Motivating students the focus at Methodist Ladies' College

focusing on the social and academic indicators of engagement is valuable up to a point – for example, attendance, a sense of belonging to a community, participation in sports and other co-curricular activities such as submitting work on time and on-task – Shardlow says ultimately, what must be achieved is the more ambitious goal of deep cognitive engagement that results in learning.

"At MLC, we send out 'welcome back' letters to students at the start of the school year, letters that talk about the importance of making mistakes and learning from them and focusing on learning goals rather than marks."

Two of the most effective strategies to continually monitor students' learning are "traffic lights" and "fist to five", Shardlow says.

With "traffic lights", students are given red, amber and green disks of paper and teachers get feedback on how students are tracking in their learning by asking them to hold up the appropriate colour to indicate their level of understanding: green for "OK – I could explain this to someone else", amber for "I'm not sure – I get most of it but not all yet" and red for "help – I am lost".

"Fist to five" is similar to traffic lights, but students hold up a number of fingers to indicate their level of understanding.

"Research indicates that students don't want learning made easy, they want it to mean something," Shardlow says. "They want to feel something, to be moved by what they learn and they want the chance to make a difference."