Exploring a New Approach to Student Engagement

Picture a kindergarten classroom, and you get images of joyful chaos—art supplies strewn across desks, students gathered on the rug for story time, bins of tangrams and counting blocks everywhere. Now imagine a high school classroom, with the teacher lecturing at the front and students sitting in quiet rows, laptops out and heads down. It’s no wonder that most elementary schoolers relish school, while most teenagers emphatically don’t.

“Kids really fall out of love with school,” said Rebecca Winthrop, an education researcher and policy expert at the Brookings Institution. “In third grade, about 75% of kids love school. By the time they get to tenth grade, it’s flipped and only about 25% love school.”

Stopping that slide toward disaffection has become an obsession for Winthrop and Jenny Anderson, coauthors of the new book The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. Why do students so consistently lose their excitement for school? How does earnest curiosity devolve into an anxious race for grades and college acceptance letters? Or to a student who is checked out altogether?

“We really need to move from the age of achievement to the age of agency,” said Winthrop. “We need to build schools that put student engagement and agency at the core. We need to maximize for those values.”

That doesn’t mean devaluing academics but connecting them more clearly to the things students care about beyond school. If students understand how the things they’re learning are relevant to the wider world, they’re less likely to fixate and stress over grades, test scores, and other forms of external motivation. “Do you know what you care about and why you’re doing all of this?” Anderson said. “Because there are so many hoops to jump through, and they just keep getting higher. You don’t want to be a fragile learner, where all you’re doing is what the system has pushed you to do.”

Winthrop and Anderson cite research showing that unhappy achievers struggle in college just as much as students who were actively disengaged at school, suggesting the real problem is a lack of self-direction. “We talked to a lot of these high-achieving kids who fell apart the first year of college because they were so turned into what others told them to do,” Winthrop said. “They got really good at following instructions, following rubrics, following a path someone else laid out for them. But in college, no one is sitting there telling you exactly what to do. And many of these high-achieving students didn’t know what to pursue, what to study, who they were.”

The Disengaged Teen makes the argument that students operate in one of four basic modes of learning: 

• Resister: when students struggle against school strictures to the point of ignoring work, skipping class, or being actively disruptive.
• Passenger: when students coast along with little investment or sense of how school relates to the real world.
• Achiever: when students are doing all the “right” things but motivated by grades, parental expectations, or a fear of failure.
• Explorer: when students are driven by their own curiosity and have a clear sense of how their learning connects to things they care about.

A single student may pass through different learning modes across a year or even across a single school day, but the goal of good teaching and sound education policy should be to make more explorers—more students who are eager to learn, not just trying to get through the day. “School feels like prison, many teenagers told us over three years of research,” Winthrop and Anderson wrote in The New York Times. “The more time they spend in school, the less they feel like the author of their own lives.”

Giving more students the chance to be in explorer mode—and giving teachers the freedom to create lively, curiosity-driven classrooms—is the focus of Winthrop and Anderson’s book. Their core insight is clear and intuitive: people learn better when they care about the subject and have the freedom to follow their own interests. “Every teacher I’ve ever talked to or observed wants to teach kids who are engaged,” Winthrop said. “It’s so much more fun and interesting and energizing when the kids are with you, when they’re driven by real investment in the topic.”

Nearly every student has memories of a well-designed science project that tapped into the excitement of discovery, or a history class role play that transformed rote facts into compelling human drama. The early grades are filled with moments of experimentation and creativity, but that fades for many students by the time they reach high school.

It doesn’t have to be that way, Winthrop and Anderson argue. There are plenty of small things teachers can do to change the classroom dynamic. Ask open-ended questions and try to see what the students find interesting. Make space for conversation among students, so they can bounce ideas and reactions off each other. And give them real choices about topics to research or the kind of projects they want to take on, recognizing that there’s more than one way to engage with any given subject.

Much of the standard classroom practice in American schools pushes against the kind of open-ended, exploratory learning that engages students, Winthrop and Anderson contend. An overly prescribed curriculum can keep teachers from pursuing an unexpected topic that students want to delve into. State standards might demand more time for reading and math and less time pursuing science, history, art, and other subjects that can spark students’ creativity. And the regimented nature of school itself, with strict schedules and classrooms full of front-facing desks, can discourage freewheeling, curiosity-driven learning.

“I don’t think we designed schools for what we now know about how learning happens,” said Anderson. “We designed schools with a really specific set of objectives. It was a standardized, average-based system—let’s get the average kid through with some job skills, assuming that all kids are quite similar.”

But of course, that’s not at all how kids—or jobs—function in the real world. Standardized, routine work has given way to a much more fluid and demanding economy, with a premium on creative thinking and adaptability. The Disengaged Teen draws from decades of learning science that argues students absorb and apply information in wildly different ways, at very different paces, and that the most effective teachers make room for students to show their skills in a variety of formats.

“We have moved to a world where we’re personalized and customized on almost everything we do, and then schools remain this very standardized thing,” Anderson said. “I think we now recognize how completely individual kids are and how specific their learning pathways are, but we haven’t really adapted to that.”

The most talented educators already embrace many of the tenets of explorer-style learning. Granting teachers more trust and flexibility in the way they cover the curriculum, including more opportunities for team teaching and collaborative student projects, must be a priority, Anderson and Winthrop argue. “Give educators some freedom to really roll with the students they have,” Winthrop said. “Of course they need to ensure that kids are learning rigorously, but it doesn’t have to be all kids at the same pace every day of the week.”

She pointed to AP Seminar, which allows students to design a research project around a topic that interests them, as a great example of a course that centers exploratory learning. Both WInthrop and Anderson would like to see fewer standardized exams in school and more projects, more discussion, and more opportunities for teachers to experiment with creative assignments in the classroom.

“That’s why teachers go into teaching!” Anderson said. “They love kids, and they want to see them light up!”