Shawn Buttner explains why students are disengaged after remote learning: schools raised academic expectations without preparation, and isolation left students questioning whether their coursework matters. He argues curricula need to connect classroom content to real-world applications and emphasize critical thinking so students see the future value of what they're studying.
There's a couple ways to think about disengagement in education. It could be that for a long time, students, they didn't have. They, like, we, we lowered the expectations because we had to streamline things and we, you know, and, and so now students are being held to a higher expectation. And that's challenging. I think that's, that's one piece of it, but I think the other piece of it is students spent a year and a half sitting in their rooms and now they're back and they're like, I don't know how much. Like, I don't know how much of this matters. And, and I want meaning in what I'm doing. I want to feel like this matters. I want to. I want to feel like this is a worthwhile investment in my time. Even though I have to be here. The law, the law requires that I'm here. Yeah. Just like workers who, who don't wanna go back to that job because that wasn't fulfilling on some level. And I don't wanna say one, I don't want anyone to think that our curriculums are just fluffy with stuff they don't need. I don't think that's it. But I do think it's reevaluating what really matters curriculum wise and then finding ways to make it more relevant and engaging so students can see why this thing that we're reading or we're learning is going to help them later on. And it's not always just about knowledge. Right. It', skills, it's about critical thinking, it's about reasoning, it's about problem solving. But trying to paint that image for them as often as possible about why this matters or how it could matter in the future, I think is what it, it ultimately comes back to. Right. Because if students can understand that, there may be a time where this would be really helpful to think about what we're doing and why it matter.
