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Students in colleges of agriculture will face a dynamically changing workplace. In order to learn the skills needed to succeed in such an environment, students must be cognitively engaged in the college classroom. Engagement with instructional content is a precursor to learning, and teachers in colleges of agriculture must shift towards using more learner-centered, engaging instructional methods. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore college of agriculture students' perspectives of specific teacher behaviors contributing to cognitive engagement. A focus group methodology was applied using the Student Content Engagement (SCE) framework to guide the interviews. The SCE framework consists of four constructs that must be in place for cognitive engagement to occur: subject matter content level, occasion for processing, physiological readiness, and motivation. Results of the study showed a multitude of teacher variables contributed to student content engagement and many of