15 Ways to Use Novelty to Boost Student Engagement

Classroom razzle-dazzle and confetti cannons won’t deepen learning unless that novelty triggers students’ need to understand, which Professor Susan Engel calls “epistemic curiosity.” Recent research on how learning happens in the brain suggests that this hunger for answers enhances learning experiences and improves memory.

Whether students examine two preserved lungs with dramatically different coloring or a circuit with a glowing bulb but no visible power source, the best provocations invite active inquiry. The hard part is inventing experiences students can’t ignore. I hope that the following strategies, drawn from my own classroom experiments, observations of colleagues, and trusted experts, offer inspiration you can adapt for your classes.

Unexpected Retrieval and Assessment Routines

These brief, energetic routines activate prior knowledge and help you check for understanding. The idea is to make students wonder, “What is this?”

1. Unfair Game. The Comprehensible Classroom’s “Unfair Game” turns quiz review into a boisterous competition—it’s “unfair” because each question is worth a positive or negative number of points, and students don’t know the point value until after they answer. After you read a question, the first team to raise a hand answers. Use this free buzzer for wrong answers and a ding for correct ones.

The game ends when time runs out or a team reaches a specified number of points.

2. Diagram Labeling. Before teaching new content, take a diagram—a supply and demand equilibrium graph, Gustav Freytag’s plot pyramid, and the anatomy of a black hole are examples—and white out the text labels while leaving the pointer lines intact. Then give students a tight countdown to fill in the missing information. Diagram labeling sparks interest in a topic and assesses prior learning.

Find more information on bite-sized checks for understanding in Cult of Pedagogy’s “Retrieval in Action.”

3. Blackboard Knowledge Audit. Tell students to write everything they know about a subject on the board as a brain dump. They can’t talk or collaborate. After five minutes, have them sit down as you circle the correct answers and discuss flawed assumptions. In the Big Paper version, small groups collaboratively record their ideas on poster paper.

4. Crack the Redaction. In this cloze exercise framed as a redacted report, student pairs receive a paragraph, historical summary, or scientific law where key words are blacked out with heavy black marker. They reconstruct the missing ideas and then create a “declassified memo” justifying their interpretation.

Analysis Routines With a Twist

These analysis exercises engage students by presenting something incomplete, misleading, surprising, or flawed to investigate.

5. Classroom CSI. Set up crime-scene tape for students to duck under as they enter. Then have them act as detectives to solve the “crime”—that is, identify a content flaw and make corrections. In a science class, they might discover that a graph represents a tiny change as more dramatic than the data suggest. Find more ideas in Enjoy Teaching’s “How to Stage an Easy Classroom Crime Scene Investigation” and the Science Spot’s “Forensic Science Lesson Plans.”

6. Spot the Difference. Turn analysis into a visual challenge by showing two nearly identical examples: two chapter summaries, two historical causes, two circuit diagrams, etc. Edutopia’s video on examples and non-examples details how a version of this approach works in Sarah Yuska’s sixth-grade science class.

7. Slow Reveal. Revealing a text or image bit by bit heightens suspense and teaches kids that new evidence can reshape interpretation. To help her fourth graders analyze parts of a graph, Jenna Laib reveals more elements as the slide deck advances. Another progressive disclosure protocol, Project Zero’s “See, Think, Wonder,” helps students with evidence-based reasoning.

8. Faulty Rules. Present a plausible but incorrect rule that students are invited to correct. Examples:

• Science: “One successful test proves the explanation is correct.”
• History: “The historian who describes the scenario closest to the event is usually the most accurate.”
• Civics: “A government decision is constitutional if the president makes it.”
• Geography: “Two places at the same latitude have basically the same climate.”
• Art: “Fill every empty space to make the painting look finished.”

Then have them rewrite the statement as a correct rule of thumb and explain what made the original misleading.

9. Cognitive Conflict. To create productive friction, begin a lesson with a pervasive misconception or startling fact. A history teacher might reveal that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to the border states that remained loyal to the Union. A psychology teacher could show YouTube’s “The ‘Door’ Study,” a vivid demonstration of the change blindness phenomenon. “When presented with a discrepant event, students are forced to reconsider their preconceptions and beliefs in light of the new evidence,” writes Jessica Fries-Gaither, an elementary resource specialist at Ohio State University. This type of cognitive conflict often motivates students to investigate.

General Engagement Hooks

What makes your discipline impossible to ignore? Try these attention-grabbers.

10. Genius Questions. When students’ energy fades, a provocative and challenging question can refocus the class. For instance, I’ve asked sophomores, “What is one thing you can never have too much of?” Wisdom is one answer. Unlike an essential question that frames a unit, genius questions are more of an intellectual dare. Examples:

• When does a number become a lie?
• Can a machine make a choice?
• Mindfulness experts say we are not our thoughts. Then who are we?
• When is ugliness beautiful?
• Why do we get the chills right before the singer reaches a high note?
• If human experience is universal, why do some words exist in only one language?
• When can a character tell the truth while lying?

For more genius questions, check out “300 Philosophical Questions” by We Are Teachers.

11. Micro-Museum. Display four things on a table or slide: a brief quotation, a compelling image, a probing question, and intriguing detail, all connected to the day’s topic. Students predict how the diverse pieces relate to the upcoming lesson. According to researchers Megina Baker and Jen Ryan, this type of “playful provocation” captures attention and promotes creative thinking.

12. Ignite Talks. These five-minute student presentations use 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. My classes find these speeches challenging to deliver, but also more entertaining than traditional research presentations. Edutopia’s “Teaching Presentation Skills With Ignite” describes the format. PechaKucha explains a related presentation structure.

13. Would You Bet? Raise the stakes with this group prediction exercise. Give each team $100 in pretend money, divided into smaller denominations. Ask them to wager any portion of their money on a prediction. Which factor most contributed to the fall of Rome? Which character will betray the group? Which paper-airplane designs will fly farthest? Teams justify their bets in writing. After the teacher reveals the answer, a student banker returns correct bets plus an equal amount. Incorrect wagers are lost. Continue for several rounds and then determine which team finishes with the largest bankroll.

14. Sensory Anchor. A sensory anchor links a physical object or picture of one, a sound, or a scent to a concept. Play a bat’s ultrasonic chirps before a lesson on echolocation, or have the class smell damp soil before learning about decomposition. Concrete sensory cues make unfamiliar concepts easier to understand and recall.

15. Literary Text Blasts. Inspired by ReadWriteThink’s “A Tale of a Few Text Messages,” send students after-school messages via Remind or another school-selected messaging app from characters in the class text. During Act 3 of Macbeth, the king might text: “Banquo is dispatched, but Fleance has fled. My mind is full of scorpions! How do I conceal my panic from the feasting lords?” Just change the profile name in Remind so that students receive texts from different characters. For a low-tech version, place a “confidential” message from a character on each desk, printed in a handwriting font.

Lessons That Deliver a JOLT

Novelty has voltage. Eyes widen, brains engage, bodies lean in, especially when the lesson delivers a JOLT:

Jarring: A surprise, contradiction, or strange detail.

Open-ended: An unresolved claim, unfinished diagram, or incomplete explanation.

Laugh-inducing: A playful title, exaggerated mistake, bad model, or absurd scenario.

Tense: A dilemma, unresolved problem, or misconception, or something that invites prediction.

For teachers, that jolt clears space for the creativity and connection that initially drew us to the work. If you want to dive deeper into the cognitive mechanics of attention and curiosity, Daniel T. Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? shows how to design playful hooks that lead to active problem-solving.