When it comes to teaching, the most effective student engagement strategies aren’t about entertainment.
In fact, when we surveyed over 1,400 students about their favorite classes, the most common answer wasn’t “engaging professor.”
Instead, students said they valued classes that taught them personally relevant skills—lessons they could apply to their lives right away.
If your goal is to get students to stop scrolling and start learning, you do not need to become a performer.
You need to make each lesson a surprising, life-altering, and personal experience. Put those three together and you have the SLAP framework.
This post covers student engagement strategies to turn your lessons into the ones students actually care about.
Students Want Relevant Skills
Instead of entertainment, students are craving skills they can apply now and throughout their careers.
That means effective student engagement strategies should do three things:
- Grab attention so students show up mentally.
- Change their behavior now and for the future.
- Connect to what students care about.
How do you create experiences that meet all of the above for your students? SLAP your students.
What is SLAP?
SLAP is a simple checklist you can use when designing lesson plans.
We designed the SLAP framework to ensure that all of our ExEC lesson plans are valuable. That framework has inspired multiple award-winning exercises, and now we’d love to share it with you!
Here’s how SLAP breaks down:
- Susprising
- Life-Altering
- Personal
Surprising
Novelty captures your students’ attention.
The surprise of your lesson can be a counterintuitive prompt, an unexpected prize, or a constraint that forces creative thinking.
Surprise does not mean gimmick. It means you intentionally break expectations to create a memorable learning moment.
Life-Altering
If we’re not changing our students’ lives every class session, we’re wasting their time and ours.
Put another way, what’s the point of teaching something if our students never apply it? It’s imperative that our lessons change how students think or act, in lasting ways.
Personal
Make the work immediately relevant to students’ lives.
Start with their context, e.g., personal finances, job search, family, or campus life, etc., and then map the same skill to entrepreneurship outcomes.
Students will engage when they see direct value today and a path to use that skill later.
Use these three pillars as the rubric for every activity and discussion you run or design. If an activity is missing one pillar, consider how to add it.
SLAP in Practice
To see what these student engagement strategies look like in action, we’ll break down a lesson plan that incorporates the full SLAP framework.
Lottery Ticket vs. Dime
Learning objective: Students will see how emotions drive choices and learn to design emotionally resonant experiences for customers.
Surprising |
Students are given a real choice between a lottery ticket worth up to $40 million and a dime. They are told the dime is objectively worth more money (after taking into account the odds of winning the lottery and taxes) and forced to choose one or the other. This contradiction creates a moment of cognitive dissonance. Why would anyone choose the less valuable item? …Also, is my professor really giving me a lottery ticket?! |
Life-Altering |
Students learn that emotions drive all human decisions, including their own. Building great products isn’t enough; entrepreneurs must create emotionally resonant experiences. If our students want to be successful in entrepreneurship and life, they need to remember the role that emotions play in decision-making. |
Personal |
Students use a tool called the Emotional Palette Canvas to reflect on and articulate their personal emotional responses. This connects emotional decision-making to their personal experiences. By the end of the lesson, students see how understanding emotions can make them better entrepreneurs and job candidates—skills they’ll need today and in the future. |
Quick Surprises You Can Use Today
If you need a fast hook or an active learning activity for a single class, try these low-prep surprises:
- Reverse quiz.
Give answers first. Ask students to write the question. The unexpected order forces deeper thinking. - Live customer quote.
Play a 30-second audio clip of a real customer and ask students to identify the emotional driver. - Constraint sprint.
Give teams a ridiculous constraint (only charcoal, only three words) and a 7-minute build. Constraining options sparks creativity. - Price-anchoring demo.
Show an overpriced item, then a mid-tier item; ask which feels better and why. Use to teach anchoring and positioning.
These quick hooks fit large lectures, seminars, and online settings. For an online class, use breakout rooms, shared docs, and short polls to recreate the same cognitive surprise.
How to Measure if a Lesson Was Life-Altering
Measuring impact keeps you honest.
Use a mix of immediate reflection, short-term behavior change, and follow-up signals.
Simple rubric (use 1–4 scale)
- Attention: Students were mentally present and engaged with the activity.
- Insight: Students can explain one surprising insight in their own words.
- Application: Students produced an action they can use now (a plan, a prototype, a budget).
- Transfer: One week later, students report using the skill or idea in another context.
Sample quick survey questions (pre/post)
- Pre-class: “On a scale of 1–5, how often do you apply what you learn in class to your life outside campus?”
- Post-class: “Did you leave today’s session with one thing you will use in the next 7 days?” Yes/No and one-sentence description.
- One-week follow-up: “Have you applied the idea from class this week? If yes, describe.”
If you use an AI grading assistant like Flex, you can auto-score reflections against the rubric and provide personalized feedback. That reduces grading load and gives students faster, formative guidance.
Scaling SLAP: Sample Weekly Checklist
Aim for every session to meet at least one SLAP pillar. Here is a simple module map for a 12-week course:
- Weeks 1–2: Foundation (Surprising hooks + Personal assignments)
- Weeks 3–5: Practice sprints (Surprising constraints + Application tasks)
- Weeks 6–7: Deep reflections (Failure Resume, Life-Altering insights)
- Weeks 8–10: Customer-facing MVPs (Surprise launches + Personal validation)
- Weeks 11–12: Synthesis and transfer (students present how they will use these skills after class)
Weekly instructor checklist:
- Did this lesson include one explicitly surprising element?
- Did students complete a personal application or artifact?
- Is there a measurable follow-up activity within 7 days?
- Can I reuse one student artifact as evidence of impact?
Mapping this way helps you avoid the trap of “randomly engaging” and instead ensures consistent, testable design across a course.
Adapting SLAP for Large Lectures and Online Classes
- Large lectures:
Use polling and Think-Pair-Share. A surprising live demo works at scale if you pair it with small-group work. - Online:
Use short breakout tasks, shared canvases, and low-friction submission methods. Keep activities short and make results visible. - Time constraints:
If you have only 20 minutes, focus on one SLAP pillar per session. A single strong surprise plus a short personal reflection can be enough.
Wrap-up and Next Steps
If you want your students to stop asking “Will this be on the test?” and start asking “How can I use this now?” use SLAP as a planning checklist.
Designing lessons students actually care about does not require theatrics.
It requires intention.
Use SLAP to make each session useful, memorable, and relevant. Do that, and engagement becomes a natural outcome.
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