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Student Engagement: The Key to Deep and Meaningful Learning
On 19 February 2026, teachers from Nigeria, Uganda, South Sudan, Senegal, Zimbabwe and the United States gathered on Zoom for the first workshop of the TLI Learning Community. It opened not with a lecture but with a riddle: name your country without naming it. The teapot-shaped country. The pearl of Africa. The land where the Nile begins. Within ten minutes, the room had established what it was: global, warm, and not there to be taught at—a community of practice, professionals learning from one another.
What we explored
Ric Campbell began with a deceptively simple claim: if students want to learn, they will. So the real question for a teacher is not how to make students learn, but what creates motivation in the first place.
The session took that question into Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan and tested across fifty years and dozens of countries. Its answer is economical. A learner needs three things:
- Agency: a sense of choice and control over their own learning.
- Competence: the feeling that a challenge is hard but achievable.
- Meaning: a reason to care, whether love of the subject, a valued relationship with the teacher, or the pleasure of working alongside others.
Between the theory, the room wrote. Ric led three rounds of free writing, then teachers shared stories of times they had been genuinely engaged as learners, and found agency, competence and meaning in every one. The session closed on the hardest problem in teaching: how to take abstract curriculum content and make a child actually want it. Ric answered it by doing it, turning a lesson on the human skeleton into a question worth asking.
Watch the full session
The complete workshop, including the free-writing practice and the teachers’ own stories, is on our YouTube channel.
What we read
- Deci, E. L., Ryan, R. M., & Williams, G. C. (1996). Need Satisfaction and the Self-regulation of Learning. Learning and Individual Differences, 8(3), 165–183.
- Richard Elmore, the instructional core, from Instructional Rounds in Education.
- Peter Johnston, Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning.
Next in the series
Understanding Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible
Thursday 23 April 2026
If students cannot see how thinking is done, they cannot learn to do it themselves. The second workshop focused on cognitive apprenticeship: modelling not just the answer but the struggle and the strategy behind it.