Written by a Monash University researcher drawing on action research in a disadvantaged Victorian high school, this paper challenges mainstream definitions of student engagement as inadequate and politically naive. Zyngier identifies three competing frameworks: instrumentalist engagement (compliance with adult-determined rules and tasks); social constructivist engagement (student-centred but often uncritical); and critical-transformative engagement (students actively questioning and reshaping their own learning in pursuit of social justice). He argues that engagement is not a predictor of academic success, and that framing disengagement as a student problem obscures the ways schools fail marginalised young people. The paper proposes CORE Pedagogy — Connected, Owned, Responsive and Engaging — as a framework for teaching that is genuinely purposeful rather than merely compliant. Particularly relevant to Years 7–9, where the paper notes that procedures most likely to engage students decrease precisely at the age when they are most needed.