Schools spend a great deal of time trying to understand why students disengage. Teachers see students lose focus, avoid participating, or give up when an assignment becomes difficult. These behaviors are often treated as motivation problems. Jeremy Packman believes educators should also consider another possibility: sometimes the problem is not the student’s willingness to engage, but the way the learning experience has been designed.
Packman has spent 25 years in public education, moving from AmeriCorps and classroom teaching into school leadership. Before entering education, he studied Mass Communication with a focus on film and video production at Towson University. He is also a musician who plays guitar, sings Americana music, writes original songs, and performs at open mics. His professional and creative worlds came together when he served as principal of Costaño School of the Arts, where his approach emphasized educating the whole child while developing confidence and curiosity.
Those experiences have shaped his view of arts education. He does not argue that every student should become an artist or musician. Instead, he believes schools can learn from the way students learn when they are creating something.
What Learning Music Can Teach Schools About Learning
Consider what happens when someone learns a song on guitar. Nobody expects a beginner to hear an explanation of a chord progression once and immediately perform the song correctly. The musician plays, makes a mistake, stops, listens, adjusts, and tries again. Difficult sections may require dozens of attempts before everything comes together.
That process is accepted as part of learning music. Packman believes schools sometimes treat mistakes differently.
“When you’re working on a song, a mistake gives you information,” he says. “You know which transition you need to go back and practice. In school, students can start seeing a mistake as a judgment about whether they’re good at the subject. Without the right support, this could lead to a deeper internalized failure, which makes it difficult for a student to stay motivated”
Arts education makes revision part of the process rather than something that happens after failure. A scene is rehearsed. A drawing changes. A song improves through repetition. Students learn that the first attempt is rarely supposed to be the finished product.
That lesson has value far beyond an arts classroom.
Student Engagement May Be a Design Problem
Engagement is often discussed as though some students naturally have it and others do not. Packman’s experience in the classroom gave him reasons to question that assumption.
Before becoming an administrator, he taught American and World History in East Oakland. Like many teachers, he saw students respond very differently depending on what they were being asked to do. A student who seemed disconnected during one type of assignment could become deeply involved when the work required collaboration, interpretation, or creation.
“A kid can look completely checked out when the job is to copy information and then become the person organizing everyone when the class has to produce something,” he says. “That should make us curious. The student didn’t suddenly become a different person.”
Research offers another reason to examine the connection between arts and engagement. A randomized controlled study conducted through Rice University’s Houston Education Research Consortium examined students at schools receiving increased arts-learning opportunities. Researchers found improvements in several areas, including writing achievement and compassion, as well as increased school engagement among elementary students.
The research does not prove that adding an art class will suddenly make every student interested in school. It raises a more useful question about what happens inside strong arts-learning environments that encourages students to participate.
Creativity Requires Students to Use What They Know
Traditional assignments often ask students to receive information and reproduce it. Creative work can demand something different because students have to make decisions with what they have learned.
Consider a history lesson. A student can memorize the date of an event without understanding why the people involved made certain choices. Ask that same student to create a scene showing the event from two opposing perspectives, and the task becomes more demanding. The student must understand motivation, sequence, conflict, and point of view before deciding how to represent them.
The creative activity does not replace history. It requires the student to use history.
Packman’s background in film and video production gave him experience with this type of thinking before he entered a classroom. Producing something requires constant choices. A creator has to decide what information matters, what can be removed, what an audience needs to understand, and whether the finished work communicates the intended idea.
“When you create something, it exposes what you understand very quickly,” he says. “At some point, you have to make a choice and explain why you made it.”
That principle can apply across subjects. Students might represent a scientific process visually, explain a mathematical concept to an audience, or use a presentation to defend an interpretation of a text. In each case, the teacher gets another way to see what the student actually understands. He explains, “This could be done through dramatic tableau, a painted picture, a song, a poem, or other artistic vehicles”
Arts Education Cannot Fix a Poorly Designed School Day
There is a risk of taking this argument too far. Adding arts programming does not automatically solve disengagement, and Packman does not believe every academic lesson needs to become a creative project.
“You can have a great music program and still have kids sitting passively for the rest of the day,” he says. “The lesson isn’t just ‘add more art.’ The question is what the arts are doing differently that we can learn from.”
Strong arts instruction often combines clear expectations with room for individual choices. Students receive feedback and revise their work. They produce something that other people can see, hear, or experience. There is usually a clear purpose behind the work.
Other subjects can borrow those principles without pretending to be arts classes. A science teacher does not need to turn every lesson into theater, and a math teacher does not need students writing songs about equations. Creativity works best when it helps students understand, practice, or demonstrate the actual concept being taught.
What School Leaders Can Learn From Arts Classrooms
Schools do not necessarily need another major initiative to apply these ideas. Leaders can begin by examining the learning experiences students already have.
They can look at how often students are asked to produce something rather than only receive information. They can examine whether students have meaningful choices within assignments and whether revision is treated as part of learning. They can also ask which classes students hate missing and investigate what those classrooms are doing differently.
Those questions make engagement easier to examine.
They also challenge a common assumption about what an engaged classroom looks like. A quiet room is not automatically an engaged room, just as a noisy classroom is not automatically out of control. The more important question is what students are thinking about, what decisions they are making, and whether the work requires meaningful participation.
Give Students Something Worth Paying Attention To
Schools will always need direct instruction. Students need foundational knowledge, repetition, practice, and the ability to complete work that may not immediately interest them. Arts education does not remove those requirements. But instead, adds to the model when students are asked to apply this learning and produce deeper critical thought in a more engaging way.
What it can offer is a useful model for thinking differently about engagement.
A student rehearsing a song is practicing a difficult skill. A student rewriting a scene is revising. A student preparing for a performance is managing a deadline and responding to feedback. A student creating a visual piece is making choices about how to communicate an idea.
Those activities are not breaks from learning. They are examples of learning that requires active participation.
Across Packman’s experiences in film, classroom teaching, school administration, arts education, and music, one idea continues to surface: people tend to engage more deeply when they have some ownership over what they are building.
Schools may therefore benefit from asking fewer questions about how to make students pay attention and more questions about what students are being given that deserves their attention.
The strongest lesson from arts education is not that every classroom needs to become more entertaining. It is that students have fewer reasons to disengage when they are being asked to think, make choices, revise their work, and create something that feels meaningful.
