Great teachers are leaders. They persuade students to care about what they are learning.

In This Lesson

What makes kids interested in school?

What makes school fun for kids?

What is pedagogy? Is it illegal?

How to pronounce pedagogy

How does project-based learning work?

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★ Discussion Guide

Some make it exciting. Some make it fun. Some make it feel important and grown-up.

Some make it part of a journey that leads to a destination that students care about. But one way or another, great teachers make learning relevant.

Buzzwords

Curriculum is the education buzzword for "what" is taught.

Pedagogy is the buzzword for "how" it is taught.

Teachers are accustomed to this odd word, and use it without blushing, even though parents have little idea what it means. If you are new to education it helps to practice saying it in different ways: "she's improving her pedagogy," "my concerns are pedagogical." (Better yet, don't.) In the USA, the word pedagogy rhymes with stodgy in common use, but you can make it sound phaahncier if you rhyme it with emoji.

The 19th-century term "pedagogy" got its groove back in the early 2000's (Source: Google Ngram Viewer)

Good pedagogy (more simply, effective teaching) engages students in curriculum (the content of learning).

If you want to know what students find engaging, why not ask them? In a 2022 report, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) surveyed students about what they find engaging in school.

The students’ responses included:

• Working with their peers
• Connecting school work to the real world (e.g. project-based learning)
• Giving students choices and a variety of different types of experiences
• Having a teacher who is excited about the work, interested in students, and approachable.

Educators want to teach in engaging ways, but it can be hard to sustain students’ attention, especially in places with giant class sizes, like California. Teachers have shown growing interest in project-based learning, an approach to teaching that enables students to show their knowledge through projects connected to the real world.

The most basic indicator of student engagement is measured every day: attendance, which we discuss in Ed100 lesson 4.8. Surveys of students can be also be helpful — we discuss those in Ed100 Lesson 5.10, our lesson about school climate.

The next few lessons explore specific subjects and approaches that educators use to make learning engaging and relevant. The next lesson explores the idea of making school a place for creative experiences.

This lesson was updated in October 2025.