The Engagement Crisis: Motivation, Belonging & Attention in the AI Era

Schools are facing an engagement crisis that shows up everywhere, from chronic absenteeism and declining motivation to fractured attention and growing student disconnection. At the same time, AI-powered tools and digital learning environments are reshaping how young people focus, create, and experience school. Engagement today is no longer just a classroom challenge. It is a systems challenge.This session brings together learning science, system leadership, and product innovation to examine engagement as an ecosystem. Panelists explore what research tells us about motivation, belonging, and attention in digitally saturated environments, how technology can either erode or strengthen those drivers, and what school systems are seeing when engagement breaks down at scale.From statewide absenteeism trends to classroom-level design choices, speakers will share how districts and developers are rethinking learning experiences to restore relevance, agency, and meaningful challenge. The conversation connects theory to practice, asking how schools can use AI and digital tools responsibly while rebuilding the human conditions that make students want to show up, persist, and learn.This is a conversation about re-engaging a generation, not through a single solution, but through aligned science, design, and leadership in an AI-shaped world.