During my final years in the classroom, I struggled with something many teachers now face: We’ve lost our students. Disengagement is everywhere, and if we keep teaching the same way, we risk losing them for good. We must find a way to bring them back.
“There are many students who are lacking motivation,” a Pennsylvania teacher recently told me, “and I am learning that I do not know how to support all. That seems insurmountable.”
For 14 years, I taught history, civics, sociology, and psychology to grades 8–12. I entered the profession eager to spark the same passion for history and civic engagement that inspired me. For a time, teaching the way I was taught seemed to work. But in my final years, no matter how entertaining I tried to be, content-heavy delivery no longer connected. Students tuned out, and we fell into a cycle of frustration and disengagement on both sides.
One lesson made this painfully clear. I spent hours designing a gerrymandering project where students would redraw Pennsylvania’s districts fairly. I expected lively debates. Instead, groups turned in maps that copied county outlines or abandoned the work altogether. What I saw as an exciting, hands-on activity felt like busy work to them. At the time, I blamed the students. Only later did I realize the real issue was pedagogical.
Ironically, during that span, I experienced a similar level of disengagement as I was forced to attend a series of cookie-cutter, content-heavy, “sit-and-get” professional development (PD) sessions.
Repeated classroom and PD disengagement wore me down and led me to my current role at Penn State’s Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Initiative, where I now facilitate professional learning. I wanted to be part of something different. Our approach positions teachers as the drivers of their learning through practitioner inquiry, a process that enables them to investigate the challenges they face and the questions they need to explore. We guide their learning through three lenses: trauma-informed practice, asset-based thinking, and contextual responsiveness. Teachers shape their own journeys. They decide what difficult issues to confront, come up with compelling questions, and collect data to inform their classroom application. Rather than prescribing one-size-fits-all solutions, our programs emphasize customization, collaboration, reflection, and application within each educator’s unique context.
In this new role, I’ve come to see what was missing in my own classroom—and what’s possible when we shift to student-centered teaching. Real engagement comes only when learners—teachers or students—are in the driver’s seat.
Two program participants with I whom work in Pennsylvania’s Keystone Central School District illustrate this shift. Both began with the same urgent concern:
How do I bring my students back?
Mya Trauger, a 7th-grade Keystone Central ELA teacher, wanted to deeply engage her students in becoming stronger writers. She hoped to go beyond basic ELA skills and help them develop empathy. Rather than follow a standard script, Mya framed a driving question: “How can engaging with pen pals impact students?” She reached out to a colleague at a nearby school and they launched a yearlong pen pal project.
The results exceeded her expectations. Each month, students exchanged letters with their pen pals, sharing personal stories, family traditions, and a variety of reflections. Trauger gave her students ownership of the exchange. Soon, they weren’t asking if they had to write—they were asking when the next letters would arrive. Writing became purposeful, joyful, and connected to empathy and social-emotional growth
Similarly, Keystone Central social studies teacher Sara Strouse reimagined her classroom, asking: “How can I create an inquiry-based Honors Early Civilizations class?”
Strouse shifted from delivering information about ancient history to designing a classroom where students posed their own questions, collaborated with peers, and explored their interests. She guided students through the process in small, supportive stages. She found that student voice and choice were crucial to engagement. Her students even co-created their own rubric, taking ownership of process and outcomes.
Strouse’s classroom has transformed. Student inquiry, where students ask the questions, became the heartbeat of the class through Socratic seminars, guided projects such as “Ancient Rome Netflix,” and daily lessons rooted in curiosity. Sara shifted from being a content deliverer to a conductor. “I love to see myself more as a facilitator—for the students to figure things out themselves and create their own understanding,” she recently told me.
These and many other stories I’ve seen and heard in our programs point to a bigger truth: Being the entertainer at the front of the room no longer works. Students don’t engage because we make content livelier. They engage when we shift the focus to their questions, their agency, and their curiosity. Engagement is not about perfectly covering every standard—it’s about creating space for exploration and discovery.
I wish I had learned that lesson earlier. In my classroom, I focused too much on coverage and not enough on curiosity. Teachers like Trauger and Strouse show us what’s possible when we flip that script: Students are motivated not by compliance but by their own drive to learn.
If disengagement is the problem, doubling down on old methods won’t solve it. We need a pedagogy that says to students: Your questions matter. You can do this now. Let’s figure it out together.
We must reengage students in authentic ways that prepare them to be thoughtful, empathetic participants in our increasingly complex world.
