


Engagement itself is a multifaceted concept, encompassing cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. Behavioral engagement involves students' participation in activities; affective engagement covers their feelings of belonging and the value they place on school; and cognitive engagement refers to their persistence and effort, especially on challenging tasks. These dimensions are interrelated and are significantly influenced by teachers' actions and instructional practices.


The level of student engagement directly impacts academic achievement and the likelihood of graduating from high school. This is especially important for students with disabilities, who, when included in general education settings, may not always engage as actively as their peers. Such students are at a higher risk of dropping out, with engagement being a key predictor of high school completion. To mitigate these risks, it's vital for special education teachers to help students set personal goals, explicitly teach and model engagement behaviors, and build strong relationships from the start. By strategically integrating engagement strategies into daily instruction, educators can address many of the challenges that threaten students' academic success and overall well-being.


Maintaining high levels of student engagement can be one of the more demanding aspects of teaching, yet it's crucial for fostering both academic achievement and student satisfaction. An effective special educator plays a pivotal role in crafting and delivering instruction that keeps students engaged and progressing toward their academic and behavioral goals. 


There's no single path to achieving this, but engagement often flourishes when the learning activities are suitably challenging, when students aren't distracted by their surroundings, and when they have access to supportive strategies that aid their success. A strong approach begins with a blend of High-Leverage Practices (HLPs) and evidence-based strategies.


For instance, incorporating explicit instruction (HLP 16) and providing high-quality feedback (HLP 8/22) within a well-organized, respectful learning environment (HLP 7) sets a solid foundation for engagement. Furthermore, systematically designing instruction to meet individual learning goals (HLP 11) and integrating relevant adaptations, like technology supports (HLP 19) and scaffolds (HLP 15), can significantly enhance student engagement. By combining these practices thoughtfully, educators can create a learning environment that not only captures students' interest but also supports their ongoing development.


Teachers who excel at promoting active student engagement understand that building strong, positive relationships with their students is key. They tailor their approaches to fit individual needs, often incorporating technology like augmentative communication devices or visual supports to enhance engagement.


These educators are adept at using a range of research-backed strategies to keep students actively involved. This might include fluency-building activities, guided notes, class-wide peer tutoring, and various digital tools. They ensure that students have ample opportunities to respond and interact with their peers, fostering a dynamic and participatory learning environment.


Feedback plays a crucial role in this process. Effective teachers provide detailed, academic, and behavior-specific feedback, helping students understand how they’re meeting expectations and motivating them to maintain or improve their performance.


Additionally, they embrace the energy of a classroom engaged in group activities, encouraging what might be termed "good noise"—that lively, productive buzz of students collaborating and learning. By integrating games, rewards, and consistent praise, they create a vibrant atmosphere that supports active and enthusiastic participation.


To effectively support teachers in fostering active student engagement, school leaders should focus on various key areas. Start by providing educators with robust professional development and coaching that covers a broad spectrum of strategies aimed at enhancing student involvement. Observing how these strategies are put into practice allows leaders to offer valuable feedback, highlighting both strengths and areas for improvement.


When teachers face challenges in applying these strategies, it's crucial to work collaboratively with them to pinpoint specific obstacles and provide targeted support. Encourage educators to think creatively and explore innovative methods for engaging students, while also staying updated on new developments in engagement strategies to keep the teaching approach fresh and effective.


In essence, fostering a culture of active engagement requires a commitment to ongoing learning, flexibility, and a proactive approach to problem-solving and support.


Research consistently shows that student engagement plays a crucial role in academic success, particularly for those at risk of poor learning outcomes. While most studies focus on general education, we know that students with disabilities are even more vulnerable to disengagement and dropout. This risk is significant because disengagement often leads to negative educational and life outcomes.


For educators, especially those in inclusive classrooms, recognizing the signs of disengagement and addressing them promptly is essential. Teachers must implement a variety of strategies to keep these students engaged. Early, positive, and consistent engagement strategies are key to fostering both academic and behavioral success. This proactive approach helps create a supportive environment that can significantly improve outcomes for students with disabilities.

Empty space, drag to resize