It was fears for their own children’s learning that brought award-winning former New York Times journalist, Jenny Anderson, and Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, together to solve what they have identified as a crisis in student engagement.
Their new book, The Disengaged Teen, released today, reveals how the majority of teenagers are disengaged from school, simultaneously bored and overwhelmed. This is harming both their learning and their mental health. Anderson and Winthrop explore why so many children lose their love of learning in adolescence, and what parents, teachers and education systems can do about it.
A worsening learning crisis
“The data is pretty shocking,” Anderson says. “In elementary school, in early years about 75% of kids are truly engaged in their learning and by the time you get to high school it’s flipped – only 25% of kids are engaged in learning. If you understand how important engagement is to learning, that should be a five-alarm fire for everybody.”
The trouble, Anderson points out, is that as a society we have resigned ourselves to thinking this is just the way things are. As a result, solving what the authors see as an education crisis has fallen to the bottom of everyone’s to do list when it should be number one.
It’s an issue that has got much worse over time and will continue to get worse unless we can find ways to better engage kids in their learning.
What’s causing the crisis?
It was the COVID pandemic and her children’s subsequent disengagement that first alerted Winthrop to the crisis, but it didn’t begin there. It didn’t even begin with the ubiquity of mobile phones and their isolating distractions, though that’s another key factor that has exacerbated the problem. The key issue, revealed through interviews with over 100 students and looking into copious amounts of data, is relevance.
“As school gets less relevant and interesting, technology becomes a real distractor,” says Winthrop. “Tech can be used well in classrooms. But mainly it’s a distractor.”
Reading, writing and mathematics will always be essential to any curriculum, but it’s crucial that these are taught in light of the real world children see around them and must grapple with.
“This is very challenging, but we must figure out ways to do it because kids can see the outside world,” Anderson says. “They can see the challenges and they don’t feel they are being prepared for them.”
Another key cause is centred on the zone of proximal development. Many students, especially in big classrooms, find themselves sitting outside the sweet spot of learning, where they are either finding things too easy or too hard. Anderson and Winthrop believe we have to think much more creatively to engage students who are either being stretched or insufficiently challenged. Teacher training can help here, as can technology, when it’s not proving a distraction.
Banning phones from classrooms
To avoid the problem of technology acting as a distractor, the authors have firmly picked their side on the hot debate raging around mobile phones in classrooms.
“I would definitely ban mobile phones from classrooms,” says Winthrop. “Cell phones, largely social media on them, exacerbate interpersonal conflict and negative social dynamics. And we certainly know that it also is a big distraction.”
The four modes of learning
The central thesis of The Disengaged Teen is that there are four modes of learning that students use. Anderson and Winthrop summarise them as follows:
- Resister: When kids resist, they struggle silently with profound feelings of inadequacy or invisibility, which they communicate by ignoring homework, playing sick, skipping class, or acting out.
- Passenger: When kids coast along, consistently doing the bare minimum and complaining that classes are pointless. They need help connecting school to their skills, interests, or learning needs.
- Achiever: When kids show up, do the work, and get consistently high grades, their self-worth can become tied to high performance. Their disengagement is invisible, fuelling a fear of failure and putting them at risk for mental health challenges.
- Explorer: When kids are driven by internal curiosity rather than just external expectations, they investigate the questions they care about and persist to achieve their goals.
Obviously, the goal for teachers and parents is to try and support students to get into Explorer Mode as much as possible.
“We want every child to have opportunities to be in Explorer Mode,” says Anderson. “But the expectation isn’t that all kids get into Explorer Mode and stay there all the time. One of the hopes that we have is that by identifying these modes, we are giving teachers and parents language to better understand where kids are – how they’re showing up for their learning as a Resister, withdrawing or acting out as a Passenger, coasting along as an Achiever, getting all those gold stars, but never asking what’s it all about as kids would in Explorer mode.”
“Sometimes you need to be in Achiever Mode,” Anderson adds. “You’ve got a set of exams, you buckle down, head down, get through this with a lot of studying. Sometimes when things are really out of whack and kids aren’t feeling great or doing well or things are getting overwhelming, a little Passenger Mode is a good thing. Resister Mode can be the way kids express to the world, and often not in productive ways, that things are not going okay for them. So it is not like one mode is good and one mode is bad. Kids are in these modes multiple times a day. These are not identities and we’re really clear about that. Sometimes kids can get stuck in a mode and it becomes an identity. And our advice is when you see a kid getting stuck, help them get unstuck so it doesn’t become an identity.”
Real world learning
Taking students out of the classroom and getting them into the real world is a key tool to encourage engagement and get them into Explorer Mode. The authors point out that often, when you do this, it’s the children who are causing problems in the classroom who become leaders in the new environment.
Here, the target has changed. It’s no longer about getting correct answers or the highest grades. It’s about discovering the world and their interests.
“Interests are the canvas on which skills are built,” Anderson says. “And so if you give kids more canvases on which to build their skills, they will build more skills.”
Impact on student health and wellbeing
Disengagement, particularly if students get stuck in certain modes for too long, can have a detrimental impact on their mental health. In particular, Winthrop points out, Resister Mode can be tough if students find themselves stuck in it for too long.
“This is where kids are actually using their voice and their agency to say, ‘This isn’t working for me, this school environment,’” Winthrop says. “And if they’re experiencing bullying and that’s why they’re acting out or withdrawing or not doing their homework and not wanting to go to school, that’s actually a fairly good healthy response and it will call attention to the adults in their life and hopefully it will get solved. But if they get stuck in Resister Mode, they can internalise this idea that they’re not good enough, that they’re not capable, and it can lead to a variety of things like mental health problems, overwhelm, they get behind, and at the tail end of Resister Mode, you have chronic absenteeism, kids leaving school, and also severe mental health problems.”
When teachers and parents help students move toward Explorer Mode it can have a big impact, not simply in terms of their academic success, but in terms of their wellbeing.
“They’re more engaged,” Winthrop says. “But they’re happier because it’s more interesting. They’re happier because they have a little bit of opportunity to be the author of their own lives, a little bit of autonomy and choice. And they’re developing these resilient learning skills, which we know kids need for a world of AI.”
System change
The Disengaged Teen is written primarily to help parents and teachers support children through a difficult period of learning. But there are lessons for education ministers and systems as well.
“I think a major message would be first and foremost, if we don’t do this, your students are not going to be prepared,” Winthrop says. “It’s the only way to really prepare your students for the oncoming world of AI where so much of what kids are doing in Achiever Mode is going to be done for them by chat GPT or another AI tool. Your kids will be severely behind.”
Winthrop argues that governments should invest in supporting teachers with training so that they can engage students. She says teachers don’t have to throw out their existing lesson plans or change their disciplinary approaches, but shift how they talk to children and give them more options and input. Small stylistic shifts can make a huge difference.
The goal is to prepare students of today for the world they will graduate into. That involves teaching the skills they need to solve the problems they will encounter, from climate change to inequality, and it involves getting them ready for the world of work and the expectations of employers. We can’t imagine that by taking students and instructing them to sit and comply in a classroom for 12 years, we will produce problem solvers.
“So really shifting to this idea of more agency for kids in school does not mean chaos, anarchy or putting the kids in charge,” Anderson says. “We’re saying give kids scaffolded opportunities in their day to make meaningful choices that allow them to build their own capacity to take initiative and to solve problems. That is a skill that can be developed. It is not really baked into how we think about education. And that is going to require a mindset shift.”
If teachers, parents and governments want to solve the crisis in student engagement, and prepare the next generation for a world changing beyond recognition faster than ever thought possible, then it’s a shift they need to take and quickly.
The Disengaged Teen, published by Crown, is available now.
