Summary: Improving Student Disengagement

What new strategies and policies can BPS implement to improve student engagement?

Introduction:

For me it happens almost every single day. I’m in class almost half asleep, bored out of my mind, and not learning or understanding anything because all the teacher is doing is just giving a lecture. This leads to me not doing the work assigned to me which then results in a bad grade on my report card and it's times like those that make me question “is school really worth it ?” According to the prevention researcher “ Most researchers believe that dropout is… a long process of disengagement from school.” Many students right now are not engaged in their classes, they aren’t wanting to learn. they’re just sitting around listening to a teacher speak

This problem we face is real, as I mentioned before according to the prevention researcher, “researchers believe that dropout is… a long process of disengagement from school.” Which means that if we let this problem persist we will risk losing more students and increasing the dropout rate in Boston.

Not only will we risk losing more students but we must also fix student engagement because with the number of student dropping out each year the number of unfilled jobs that you need an education for also rises, as said by Alpastan Sahin in a STEM jobs report “ The U.S. will produce more than 1.8 million STEM jobs by 2018. 1.2 million of these jobs will go unfilled.” Which means that more than half of the STEM jobs that the U.S. will produce will be vacant.

This leads to even bigger problems such as lack of innovation because as the U.S. department of commerce said in 2017, “STEM workers help drive our nation’s innovation…by generating new ideas and new companies.” This means that the less people we have filling those jobs, the more new ideas and companies this nation will lack. Ideas and companies that could possibly help this nation’s economy or even help stop climate change and save humanity from extinction. We would be losing all of this due to the fact that we didn’t want to help our students become interested in learning again and wanted to continue following

This is a perfect example of a simple strategy that can be easily implemented especially given the fact that “much innovation aimed at increasing student engagement and attainment is embedded in new technologies” (Rhoades 2012), so why not exploit this strategy. According to some recent studies using this strategy students “showed a trend of improved executive function”(a set of mental skills that help you get things done) and “ a trend of increased attention.” If BPS implemented this strategy in their high school classes we could see results like these in action and less or even better no students dropping out at