Engaged Academically: Students who are engaged academically demonstrate a desire to learn and to challenge themselves. They want to be challenged intellectually and approached as serious learners. They want to think and engage in tasks that are balanced with their skills and knowledge. They seek an appropriate amount of rigor. In order to effectively align instruction to meet the needs of academically engaged students, you must know your students' ability levels which heavily impacts instructional design. You can hook students that are academically engaged by aligning the following to their ability levels and skills:

• Content: What subject matter and concepts will appropriately challenge the learner?
• Process: How will the student learn this material? In what ways?
• Product: How will the student demonstrate what they learned through a manageable task?  

Engaged Emotionally: Students who are engaged emotionally feel a sense of belonging. They are respected by and emotionally connected to staff, other students, and the school. When learning, they feel the emotions of enjoyment, excitement, enthusiasm, and the joy of learning. Relationships become an integral part of learning and working together towards success. Providing students with opportunities to become emotionally engaged  not only promotes motivation in the classroom, it assists in fostering a positive culture for learning. For example, when students build relationships with their teachers and peers, they are more likely to embark on instructional challenges without fear of failure. They will acquire a sense of comfort and feel safe within a learning environment. Celebrating student successes and providing opportunities that allow students to work collaboratively on learning tasks will promote emotional engagement.

Engaged Behaviorally: Students who are engaged behaviorally demonstrate on-task behaviors. They persist and persevere when learning. They focus attention, concentrate intently, put forth effort, and process information cognitively to make meaning and transfer learning. Part of acquiring behavioral engagement is setting clear expectations and modeling appropriate behavior in the classroom. You may want to establish classroom rules with your students that illustrate positive behaviors. For example, you may establish the rule, “Listen to others while they are speaking.” Instead of, “Don’t talk when others are talking.” This way, the proper behavior is communicated to the students that focuses on what they should do instead of what they shouldn’t do.

Ideally, in a culture for learning, student engagement should reflect all three of the domains instead of just one. Each of the domains is dependent on the others as they work together to appropriately challenge students and create motivation and pride in the classroom.