Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop on “The Disengaged Teen”

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In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, host Nate McClennen explores the topic of teen engagement with guests Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, authors of “The Disengaged Teen.” They delve into the four modes of learning—passenger, achiever, resistor, and explorer—offering insights on how students move between these modes. The conversation emphasizes the importance of agency and engagement in education, providing practical strategies for parents and educators to help students thrive. By focusing on nurturing student curiosity and agency, the discussion highlights how both parents and teachers can make a difference in fostering a love for learning. This episode offers valuable perspectives on how to address disengagement and create more engaging learning environments for teens.

Outline

• (00:00) Introduction to the Podcast
• (01:17) Curiosity About Engagement
• (03:03) Engaging Learning Experiences
• (07:18) The Disengagement Crisis
• (10:46) Technology and Disengagement
• (12:16) Four Modes of Learners
• (15:20) Agency and Engagement Matrix
• (21:29) Practical Applications for Schools
• (25:45) Advice for Parents and Educators
• (38:28) Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Introduction to the Podcast

Nate McClennen: Hello. You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast, and I’m Nate McClennen. I have been interested in learner engagement for a long, long time. It feels to me that there are incredible amounts of positive outcomes that come with engagement. As our podcast guests today verify in their new book, The Disengaged Teen, which I highly recommend for everyone, higher engagement leads to higher grades and achievement, academics, graduation rates, life satisfaction, rates of staying in college, lower levels of depression, and less substance abuse, among many other things that have been verified by researchers. So, engagement matters.

The way I’ve been thinking about it over the last, say, decade is that it comes from four different areas. One is I’m engaged when I’m in control, so I have voice and choice. I’m engaged when I have self-efficacy, so when I understand and have the tools I need to learn and engage with something, when I feel like I belong to the thing that I’m engaging with or the group of people I’m engaging with.

Then the fourth one’s around purpose—does it actually have relevance and meaning? Is there actually an intention here? That’s my rudimentary knowledge of engagement. The other thing I’ve been thinking about outside of those four pieces is that I think teenagers and all humans are engaged all the time. There are very few times when you’re not engaged. Even when someone’s bored, they’re engaged perhaps in that boredom or wondering what they’re going to do next. We have very active minds. But that something may or may not be what’s important to adults, to parents, to educators, to the schools, the systems. It may not be what’s beneficial or supportive for that team, or it may just be what they’re interested in, but it may not be connected to what the system wants them to do. I continue to be very curious about this key ingredient in learning success—this thing of engagement.

So, I’m sitting on one of the final quotes from the book, The Disengaged Teen. The sentence is, “To learn well is an essential ingredient to what it means to live well.” I think that sentence captures this book in a nutshell and really talks about why engagement is so important. Given this preamble, our guests today are Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop. When I met them last year and they shared this research and the book they were writing on engagement, I knew our audience would benefit from having them on the pod. They’ve authored this great new book on student engagement. As I said, it’s called The Disengaged Teen.

Curiosity About Engagement

A quick introduction: both Jenny and Rebecca are super experienced and have done a wide variety of things. Jenny is an award-winning journalist who spent a decade at the New York Times and then pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz. She contributes to Time, New York Times, The Atlantic, among many other publications, and now is a book author. Rebecca is the director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, where she conducts studies on how to better support children’s learning and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown. Jenny, Rebecca, thank you so much for being on the pod, and hello.

Jenny Anderson: Hey, Nate, it’s great to be here.

Rebecca Winthrop: Thank you for having us, Nate.

Engaging Learning Experiences

Nate McClennen: All right, favorite question that I always like to start with. Let’s think back to our teenage years. I’m going to answer this question as well. What was the most engaging learning experience you can remember, and why was it so engaging? Jenny, why don’t you start us off?

Jenny Anderson: I was 18 and I went to Colorado College. The economy was tanking—it was 1991—and our economics professor decided to cart us off to this campus in Southern Colorado. He sat us all around a table and he said we had kind of gone over the general tools of economics and what you can use to leverage in an economy. He said, “Fix this recession.” We all kind of looked at each other and thought, we don’t know how to do this. We’re not qualified to do this. This is ridiculous. And he said, “I’m going for a walk. I’ll be back in a few hours.” And he left. By the time he came back, we were all shouting at each other. Someone was the Fed. Someone was Congress. Someone was the president. We all had incredibly strong views as to exactly what had to happen to fix the economy. It was just an electrifying moment. He came back and he scaffolded the process and added some content, then he left again, and it happened. We did this for a whole week. He took a week out of a four-week course. I think he believed that if we could leave with a sense of why that mattered, that these are the ways these discussions and this feeling about the thing we were doing versus just content from a textbook would lead us to really care about the subject. I ended up spending almost 20 years of my career covering economics, so it absolutely worked and I loved it.

Nate McClennen: Amazing. Yeah, CC is amazing that way, right? You have these four-week blocks, a unique university in that way. A few others are doing it, but a unique college. It’s a classic enduring question, right? You remember that so many years later, you still remember that particular week. So, I love thinking about that sticky learning and why you are engaged.

All right, Rebecca, what about you?

Rebecca Winthrop: The first thing that came to my mind was my extracurriculars in high school. I grew up in rural Oregon, so I was super into environmental activism. Way, way back in the day when I was in high school, we had an issue around the Spotted Owl, which nobody will remember except for some people. The Spotted Owl lived in trees that environmentalists wanted to protect and loggers wanted to cut down. Our town was half sort of hippie environmentalists and half loggers. I did a lot of environmental activism, was very passionate, started our school recycling program. I just remember feeling really important, like I was doing something real that mattered.

Nate McClennen: I love that idea of feeling important. It goes back to that purposeful piece. It’s funny because I grew up in Massachusetts and went to high school in Massachusetts, and I don’t think I even was thinking about the concept of recycling or was involved in my school at all. So, I think there might be an East Coast, West Coast differentiator there.

Rebecca Winthrop: Oh, we didn’t have a recycling program either, but we all got together and said, “This is terrible. We need one.”

Nate McClennen: I love the activism. That’s awesome. So, for me, I think I’ll go to my senior year in high school. My high school felt like mostly memorization and regurgitation, which I was okay at, but I had no interest in. But I do remember one particular science teacher in a biology class where we had to choose our own projects. The project I chose was researching how planaria, which are these little, small organisms, will regenerate their heads. So you could actually cut the planaria in half. The top half, it will regenerate. It’s actually a really amazing ability that obviously humans don’t have. But it was super sticky for a couple of reasons. One is, as an 18-year-old kid in high school, I was just astounded that I could go and cut something and it would grow back the head. That was an amazing thing. But also, it goes back to the autonomy. I got to choose the project. I got to create my own hypotheses, do the research, and then make all sorts of errors along the way and come up with some interesting conclusions. Again, it goes back to that autonomy and purposeful work.

The Disengagement Crisis

Nate McClennen: Let’s talk about engagement. Let’s start with the challenge. How bad is this disengagement crisis? What did you learn in this process? What teens are engaged? Who’s not engaged? You did a ton of interviews and surveys and collected data over the last couple of years.

Jenny Anderson: So, teens are shockingly disengaged. Your listeners are probably familiar with some of this data, but I’ll just put it out there because we should not become complacent with it, even if we know it, because it’s really bad. In third grade, about 75% of kids love school. By 10th grade, it’s flipped—about 25% of kids love school. We know how kids feel about school influences how they perform in school and how they feel about themselves as learners. So, that data matters. Now it’s important to know, and I’m sure you’re going to follow up with this, that this has been true for a long time. That is not new. The genre of the disaffected teen is a long and storied one. The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—this is sort of embedded in our culture. But the consequences of that disengagement are far worse today than they were before. There’s always been this gap between what happens in school and what happens in the real world. That gap is a chasm now, and kids see it on their phones and it makes them feel deeply unprepared for the world that is sitting right in front of them. They’re seeing all of these really big, important issues. Just to Rebecca’s point and to yours, they don’t feel that they’re being prepared to solve those problems. They don’t feel like they’re doing important things. I think the skills that we need kids to have on the other side of school, so the other side of this disengagement, are much different than the skills you used to be able to coast through school and probably be okay. You could still get a job if you were kind of checking the boxes and really not doing a lot of the hard work and digging in. Today, we need to be in an age of generative AI, with jobs changing in just dramatic ways that no one really actually knows or understands. We’re going to need collaborative problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills. We need to be able to dig in and do stuff that matters, and we’re not developing those skills. So, I think disengagement has been around for a long time—it’s not a new problem. I’d say the consequences of that disengagement really have gotten much more profound.

Rebecca Winthrop: Just briefly, we found that disengagement affects every kid in every community. It’s in high-income communities, it’s in sort of middle-income communities, low-income communities, and it’s in private schools, it’s in charter schools, it’s in public schools. So, it really is a problem for everybody to pay attention to. There is a differential impact of disengagement though. Basically, kids whose families have financial resources get second chances a lot more than kids from low-income communities who might not get a tutor or get to move school or get the enriched extracurricular program that will give them a spark and help them lean in.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, it seems interesting. It’s like Julia Freeland Fisher’s work on social capital, right? The more affluent families get, especially weaker ties, increased weaker ties of professionals and things like that compared to lower socioeconomic status. So, that’s interesting. It persists across different types of things we’re looking at. So, what I heard was disengagement affects everybody, but it has a differential impact. This gap is not new. It’s been around for a while, but it’s been accelerated.

Technology and Disengagement

Nate McClennen: Can you talk briefly about technology? Because I assume a lot of listeners, especially those of us who grew up without the technology of phones and social media, etc., will say, “Oh yeah, it’s all technology.” Is it all technology, or is there more going on to this disengagement picture, given that it’s been around for a while?

Rebecca Winthrop: It’s definitely not all technology. The disengagement crisis has been there for at least the last two decades before cell phones were invented. But tech, social media, particularly mobile phones, exacerbate disengagement if used poorly and if not regulated in a young person’s life. I mean regulated as in take it away, go to bed, and don’t pretend that it’s the burden on a young person or frankly, even an adult, to have the strong discipline to put down, close Instagram because these things are designed to keep you on it.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. And ironically, social media companies and technology are building apps to absolutely engage young people and adults.

Rebecca Winthrop: Different meaning of the word. It is very ironic. We definitely talked a lot about that. Like, wow, this is a different definition of engagement.

Nate McClennen: Right? But using the same word, right? Okay, let’s talk about the heart of the book. So, I really liked this framework and I’m a big fan of frameworks because I think they’re really helpful for the general population, parents, teachers, school leaders to understand this in a way that makes sense and has actionable work around it.

Four Modes of Learners

Nate McClennen: You come down with four different types of learners in terms of engagement. Can you walk us through those and paint a picture of what this looks like for those who are listening?

Jenny Anderson: Sure. So, we have four modes. The first mode is passenger mode. It is the most prevalent mode. About 50% of kids identify themselves in this mode in school a lot of the time. These are the kids who coast, who do the bare minimum. They will race through their homework. They oftentimes enjoy going to school because they enjoy seeing their friends, but they don’t necessarily do any of the hard work involved in learning. So, they’re showing up to learn, but they’re kind of dropping out of the learning process.

Achiever mode—these are the kids who collect gold stars in absolutely everything they do, everything that is put in front of them. They want a gold star. That could be sports, extracurriculars, and certainly in academics. The kids who fall into sort of healthy achiever mode are really developing excellent skills, goal-setting, organizational skills, but they’re often very fragile learners because they are so intent on getting everything right, and they often tilt into unhappy achiever mode. That’s where we do need to worry because kids in unhappy achiever mode really have some of the worst mental health stats that we see across the board. The challenge there is that perfection is the goal and not excellence, and perfection, as we all know, is not attainable.

Resistor mode—these are the kids we all know. They are dubbed by the system the problem children. They are using the voice they have to let you know that the system is not working for them. They have a lot of agency, which is gumption, but they are withdrawing from learning or acting out in their learning. These are really tough kids, but everybody knows who they are. Typically, they can withdraw and fall through the cracks, but resistor mode—the silver lining is that these kids do have agency. The problem is it is turned away from their learning and not turned toward their learning. That is the challenge with resistor mode.

Finally, explorer mode is where we want kids to spend the most amount of time. We want to help kids get into explorer mode as educators, as parents. This is where they are proactive in their learning. They learn about something they care about in school. They learn about waves in physics, and they come back and want to know more about it. They learn that it’s related to X-rays and know that’s involved in cancer, and they absolutely dig in and ask questions and want to talk about it. Instead of saying “fine” when you ask how their day was, they actually tell you all about what they were learning and want to know more. That proactivity is building really important resilient learning muscles that we want to encourage in kids.

Nate McClennen: I was excited to see the word explore. We do a lot of work at Getting Smart with helping people start schools and scale schools. One of the schools we work with uses explorers as the name of their students. Their students are all explorers. When I was reading this book, I was sort of jumping up and down saying, yes, that’s exactly what we—I had never made that connection, but I’m going to actually share the book with them and say, you have chosen the right word for this.

Agency and Engagement Matrix

Nate McClennen:I wonder, so I like the agency engagement matrix that you put in the book. It’s a great visual for me. Rebecca, maybe, can you talk a little bit about why this idea of agency is in resistor mode, or it could be when someone’s in explorer mode. Maybe you just talk about that matrix and explain that a little bit more.

Rebecca Winthrop: Yeah. So, the four modes, which are dynamic and kids go in and out of them at any given day or across a week or across a year in school or out of school, it depends, are basically aligned around the horizontal axis, along engagement, and the vertical axis that’s along agency, which is what Nate you’re referring to. Passengers are really disengaged and they don’t have a lot of agency. They’re not taking a lot of initiative to change their circumstance. They are literally just trying to make it through the end of the day. Achievers are really engaged, but they are not trying to influence the flow of instruction, which is what agentic engagement that we use, John Marshall Reeve. They are trying to do great on everything that’s put in front of them, and in many ways, they’re learning to be excellent followers, depending on the school, depending on what’s required to achieve, and most schools, it’s to follow instructions and do it right, not at probably in the school you talked about who are trying to do Explorers.

What we found so surprising is kids in resistor mode who are, as Jenny said, dubbed the problem children, they actually have a fair bit of agency in terms of they’re influencing the flow of instruction. They are class clown, disrupting class, they are talking to their friend, but it pointed away from their learning in school. They can actually flip pretty quickly if you change their circumstances. To explore mode. We found this in our qualitative research. It’s much easier for a kid in resistor mode again, if their context shifts, to get into explore mode, which is where you have the merge, which is basically when kids are agentically engaged, just like Jenny described, they are deeply engaged in their learning and they’re taking initiative around it and influencing the flow of instruction. Again, not like Jenny said, not standing up and pretending to be a teacher, but finding many little ways to make their learning environment more interesting and supportive to themselves.

Nate McClennen: Right? Did you find in the, when you did all these interviews and your qualitative research, were students describing flipping between these modes?

Jenny Anderson: One character in particular, and we highlight her in the book, but we did hear this from a ton of the students that we spoke to. But Stella, who was a character we highlight in the book, we literally have her in every single mode. So, in chemistry class, she had this chemistry teacher who she didn’t understand chemistry, and she went to the teacher and she asked for help, and he kept saying, “I already explained that. What is it that you don’t understand?” And she’s like, “I don’t understand anything.” She responded to that class by going fully into resistor mode and actually ended up having a panic attack in the class. I mean, it was a really tough story. And then she learned to separate herself from the class. She did all of her work on Sundays. She developed coping mechanisms, but resistor mode.

In French class, she had this teacher who was deeply invested in all of the students and deeply invested in Stella and Stella’s success. She knew that, and she felt it, and she describes the process of wanting to rise to the occasion, not just to impress her teacher, but this idea of she was giving everything, so I wanted to give everything. She even said to us, this quote stuck with me so much, “I even wanted to ask questions when I was confused.” Kids told us the only time they ask questions in class is when they know the answer. They don’t ask questions when they’re actually confused. When she said that to us, it was like this light—you know, she was so agentically engaged in this class that she was willing to be vulnerable and make sure she could get what she needed out of this and make sure she could add what she was interested in. Could they talk about something that she was interested in?

Then, she talked about sort of math and English, and she was in passenger mode for those for different reasons, but she just really articulated. She was really bored in math because she’d already covered the content. So, she sort of just coasted along in that one. In English, she was kind of overwhelmed because she was convinced she was never going to become a good writer. She kept getting all this writing back on her paper. Instead of thinking, wow, this teacher wants me to improve, she’d internalized the sense that the teacher thought she wasn’t very good. So, she was like, I’m going to do the bare minimum. She admitted that she cheated sometimes. She was sort of like, so we really did hear students rationalize how they showed up for their learning in very powerful ways. Rebecca, what would you add to that? What do you remember?

Rebecca Winthrop: Yeah. I think Jenny’s spot on. The thing that struck me the most was we think of kids who are in resistor mode as these sort of problems. These are problems, these children. The system does, parents can, and it’s easy to give up on them. But so often when kids got into a different context, a different school, oftentimes they did have to move school. Sometimes they just needed to go into a situation where they had a lot more autonomy and choice. It was like a couple of weeks, they turned massive turnaround, massive turnaround. Often when kids are in resistor mode, we feel like we need to control them more and take things away from them more. They get disciplined. They get, they don’t, they get their, all their extracurriculars taken away depending on the school and they actually need autonomy more than anybody.

Nate McClennen: If there are middle school or high school teachers out there, I’m a big fan of long advocated for students learning about the human brain.

Practical Applications for Schools

Nate McClennen: So, every student should take a neuroscience course, but now I’m thinking there’s a second course here and learning how to learn about metacognition. If each student could use this framework in a really simple way to say, where am I in that quadrant right now, in that matrix, and how do I shift into the place more, that’s more explorer mode rather than more, you know, resistor mode or whatever the case may be. It feels like a really easy framework that could be implemented in secondary schools to help really improve that metacognition piece.

Rebecca Winthrop: End of the book, a couple of—we visited a couple of class of schools in Texas, actually, who were giving kids self-reflection tools around their levels of engagement. It wasn’t these exact frameworks, but it was built, the teachers were using Amy Berry’s continuum of engagement, which is, which we used as one of the many inputs for the framework. I have often thought in this process, totally exactly what you just said, those kids, this level of self-awareness of how they showed up, enabled them to shift, to shift out of passenger mode, basically, because they were thinking about it. Then they were able to articulate, and these were fifth-grade kids. They were able to articulate to their teacher what they needed to do that, like I’m stuck on this. I’m a bit overwhelmed, and I need help here because I want to show up tomorrow better, or it could have been like, I’m really hungry today. I didn’t get breakfast. I didn’t have breakfast at home. Like, I can’t concentrate. I think I need a snack. It was incredible, and the teachers said, you know, it made a huge difference to their achievement, which is what she was measured on, but also their enjoyment in school. Yes.

Jenny Anderson: In that section of the book, there’s a moment where she asks a student, “What is your goal? What would you like to get on your next test?” It was asked in such a way that was clearly safe, right? The child felt safe to actually do that. But that is such a powerful thing to like, and then what do you think you need to do to get that? Again, the tone is everything, right? But this idea of being brave enough to muster that ambition. And then for the teacher to say, great, let’s work together on how we get there. That’s that moment in there. That was related to her understanding that she was the author of her own engagement. She had control over it. She could do it. The teacher was there to support her along the way. That is magic, right?

Nate McClennen: Yeah. I mean, just those words, like the author of their own engagement, right? It’s too often something that we miss in schools, right? We think about content skills and knowledge, but this idea of metacognition and understanding who you are as a learner, it feels like it’s the superpower and it feels like more and more it will be increasingly an important superpower in the age of AI and sort of all the things that are happening.

Rebecca Winthrop: If any school wants to test that with the four modes, sign us up.

Jenny Anderson: Can I just say…

Rebecca Winthrop: Yeah.

Jenny Anderson: Can I say one thing? Like we’ve said this, we sort of alluded to this, but it’s so important to both Rebecca and I, these modes are modes. I’m worried that people will use them to pigeonhole kids and say, oh, that’s the passenger, oh, that’s the resistor. These are not nouns. The goal for the book is for parents to see when their kids to understand how they’re showing up for their learning, to better have more vocabulary, but also when they get stuck to make sure it doesn’t become an identity, but these are not labels or ways to pigeonhole kids or learning styles or any of that, right? These are very fluid, dynamic modes. So, I just wanted to throw that in there.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. That double click is super important because it’s happened with learning styles across the education sector, as everyone says, or you see students saying, I am this type of learner, which is really not the intent originally of that work. So, let’s again reassert for our listeners that these modes are dynamic. You put the student’s face or their identity maybe in the middle, and they’re pivoting around based on where they are, and they’re recognizing they’re disengaged here, and they might need to move to an explorer mode here, whatever the case may be. But again, these are dynamic and not identity-forming. So, thank you for that.

Advice for Parents and Educators

Nate McClennen: All right, let’s pivot the second half of the conversation around action, because really your book has a lot of intention around helping parents with this work. So, I want to touch on what are the key messages for parents and then key messages for teachers, because I think obviously many teachers are parents, but also I think they apply equally well. Maybe start with parents, and what are the big takeaways for parents from this book and this research?

Rebecca Winthrop: Jenny, you want to take that and I can take the teachers?

Jenny Anderson: I think number one, more nudging, less nagging. Nagging doesn’t work. We cite this great brain study where teenagers are put into a brain scanner and they hear a recording of their mom’s voice being critical of them. The recording is something along the lines of “something that bothers me about you is,” and the problem-solving part of the kid’s brain sort of shuts down. So when we nag, we do it from a place of love or desperation or conviction that this thing is never going to get done if we don’t nag. So, what does work? Nudging, helping kids make a plan, less judgment about patterns maybe we’ve seen or how we got where we get—what’s the plan we’re going to make.

You were talking about the metacognition. We really talk a lot about trying to shift from this procrastination-nagging cycle into this learning-to-learn cycle, which is really again, helping kids understand why they’re making the choices they’re doing and then help them develop strategies. Oftentimes, Rebecca and I found this in our research, so many kids do not know how to study and they don’t want to admit that because especially as they get older. Oftentimes, it’s really open, honest questions, not judgmental questions about, do you know how to get started? Do you understand what the assignment is? Trying to help them make a plan versus making the plan for them or just telling them they better get that stuff done. Yeah, a little more nudging and less nagging. The second one I would say, and then I’ll pass it over to Rebecca, is discussion. We say in the book that discussion is to adolescents what cuddles are to infants—necessary for brain development. When toddlers are developing, literally, the cuddles are helping build their brains, and for adolescents, the way those networks in the brain are getting connected is through discussion. That discussion has to be centered around—it doesn’t have to be a really good way to have a good conversation with a teen. We all know this is to lean into their interests. What are they interested in? What sparks them? What can we get them on board about? A really inspired educator recently said to us, he has two daughters. He sat down and he’s been nagging his kids about TikTok—who among us with teenage daughters hasn’t—and he sat down and he said to them, “Hey guys, who should I follow? I want to open a TikTok account. Who should I follow?” They were so into it, and they were like, “Dad, you’re really into graphic art. You’re really going to like this.” So, two things are happening there. He is not judging their love of TikTok. He is sort of honoring it in a way. He is creating a great discussion. He said, “We talked about why they follow who they follow. We talked about why I should follow certain people. We talked about why video is such a powerful medium for expressing different art forms.” That is a discussion that is born of a kid’s interest. I am not saying we all need to spend our days and nights talking about TikTok, but that is just an example of leaning into their interests and using it to have rich discussions, including about the content of their learning, which is another point that we make in the book.

Nate McClennen: I love it. My wife and I used to use sort of “tell me more” sentence starters, right? “Tell me more about this.” Sometimes it works and sometimes it didn’t, but I love the idea of those three things: nudging versus nagging, making a plan, and just leaning into discussion around their interests. All right, Rebecca, let’s flip to the educator side. What are your thoughts there?

Rebecca Winthrop: For the educator side, I think I have two sort of big picture things for educators and school leaders. The first one is to center engagement as an important goal in and of itself. Our educators, our school leaders, our staff in the building are handling so much right now and are downtrodden, not because they are personally downtrodden, but because they are overburdened and they’re pressured from above and then they’re pressured from below by parents and community members and they’re still squeezed in the middle. So, Jenny and I have huge empathy for educators who are doing the hero’s work of educating our children every day. In that pressure, I often find that engagement is seen as a nice-to-have, you know, get the kids safe, get them on grade level, manage the bus schedule, deal with the angry parent, etc., etc., etc. It’s almost like, oh, and now you want me to worry about engagement too? Is this not like another thing that you’re adding to my list? Are you kidding me? So, I think it’s a mindset shift, honestly, around that engagement is not the cherry on the top of the ice cream sundae. It’s the actual ice cream. If you get engagement right, you get so many things right. You can, if you care about your chronic absenteeism problem, you have to focus on engagement. If you care about low achievement, you have to focus on engagement. If you care about the mental health of your kids in crisis, you have to focus on engagement. So, it’s not the only thing, of course, but it really is central. So, that to me is it’s a paradigm shift. It’s a perspective shift that we all need to do in the education sector.

Then second, to be very practical for teachers in particular, there is a lot of things they can do inside their classroom that will make a big difference. They can do today, tomorrow. You do not need to wait for a new school leader. You do not need to wait for a new instructional coach. You do not need to wait for shifting disciplinary procedures. One of the many things that they can do is take a look at John Marshall Reeve’s work on autonomy-supportive teaching practices. We outline them in the book, and there’s also a lot of great stuff online where you can make small shifts in how you run your classroom, but very subtle shifts that actually, again, 20 years, 35 RCTs, 14 countries of all different types of schools have been shown to make a significant difference. Giving a couple of options on homework so kids can choose. Starting the lesson by saying, “Hey, let’s pretend it’s science. We’re going to talk about the solar system today. Do you have any questions about the solar system?” before launching into your lesson. Just that very act of asking that, you know, think about it. Kids have to stop. They have to pause. It takes 60 seconds. They have to reflect. Do I have any questions? Like they have to look internally. All of a sudden, you’ve hooked them a bit. Explanatory rationales—I’m assigning you this text to read because it’s going to be on the test on Friday is not an explanatory rationale. It is, I’m assigning it because I want you to see how historical fact is woven with fiction or whatever it is. So, kids understand. At the core of it all is really treating kids with respect, basically, as their own autonomous individual, curious beings that they come into the world as they are.

Nate McClennen: Ah, I love it. I love the very practical examples and we’ll certainly put in the show notes. Every classroom should have a question board or in the younger grades, I call it a wonder wall, where a kid any time or a teacher or a parent who’s in the classroom can put a question on that board and that question may get answered or may not, but it’s always there and it’s validated.

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Nate McClennen: All right, we’re getting close to the end. I want to shift to the big elephant in the closet, which is, you know what, this is all great, and engagement’s really important, and I understand the four types of engagement that a student could exist in at any given moment, but the education system is fairly immutable. There’s a lot that’s happening on the innovation fringes, but a lot of times, school can be disengaging, and often, maybe a job could be disengaging. How do you think about that in your research and you’re writing in this book of when you can’t change the system, what do you do?

Jenny Anderson: Sure. I want to start by saying we originally wrote a book about school design. Our proposal and our first draft was about school design. The reason we pivoted was what you just said. Also, there’s been some really good work done on school design. We were worried that we would present to parents all these wonderful schools that their kids couldn’t go to, and that didn’t actually feel fair. So, we thought, what can parents do? Do they have as much influence? The answer is yes. They have as much influence as teachers and as peers, even in the adolescent years when your children seem like they would rather eat nails and have a conversation with you. So, yes, we have influence, and the book is very much about some of the things you can do, and I’ll just say one. I mean, we’ve talked about a few, but be the bridge. Kids feel that school too often is irrelevant, and we know that that’s not teachers’ fault. There’s a bunch of reasons that that exists, but we can be the bridge between what they’re learning in school and the real world. Teachers are going to have a hard time doing that for 30 kids in every single class for every kid’s interest. You know, your kid, you know, their interests, you know, their passions, you know, you can be that bridge. You can connect, find a way to connect physics to skateboarding. You can find a way to connect weather patterns to your grandmother’s house in Florida and some of the horrible storms that we’ve seen. You can be that bridge and you can use ChatGPT to do that. You can use the internet. That is really worthwhile time. You know, give up a few minutes on Instagram. Like a few questions. If you can be that bridge, you are reinforcing that what they’re doing is worthwhile. They sometimes don’t feel that it is; you’re saying it is, you’re reinforcing it, and you’re tying it into the real world until we all get the schools that we dream of, where that relevance is baked in and there’s experiential and there’s that’s part of it. Until that happens. We, and I don’t want to put the burden on parents and say it’s all on you, you need to do it. This is just, you’re making dinner, ChatGPT audio, like what is X, and that I think is a good starting point.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Great. Rebecca.

Rebecca Winthrop: I would add two things. One is part of the reason we wrote the book and added at the end a list of 14 organizations who work across the world. Parent demand is a barrier. It is not because parents are bad. It is not the parents’ fault. It’s because we, in the education system, have not done a good job of telling parents what good learning looks like. This is part of why we wrote this book, and we hope that it will give parents confidence in all the cool, innovative schools that are out there on the margins. So many of the characters that we have in our book who flipped from resistor mode to explore mode were in places that had innovative school design models. One, when they moved from the traditional system to the innovative school design model and those models can be in the public system if we just get lots of things going in our direction, including parent demand. The ultimate metacognitive recommendation of the book is to help your kids understand their modes of engagement and move between them when the moment calls for it. My 16-year-old was very motivated to pass his learner’s permit for his driver’s license. He’s more often in passenger mode than not. I said, well, I’m only going to schlep down there to the DMV if you get yourself into achiever mode, study this stuff, and are ready to go to pass the test. Otherwise, I’m schlepping back and forth, and you’re not going to do it. So, that is what we all need to do. I’m in passenger mode in budget meetings regularly in my job managing a large center because I actually hate budget meetings.

Nate McClennen: And even I could even see resistor mode, high agency, where they’re disengaged, where they’re pushing back at their school in inappropriate ways, resisting ways, saying, look, this isn’t working for me, or why are we subject to X, Y, and Z? Hey, we have spent, I think we could talk actually for a couple hours, but we do need to cut this podcast and bring it to a close. I just wanted to share a few things that I learned from both of you. It was a pleasure. It was awesome. I knew this conversation was going to be great, and it lived up to my expectations for sure. A couple of my takeaways: number one is that teens are shockingly, shockingly disengaged. All of us listening to this podcast have to remember, and then that puts us in the second piece, which is we need to center engagement as a critical piece. That disengagement affects everyone. It’s not just certain students, and parents, when they can understand these four different modes, that the modes are dynamic. When we can understand them and help push towards that explorer mode where and when appropriate, that’ll be helpful for student engagement. For the parent side, this idea of nudging versus nagging helps your teenager make a plan, and lean in with discussions and ask questions and be curious. This idea of leading with interest and curiosity. Educator side, like I said, center engagement. I really think I’m going to lead with this. So, my next time I work with schools is that I’m going to put up the word engagement and say, do you know how engaged your students are and see what they say? I appreciate Rebecca, you’re saying sort of engagement is the ice cream, not the cherry on top. Too often we think the reverse. And then second for educators, this idea of autonomy practices, John Marshall Reeve’s work, all these very specific practices. Parents can be influencers. They can be influenced and be this bridge between what’s happening in school and what’s happening in the real world. Fundamentally, let’s get more students and teenagers into that explorer mode. Folks that are listening, I highly recommend you go out and find this book somewhere, read it, buy it, and we’ll put in the show notes links to it. There are a wealth of resources, way, way more than what we covered in this podcast, but it’s well worth the time invested in reading it. It can help you as a parent, help you as an educator or school leader. So, Jenny, Rebecca, thank you so much for the work you do for young people, and really appreciate your time today.

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Jenny Anderson

Jenny Anderson is an author and an award-winning journalist who spent over a decade at The New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz. She contributes to TIME, The New York Times and The Atlantic, among other publications.

Rebecca Winthrop

Rebecca Winthrop is a leading global authority on education. She is the director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, where she conducts studies on how to better support children’s learning, and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Links

• Watch the full video
• The Disengaged Teen
• Jenny Anderson LinkedIn
• Rebecca Winthrop LinkedIn
• New York Times Article