How teachers can support students’ agentic engagement

Agentic engagement represents students' constructive contribution into the flow of instruction they receive, as students express their interests and offer their input. It is a purposive, proactive, and reciprocal type of engagement that is integral to promoting important student outcomes (e.g., learning, achievement), but its essential purpose is to recruit greater autonomy support from the teacher. We first highlight the different ways that teachers typically respond to student displays of agentic engagement (i.e., support, indifference, or control). We then recommend that teachers adopt an autonomy-supportive motivating style that will allow teachers to become increasingly in sync with their students as agents. Thus, the purpose of the article is to explain how teachers might best support students' agentic engagement during classroom instruction.