The Disengaged Teen

Educators at all levels have raised concerns about  growing student disengagement. In this episode, we discuss research on the causes of, and  possible solutions, to this growing problem. Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an  informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted by

John Kane, an economist... ...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer... ...and features guests doing important research  and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners. Our guests today are Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson. Rebecca is the Director of the Center  for Universal Education at Brookings, where she leads global studies on how to better support  children’s learning, and an adjunct professor at

Georgetown University. Jenny is 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 now writes a column on education in Time. Rebecca and Jenny are the  authors of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better which will be  released in January 2025 by Penguin Random House. Welcome Rebecca and Jenny. So nice to be here. Thanks for having us. Today's teas are: Rebecca,

are you drinking tea today? I sure am. I'm drinking Earl Grey, which I drink most mornings. And how about you, Jenny? I am drinking chamomile because it is my afternoon  and I have to ease up a bit on the caffeine. And I am drinking a black  raspberry green tea today. Oh, that sounds nice. John, I have a London Strand  breakfast from when I was in London earlier this year from the Twinings flagship store. That sounds delicious.

Very nice. So, we've invited you here to  discuss The Disengaged Teen. Can you tell us a bit about the origin of this book? Yeah, I can start. It's Rebecca. I was very shocked during COVID. I have two adolescent boys,  one was in third grade, one was in sixth grade, and I was shocked to discover that I had misjudged  which of my boys was really engaged and which one

wasn't. And as someone who's worked in education  her whole career, for several decades, I thought, “Gosh, this does not bode well for other parents  who don't have this set of expertise,” and knowing how important student engagement is in children's  achievement and developing learning skills and mental health, and all the good things, that was  what really motivated me to reach out to Jenny and say, “Hey, let's partner up.” So Jenny has  her own reasons, I'm sure, for saying yes.

Well, the timing was perfect. I was a financial  journalist for almost 20 years before I switched to education. And I switched because I had  my own kids, and I felt I wanted to better understand how they learn and how to support  their learning. And I was shocked at how little there was on that topic in the mediums  that I'm used to in journalism. So education was traditionally covered very much in a sort of  siloed political, charter/non-charter, standards,

changing standards, teachers unions. Those were  the topics, which are very important topics, but it is one of many, and having covered finance  for so long, and seeing how sophisticated it is in terms of way we organize the coverage, the  number of people we put on it, and the sort of intensity of the coverage, I was really very  disappointed to see how little attention was spent on teaching and learning and understanding  learning as a process better, and as a parent,

understanding how to support a child's learning  better. So instead of complain about it, I decided to do something about it. And Rebecca asked me  to write a book. So we dove in together. You begin the first chapter with a discussion on  the results from the program for international assessment, an international test  administered to 15 year olds. What

happened to the scores about a decade ago? We started to see the scores in reading and science start to go down in about 2010 and in  math, about eight years later they caught up, at which point they had gone from declining gently  to kind of falling off a cliff. So there was a very precipitous and alarming decline in these  PISA scores. And that's not what we should see. What we should see, as systems invest more in  education, we should see those scores climbing,

and we know more about how kids learn and we  implement those practices in classrooms. So this was not the expected trajectory. Rebecca,  do you want to add anything to that? I think you nailed it. The thing that was  particularly worrisome is how, across the board it was, across so many different countries. That decline is rather dramatic, and it was interesting to see that it had begun before COVID,  because often this type of discussion takes place

within the context of COVID, but that certainly  accelerated things. But the issue was already beginning before that. Could you talk a  little bit about some of the harm that results to societies when we see this sort of  decline in the cognitive skills of students? Well-educated scientists cure diseases and  ease discomfort. Well-educated knowledgeable entrepreneurs drive innovation. Well-trained  engineers create bridges and make sure they don't

fall down. Really, at the center of everything we  want in a society is a well-educated citizenry. There's sort of multiple layers, but we have  tremendous problems in the world, and we need people to be educated to solve these, both in the  content of science, math, English language arts, but also in skills, really kind of critical  thinking skills, and interdisciplinary skills and tying together things and working with other  people, and communicating well and listening to

others. So I think when you see those scores  falling off a cliff, we're only measuring one very narrow subset of skills, and those are  declining, and they're very important skills. We're not even measuring a lot of the other ones.  But there's a lot of evidence that we're not doing a particularly good job on those either. The only thing I would add to that is how critical these skills are today, but especially  over certainly the next decade, given the rapid

increase of generative artificial intelligence. So  we're particularly concerned about the fact that so many young people seem to not be able to think  critically enough around texts that they read, or how to think about using and applying math.  You're much more susceptible to manipulation, fake news, this infodemic that is spreading around  the world, as the UN Secretary General calls it. So to us, that's also incredibly concerning. Not everyone prefers having

low-information voters, for example. Yeah. and I'd love to build on that, and Rebecca, I want to kind of give this one to you, because  you know so much about it and have done some deep work in this. But I also just think, and we  haven't sort of said it outright, but we should, which is, for a democratic society, you need  educated citizens, and data suggests we're less educated in a moment where we really need to  be building, weaving, civic society together and

not tearing it apart. That is another reason we  should be very, very concerned about this decline in skills and decline in knowledge. Well said. The book relies on data from  large data sets. Can you tell us a bit about the data that you relied on? Sure, we culled from a lot of different sources, but largely four main bodies of data. First, we  did a massive literature review around student engagement in the US, but elsewhere,  we looked at studies around the globe,

and so that was from all types of disciplines.  The second, we did a lot of qualitative research, where we interviewed almost 100 young people,  largely between the ages of 10 to 18 and often their family members and often their teachers, to  really start getting a vision of their experiences

in school. And then we partnered with an  organization called Transcend, which is a nonprofit in the US, working in the K through 12  space, and did research that included a nationally representative survey of over 65,000 students and  a sort of similar survey of almost 2000 parents. And in those surveys, we were asking questions  around students’ schooling experiences. So what were they experiencing when they were at school?  Did they have any choice around how to do their

work? Did they feel they belonged? Do they feel  like there was someone they could go to if they had fallen behind and needed academic supports? A  whole bunch of those types of questions. And then we asked… it wasn't matched parents to the exact  students, because there was way more students than parents… but then we just asked parents of  that same age group what their perceptions were of students’ schooling experiences. Did they  think students felt like they belonged and had

friends. Did they think students had supports  to catch up if they were behind or had choices over how to do their work in school, et cetera,  things like that. So that's sort of primarily the sets of data that we used. What did the data tell you about the status of students in terms of their  perceptions of well being, etc.? We found what others have found, which is that the  kids are not alright. There were sort of really

alarming levels of apathy and stress. And when you  dig into that combination, it's particularly toxic to think about that, that so many kids feel both  overwhelmed and extremely disengaged, extremely apathetic, so kind of bored and overwhelmed at  the same time. And I think at a moment in their lives where they feel kind of primed to do stuff  and to be part of something. I’m like, how did we pull this off? How have we managed to both bore  them and overwhelm them at the same time? I mean,

it seems like kind of an epic feat, not one that  we really want to repeat. Terms that we heard over and over again from these interviews with young  people: unseen, very unprepared for the world in front of them, a little bit hopeless about the  state of affairs in the world, and a little bit helpless to change things, bored and overwhelmed  I mentioned. So just you kind of put all of these feelings of their experience in school,  and it doesn't translate to motivation. That

doesn't translate to: gosh, I really want to go to  school tomorrow. And so that was very telling.

One thing I would add to that, which Jenny  and I were both really concerned about, was, in addition to everything, she just said, there  was a real sense among many students that they couldn't change things, that they didn't really  have the power, or they didn't see the possibility of how they could make school more interesting  to themselves, or change things in their lives, and it can be very defeating when you feel done  too and like you don't have an opportunity to

have volition in your life around things you care  about. So that was very concerning for us. Having no agency at all, or feeling like you  have no agency, is certainly not something that's motivating, that's for sure. Exactly. It's totally demotivating. If you feel like you have no opportunity to actually have  a voice or change things in your daily life that you might be able to do, have a different tactic,  do better, if you only could shift something.

They're feeling this lack of agency at a moment  where developmentally, it is crucial to the formation of their identity. So the timing  of this is just particularly tragic, because when you think about what adolescence is, it's  separating from a caregiver and finding your own

tribe and finding your way to live in the world.  To do that, you need the experiences which give you the information to form the kind of person you  want to be and the sort of tribe you want to join, and the partner with whom you're going to mate  with later on and in this moment, developmentally, where they want to be, craving doing and  being and trying, they feel, like I said, helpless and hopeless and without agency. And  that is not ideal for adolescent development.

One of the things our colleagues often talk  about, and we see in reports pretty consistently, is the lack of student motivation. And  educators have reported these concerns consistently for a very long time. What is  different in this moment? What's changed? We really puzzled with this. We really puzzled  with this question. Because if you look at the data on student disengagement, kids have  been disengaged. It's gone down a little bit,

especially because of COVID, but basically at high  levels for a long time. Kids have said that the things that most bother them is school-related  pressure for a long time, and this is before the advent of cell phones. So you have kids who are  disengaged, especially as they get older, that has existed for a long time. And then we think  what's going on is you've got disengaged kids

in school. You've got the advent of technology  like social media and cell phones that are really fun distractions, and the skills that young people  really need to thrive in work and life are getting farther and farther away from the normal academic  teaching of what's going on in school. So 50 years ago, most employers were really prioritizing  good literacy and numeracy in the US, those were sort of the most requisite skills, and those are  needed, but they're necessary, but not sufficient.

Colleges want young people to have invented  or patented something… I'm exaggerating, but not totally… to get into competitive schools, and  there's increasing pressure for honors classes and AP classes, and what we're asking kids to be able  to do has sort of gotten out of hand in some ways, and gotten farther away from what this reality  looks like when they leave the school walls.

So this combination of sort of feeling it's  irrelevant inside school and technology being very distracting, and I would say there's  also been well documented less choice and decision making that young people have over  the last couple decades, this sort of sense of not being in control over much of their  lives. Those sort of three things, I think, has kind of created a toxic combination all  really leading to unmotivated young people.

Yeah, I would just build on that a tiny bit and  say, as you all point out, and as Rebecca points out, there's always been a gap between what  happens in school and what happens in the real world, that that gap is like a chasm. It's just  much, much bigger, and kids are much more aware of what the world will demand of them because  of smartphones. They see what the world is out

there. They were a little bit protected before .  You saw in your community or in your school what that world was and now, they sort of see it a lot,  and I think that feeling of unprepared for the world that's coming is much more profound. This seems to extend into older age groups as

well. We see a decline in fertility, more people  are choosing not to bring children into the world, and a lot of it seems to be tied to this  same sort of environment where people are not very optimistic about the future and  they do feel this lack of control.

Absolutely. I think that a lot of the sort of things that people talk about in terms  of personal self improvement and, in adults, whether it's mindfulness and/or developing  friendships and connections or finding meaningful work and interests, or, you know, there's a whole  industry to help adults sort of get out of their funk and improve their lives. And I think a lot  of these things are sowed in school where young

people don't have a lot of chances inside school  to really pursue their interests. They aren't developing what the folks at CASEL talk about as  confident self awareness, where they have a sense of who they are and what path they might like  to start on, and if they want to change paths, they're confident enough to try to figure out  how to do that as they go, and all of that is needed to be the author of your own life, which is  affirming and creates optimism. And without that

feeling, it is hard to move through the world. You note that more engaged kids learn better, perform better, feel better, and live better.  And you describe four modes of engagement, resisting, coasting, achieving and  exploring. What types of behavior would we observe for students in each of these modes? So the passenger mode is where kids are coasting, and these are kids who are showing up to school,  not disrupting class, but putting in minimal

effort, zooming through homework as quickly as  they can. They may enjoy school because they have friends, but they don't necessarily see  the relevance of what they're learning to the real world, to their daily life, and they're doing  what we would call surface learning. They're not going deep and they may be getting good grades.  Some of them may be struggling, so it's often because school's either too hard or too easy that  kids decide to coast. So that's passenger mode,

and that's most kids. In middle school and high  school, we found that about 50% of kids said that their schooling experiences were sort of “meh,”  ones that were not inspiring or terrible, either way, they were sort of coasting along. So that's  the first mode. The second mode is achiever mode. And these are kids who are trying to be perfect  and trying to be excellent and get top marks and excel in extracurriculars. And teachers and  parents love achievers. Society loves achievers,

and achievers can be very happy because they're  doing very well, but there is a dark side. We talk about the achiever conundrum, where a lot of  kids who spent a lot of time in achiever mode tip into unhappy achiever mode, where they replace  their performance with their sense of mattering, so they feel that they only matter if they do  well, so getting a bad grade is sort of the end of the world for them. These kids often have quite  a bit of anxiety and mental health challenges,

and they're often very fragile learners in that  they don't really want to take risks. One of the quotes that I think about a lot when we talk about  this mode was a kid who was really in achiever mode for a long time saying the thing that she  hated most about school that drove her crazy is when teachers didn't tell her exactly what  to do to get an A, a good score, because that's the sort of mindset of achiever mode. Tell me  exactly what to do and I'm gonna go get it. It

also limits creativity being in achiever mode  too often. So in middle school, high school, that's about 30% of kids. And then you've got  the third mode, which is kids in resister mode. These are kids who actually do have a fair bit of  agency. It's just not pointed towards the learning in school that parents and teachers and adults  want them to be doing, and they're using their

voice in whichever way they can to say school  isn't working for me. So they are the classic quote, unquote problem children disrupting class,  class clowns, not doing homework, skipping school, or leaving school altogether, ultimately, if you  can't re-engage them. So, they often need a wide range of supports to bring them back, because  they're often resisting for different things. It could be they're deeply overwhelmed, they’ve  gotten behind in work. It could be a family issue,

and they need extra support. But we found that if  you can remove some of the barriers and give them, actually, more autonomy and freedom to pursue  their interests or take on responsibility, they do have agency, and they quickly can move to explorer  mode, which is the fourth mode. And explorer mode is what we talk about as agentic engagement, which  is the term in the academic literature, and that's where kids are getting good grades, they are  happy and they're developing the resilience,

the learning to learn skills needed for  an AI world. So it's the trifecta that

you want. It's just that less than 10% of kids  grades 3 through 12, and less than 5% of kids in middle school and high school say they have  the regular opportunity to explore in school, and this is where kids’ agency meets their  engagement levels, and they are able to ask for things or make suggestions, or find creative  solutions to make their learning environment more interesting to themselves and more supportive  regardless of the context they're in.

Preschool kids are very much engaged in that  exploring mode, and as they enter schools that seems to fade a little bit with each year  of schooling. Why is this breaking down? We bring in kids who are intrinsically motivated  to learn more and curious. Why is that fading so rapidly in the early years of schooling and  continuing through the schooling process? There’s the real intersection of development  and sort of what we do to them. So a lot of it

is the environment we put kids in, which does  seem to dampen curiosity. There's not as many opportunities to ask questions, or for a teacher  with a big class to answer every kid's questions, a toddler asking sort of 60 to 100 questions a  minute, it feels like as a parent. Obviously, that's not possible. So there are a lot of reasons  that in that trajectory from sort of primary elementary school up until middle and high school  you see kids disengaged. The top reasons are it's

too easy or too hard. They're not in their zone  of proximal development. They're either bored or overwhelmed, and so they check out. That's the  easiest approach to that. Mental health problems is increasingly a reason. It's very hard to engage  if you're anxious or depressed or neuro-divergent. There are a lot of neuro-divergent kids, and that  needs to be recognized and diagnosed so that you can put in place the supports to make learning  more accessible. A lot of kids experience bullying

or discrimination. That would be a very important  reason that kids disengage. A lot of kids don't feel they belong, and belonging plays an essential  role in learning. We have a whole chapter on this that… I really love this phrase: “belonging  uncertainty,” when you feel you don't belong, you are looking for evidence to confirm that you  don't belong, and you are very unwilling to do the things that you need to do to learn. In a moment  where you don't feel you belong, you are not going

to ask for help and confess to an entire class  that you don't get it. That's a very brave act. I don't understand, could we slow down? Could you  repeat that? That's hard to do in college, much less in middle school, when you're really kind  of in the throes of that identity development. And as we've talked about in this conversation,  this lack of choice is a profound reason that kids disengage. They don't feel that they have  an opportunity to put themselves out there in any

significant way, so why try? So we don't give them  limited opportunities. We're not saying, choose your own adventure in school. That's one dramatic  approach. But another is, you have a homework assignment that you're going to assign. Let's  offer three ways to do it. That little bit of choice really resonates, because you start to feel  a little bit in control, and so you feel a little

bit more motivated to do it. It's very similar to  offering a toddler: peas, corn, or carrots. You're not saying, “Do you want vegetables or don't you?”  You're saying, here are the three vegetables, which one do you want? And suddenly they feel  I get to make this decision, I'm going to eat

carrots versus I don't want any vegetables. So  scale that up. And when you get in middle and high school and in college, that's why so many  kids actually can get re-engaged in college, because they can start to exercise a little  bit more choice and agency over their schedule. Whether they've developed the sort of learning to  learn skills and study skills to be successful is a different story. But I do think that you see a  number of kids sort of get to college and find a

thing. A couple kids in our book, they got to  college and the combination of feeling less controlled and having some choice over what they  could pick in terms of classes and how structured their days allowed them to re-engage in a way  that they were unable to do in high school. I would also chime in and add that the  structure and design of schooling, I think, really impacts this downward slide of  disengagement, because we see a huge

dip from elementary school to middle school.  That's really where, all of a sudden, you get kids reporting many more passenger and resister  experiences than achiever and explorer experiences is that switch from upper elementary to middle  school. And some of the design features are having multiple classes, not having one teacher who is  sort of your go to, who knows you very well, and that continues. So it's important for educators to  have subject matter expertise, of course, so they

can teach well. But the entire sort of design of  having siloed, not necessarily connected different subjects can be quite mind numbing to kids, plus  they feel a little bit lost in the shuffle. They don't necessarily have a place to belong in  traditional schools, in traditional design of schools. Now, lots of folks are playing with  how to redesign middle school and high school, but I think that has a big role to play. You've hinted towards some changes that K-12

could promote, where they could promote student  agency and engagement. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what some of those design changes  could be to maybe improve engagement? Yes, I think we have a whole section towards  the end of the book suggesting organizations that are doing this work, if readers want to go  be champions in their communities or in their institutions, and there is a spectrum. So on the  one hand, you could really work with teachers

themselves to use autonomy-supportive teaching  practices. This work comes out of Johnmarshall Reeve and his colleagues, so 20 years of research  on this, which really is shifts in style. You don't have to shift your curriculum or your  lesson, a bit of tweaks on the lesson plans or your disciplinary approaches as an educator.  But it is things like Jenny said, offering choice

on homework. It is things like being vulnerable  enough to ask students at the end of a lesson, and if you have a large class, you can give  everybody either an electronic exit ticket or a sticky note to say, what's one question you  want to explore tomorrow or you didn't understand, and then taking that feedback and shifting  it. So there's small things like that that actually engage them and give them more  agency. There's also more profound design

changes. We interviewed a number of students for  the book who are in big picture learning schools, which basically take the traditional school day in  their high schools and three days a week they're in class doing their courses, and two days a week  they are in internships in the workplace where they are developing all sorts of life skills and  collaborative problem solving skills and critical thinking skills. And then every week their entire  high school career, they meet with an advisor,

the same advisor and the same small group of kids  in their advisory across all four years. If done well, of course, they become like a little family,  and it's a go to person, and they debrief on their internship experiences and what they're learning  from them. Because, of course, you can learn a lot of these quote, unquote, 21st Century Skills  anywhere in life actually, it doesn't have to be inside a classroom around academic subjects. I would add two things. I would say a K-12

timetable is a zero-sum game. And I think we've  been willing to push more content in because we've decided what we care about, and let's do  more of that. And I think Rebecca and I would say that agency is the skill that needs to be  developed, and it needs to be developed through the ability to make choices and to exercise that.  And so I would argue that that skill actually is

worthy of cutting up some time and that it will  help with everything else. It can help with the other academics, but take away a little of the  content and put in its place an ability for kids to make some choices. So I'll give you an example.  In a lot of countries around the world, you can do something called an extended project qualification  in your final couple of years of schooling. Y ou pick a subject, and it's very carefully designed  such that you have to go find your advisor,

you have to design a timetable. 20% of your grade  is your ability to manage a project over a year. It's a time management skill, and another 30% is  the quality of the sources you choose. So at 50% you are not assessing the content of that project.  You are assessing some skills we know are going to be incredibly important in college or in the  workplace, the ability to manage multiple demands, to ask for help, to know when you're falling  behind, to change your mind, and all of that.

So I can really envision, and we've interviewed  some schools in this process who did studios or projects just carving out some time to say,  even if you assume they don't learn anything, which is 100% not going to happen. But let's  just give some credit to those who say not enough knowledge acquisition happens, they are developing  other skills, and those skills are worthy of the time we are taking away from other things. And  the gravy, the cherry on the ice cream sundae,

is that it will make kids happier, which we should  care a lot about. You know, we should care deeply about that as a factor to motivate, but just as  the sort of we would like our kids to be happy. So I do think the timetable is a major barrier, but  it is one that is surmountable, and I think we can be creative, and it doesn't mean that we have to  give up all standards tomorrow if we do this.

Much of this discussion reminds me of a discussion  we had earlier with two economists, with Fabrizio Zilibotti and Matthias Doepke, who talk about  differences over time and across countries in the amount of freedom that children have outside of  school and how much of their lives are controlled. And what they observe is that in those time  periods and in countries where there's more

income inequality, parents tend to put much more  structure on children's lives. And I'm wondering if this could be related to the lack of autonomy  that children may have outside of the classroom,

where they spend a good deal of their time.  So it does seem like in the US, in particular, where we have an extremely high level of  economic inequality and there's a lot of pressure on children from their parents  and other sources to do well in school, that perhaps that lack of autonomy, both  within schools and outside of school,

might be leading to some of this disengagement.  If that's the case, is that something that parents perhaps should work on, providing students a  bit more autonomy and choice and control in their day-to-day lives. Would that be helpful? Absolutely. I interviewed them and did a couple stories on them, and I read their book, and  I would say my favorite conclusion from that book is that parents aren't crazy. Parents are  responding to the environment that they're in.

So our responses may seem irrational, but they're  rational within the context that we're in. And so in Sweden, where you're almost guaranteed a  university place, there is a lot less stress around what kids need to do in that process.  I'd say between the US and the UK, there are very different markers, and those markers of how  you get into university then shape everything that comes down. So to me, the thing that's challenging  about what you're saying, I think it's 100% true,

and I think parents do have the influence. We  showed this in our book, and there's a ton of research to defend this. We know that parents  have a lot of influence, but that you have to be brave. You have to say, is this a long game? I  care about my kid and their happiness more than I care about feeding a system that is insatiable  and does not care about my kid. And so I think part of why Rebecca and I wrote this book, it  requires the confidence of knowing that long term,

these bets pay off, investing in agency over  more math. Not that math is irrelevant. We're not saying knowledge doesn't matter at any  turn, but investing in agency, in choice, in a little bit of freedom, and definitely giving  them autonomy so they can figure out who they are. That will 100% pay off in the long term, but  it might not pay off on the math test tomorrow, and it requires bravery on the part of parents,  and that's hard, it’s hard to be brave in the face

of a system that is telling you otherwise. It seems like there's a lot of bravery in this discussion. …name of my substack: how to be brave. We talk about in the book that one thing explorer  mode does, if you give kids the opportunity to be in explorer mode in school or out of school, is  it helps them be brave, because it takes bravery

to chart your own path. It takes some element  of bravery to think about what you were really interested in and try to pursue that regardless  of what other people around you might be telling you to do. And I think more and more, it's going  to take some level of bravery to navigate this huge shift we have coming with AI that's going  to be massively shifting how our jobs work, what skills we need, how we're teaching… kids are gonna  have to have the courage and gumption to figure

things out as they go, and to tack and weave and  navigate. It takes bravery to do that. You don't need as much courage to follow a well trodden path  that someone has told you just to walk along. We cite and we spoke with a developmental  psychologist named Ron Dahl in this book, and said something to me that really stayed  with me, and it comes up at different points in the book, which is, you can't tell a kid to  be brave. They need an opportunity to be brave

and feel what it is to be brave to then feel a  little braver. I mean, it's very obvious when you say it out loud, but when you think about it  in the context of learning, what opportunities are we giving young people to be brave, so they feel  the benefit of that bravery and they want more

of it. And so we’ve loved that framing. Yeah, one of the quotes I love most in the book is from a young woman who was a total  achiever mode her entire time in high school, got to an Ivy League university and had a total  meltdown because she didn't have that internal explorer muscles and that bravery. She didn't know  what the path was, and it was very disorienting. And she said, “You know, I wish I'd had failure  therapy in high school.” We were like, “What do

you mean? What is failure therapy?” And she said,  “Well, I never once failed in high school, and I didn't know what it felt like to not be able to  do things perfectly and then have to pick yourself back up again.” And that is a form of bravery.  So just to give some color to Jenny's point, I'm not saying we should go around and fail all  our kids, but give them an opportunity to struggle

and figure out how to get out of it again. We have a lot of students that enter college who haven't been in explorer mode, as you just  illustrated, they might have been in an achiever mode, or they might have been coasting along.  How do we help ignite explorer mode as college faculty, knowing that maybe they don't have the  skills quite yet to be in explorer mode. How do we help ignite them to be in that mode and support  them to be in that mode when we probably think

that that's what college should be about? I have a great example of that from university, and then I'll pass it over to Rebecca, but  I interviewed a Clayton Spencer who was the head of Bates, and she developed a program called  purposeful work, which kind of had three prongs, but one of the key prongs was asking faculty  to bring practitioners into the classroom. And you will probably not be surprised to learn  that there was quite a bit of resistance to

this when it was presented. But her idea was that  you're teaching these wonderful classes, you have this incredible content that you are imparting to  these kids, but they don't know how yet to tie it to the real world. They don't get the relevance  piece of it. The practitioners by dint of having them come in… four practitioners a semester, if  it's a psychology class, it might be a doula,

it might be a nurse practitioner, it might be  a social worker. They come in, talk a little bit about their day, and you're starting  to get these data points as to, “oh, wait, this matters in the real world.” Okay, I'm gonna  double down on why this particular experimental method is really important. It can really feel  quite disconnected. And I think one thing that I think college professors could do is to try to  connect it better, and that can be outsourced.

They shouldn't be expected to be able to draw  those connections, but inviting practitioners in would be one way. And this program is also another  example of timetabling. They decided to use every January to do these kind of mini-courses, but  four weeks doing something with zero stakes. It does not affect your GPA. It is literally all  about explore something you love, see how it goes, and bring that back to the classroom. And it's  just four moments in college to try something,

no stakes, no GPA affected, collecting data here.  For students who have to work in college it might have a different structure. But I thought those  were two interesting attempts to try to build relevance, help kids find their purpose, and  also break up the school year a little bit. Another way that I think college professors  could be incredibly helpful in helping young people develop these explorer skills is really  sending the message that they can advocate for

themselves. Often, of course, and we could ask  you guys, one assumes that young people come to college or university with these explorer skills  already, but often they don't. So we interviewed one young man who lived in Dallas, and he was  first generation. His family had immigrated from Latin America, a first-generation college  goer, and he had learned to really advocate for himself in high school, because he did great the  first two years, and then started to struggle when

classes got a lot harder, and he had someone in  the front office. It wasn't a college counselor, but I think it was like the assistant principal  or something, to sort of take him under his wing and say, you go talk to the teacher and ask them  this question, and then here's how you study, and here's how you can ask for help and communicate  like “I'm flailing. I need help, but I care.” And he had really gotten those skills. So when he  showed up in college, he was very excited. It was

a big deal, and his first sort of core course for  his major, he found super difficult. It was super hard. He didn't quite have the academic knowledge  to really excel. And midway through, he was getting a C, close to a D. And he was like, “Oh my  gosh, this is my major.” He knew it was something he wanted to do. And he went to the professor and  said, “I'm really struggling. I don't know what to do. I know I need your help to help me succeed.”  Like he had the gumption to say that. And then

the professor also had the perfect response. She  said, “I got your back.” She sat him at the front. It was a very large lecture class. You guys have  talked about pedagogy for large classes, but she sat him at the front. She paired him with two  other top students in the class. Introduced him, said, “Hey, I’d like you guys to be in a study  group together.” They ended up becoming sort

of best friends, and he aced the class. So any of  those strategies to really let kids know they can advocate for themselves and when they do, taking  it seriously and really trying to find ways to help them, I think can be incredibly helpful. We always end by asking, what's next?

One of the things that I have started  to do organically, not planned, is use these modes as language with my team members,  particularly my young new fresh out of college, or maybe fresh out of their masters, team members,  early career team members who have spent a lot of time in achiever mode. But also I always look  for a fair bit of sort of explorer tendencies, and they often get overwhelmed with the large task  lists that we have at the Brookings Institution

to do every day. And one of the things I've been  telling them is, look, you can modulate between modes. Sometimes you just gotta get it right.  Sometimes you gotta really create something, and sometimes tasks are not that important. You  can go in passenger mode, do the bare minimum, and it's enough to be fine. So I'm beginning to  experiment about what these modes look like in the workplace. Jenny, what about you? Over to you. I'm in the process of writing something about

launching, so sort of launching from college into  the real world. And Rebecca's saying how relevant everything that we've written in this book is for  that moment as well. So it's kind of relevant all

the way through, is the bottom line. But this  idea of, in this really tricky moment, of even if you've succeeded in college, suddenly the  workplace seems very fuzzy, very fast changing, very hard to get a toe hold, very choppy right  now, it's not so much about the job as it is about the sort of projects or gigs, or less kind  of I've got my job, I will succeed, and more kind

of forever hustling. There's the complaint I'm  hearing more, the forever hustling and feeling like you're not getting anywhere, and sort of  using the modes to build the self awareness to try to target those searches and think more about  kind of how I fit in in the world and what I want to do versus what's available, just so it doesn't  constantly feel so completely overwhelming, that's sort of like, well, I'll just try everything,  and I don't really know what I want, and I've

never had to really ask myself this question. And  there's this kind of paralysis that can come from that and be like, “Okay, well, let's think about  these modes, and how do you show up in the world, and where are you most comfortable, and what  do we need to get out of,” and so I think this sort of developmental period, launch period,  I think, is interesting to me right now. Well, both of those sound really interesting  as the next phase of this work. Thanks for a

really great conversation. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. It was really fun. Well, thank you. You're doing some really great work on a topic that's incredibly important. Thank you so much. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please  subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To  continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and

other materials on teaforteaching.com.  Music by Michael Gary Brewer.