The Disengaged Teen: Understanding Why Students Check Out—and How We Reignite Their Drive to Learn

Podcast Episode

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI transcription tools to support accessibility and provide a searchable, readable version of the podcast. While we’ve reviewed and lightly edited the content for clarity, there may still be occasional errors or omissions.

Catlin Tucker

Welcome to the balance. I’m Dr. Catlin Tucker, and today I have two guests for you, Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop. They are the coauthors of a brand new book called The Disengaged Teen Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel better, and Live Better. And Jenny Anderson is an award winning journalist who spent more than a decade at The New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at quartz.

Catlin Tucker

Her work regularly appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time, among other places, and also in the How to Be Brave Substack. Rebecca Winthrop is a leading global authority on education. She is the director of the center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institute, where she conducts studies on how to better support students learning. And she is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Catlin Tucker

I picked up their book first as a parent and then, of course, read it through the lens of an educator and was so excited about it that I reached out. Ask them if they join me on an episode of The Balance, and I am so excited to have them both here today.

Catlin Tucker

So I could not be more thrilled to be talking to both of you. I am a mother of two teenagers, a 16 year old and 18 year old, so it’s part of the reason I originally picked up the book The Disengaged Teen. The title screamed out to me. I also taught high school English language arts for 16 years, and now I support teachers.

Catlin Tucker

A lot of them really grappling with disengagement in classrooms. And as I read, I was just like, I have to see if these women will come and talk about this book on my podcast. So I’d love for you to just kind of tell listeners a little bit about your background, because you’re both so accomplished and the work that you do, and kind of what brought you together to write the book The Disengaged Teen.

Rebecca Winthrop

So just in terms of us, two things, our background and then what brought us together. So my background, is, yeah, doing education programing, education policy, education, research. I started off as a very young person out of college, doing actually adult education work in the US and abroad, and with refugee and migrant populations in the US and abroad.

Rebecca Winthrop

And, I just, loved, loved it loved the work felt like I was really interested in human rights. And I just felt like education is so foundational to people being able to, achieve the life they want to their, you know, be their best selves and help shape and craft opportunities, in their environments. So I’m pretty passionate about, sort of the role of education in people’s individual lives, but also, in the world how important it is.

Rebecca Winthrop

And so anyways, long story short, got my PhD, did policy work working a bunch, did a lot of programmatic work designing programs on the ground, and have been here at the Brookings Institution for the last 15 years, really doing education research. And our, Brookings is like working at a university with no students and kind of policymakers and practitioners.

Rebecca Winthrop

Are your students and so it’s it’s a fun feel. And so we do a lot of collaborative work with districts and practitioner organizations, teacher orgs, and do a lot of behind the scenes advising and accompaniment, which is always my favorite part, which is around how do you bring research to life? On the ground. And, I reached out to Jenny to say, please can can you collaborate with me on this topic?

Rebecca Winthrop

Because actually, I, had a personal moment in Covid because I have two kiddos, two are also teens now. But in Covid, I realized the what the the son I thought was engaged was not. And some I thought was disengaged was also not. So I thought, oh my gosh, I’m not even really able to fully assess how engaged my kids are.

Rebecca Winthrop

And with all my expertise, it would be really hard. If you’re a parent or a caregiver to really see engagement, because we don’t do a good job in education. And I know you’ll agree, Catlin, of really telling the public and telling parents what good learning looks like. So I really wanted to do a book on this. And Jenny is an incredible storyteller.

Rebecca Winthrop

And, I just really admired her work for a long time and, and was like, please, please, Jenny, do it with me. So, Jenny, over to you for your background and why why you said yes. Yes to work on this.

Jenny Anderson

Because you’re so persuasive, Rebecca. No one says no. Yeah. So I’ve been a journalist for over 25 years. I actually covered finance, Wall Street, hedge funds, private equity, sort of that whole world for a really long time and absolutely loved it. And my free time. I always read about parenting even before I had kids, which is weird.

Jenny Anderson

Like, I go into a magazine store and the section I would want would be sort of, parenting advice and, I don’t know, kind of wonky stuff. So I had these kind of dual interests, but I was really into the financing. And then I had my kids and my interest just completely shifted. I wanted to be spending my days doing the same thing that I was kind of doing in my free, time.

Jenny Anderson

And so I shifted to, education, which is sort of where there was a beat. And I really, found it very surprising how narrow conception, was applied to the idea of education in mainstream media. It was just very much about kind of when I joined in 2010, it was very much about sort of school choice and unions and, you know, very, very important stuff.

Jenny Anderson

Not that it’s not important, but it wasn’t the stuff I was interested in, in which was learning and development and how kids become who they are and what we can do to support them as parents and sort of, like high level, sophisticated advice was what I was looking for, not the, there was a lot of stuff out there that I thought kind of talked down to parents typically focused on moms.

Jenny Anderson

And so I quit the New York Times and joined a digital media startup and started to explore the topics I cared about, which was the science of learning and the, neuroscience of infants and future of schools. Those were some of the beats obsessions we called them that I, created. And I just thought it was a bit of a test case.

Jenny Anderson

My editors were like, we don’t think anyone’s going to read this stuff, but we’ll give you a year to try it. And, tons of people wanted to read about it. So it was a really nice proof of concept. And then Rebecca came along and sort of said, let’s do this in a much more systemic, like, systematic way.

Jenny Anderson

Right? Let’s actually add to the literature of what we can do to support kids. And that, felt scary because it’s a lot of work writing a book. I had written one before I knew how much work it was, but also exciting because I think there is or there was a hole in the market. There’s so much great stuff about supporting the emotional lives of teens, and I just quoted the book of Lisa de Moore, but they didn’t feel like there was as much around, like learning from the parents perspective.

Jenny Anderson

And so that was it felt like maybe we had an opportunity there.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And you guys do such a beautiful job of weaving together all of these stories of actual kids and their experiences with the research and with the strategies. So I can imagine that wasn’t daunting task. But as a parent, I can imagine any parent picking this up and connecting with some of those teen stories, benefiting from the research without it feeling too dense, right?

Catlin Tucker

To get through. So you describe engagement in the book as the core of what it means to learn. Well, and you called disengagement corrosive, which really like stuck for me. That resonated. So before we get into the whole book, Disengage Teen, can you define engagement for listeners and maybe even speak to the parts of the traditional school structure or the traditional school experience as we think of it, that might be kind of responsible for breaking down some of the engagement that young learners enter school with.

Rebecca Winthrop

Jenny, should I start with what is engagement and past you about sort of school structures that get in the way? So we are sort of top line headline description of student engagement is, you know, engagement is what kids do with their motivation. A motivation is really internal and engagement is what you do with that motivation.

Rebecca Winthrop

I always give the example of like, oh, my son wants me to lift weights. He’s like, don’t get osteoporosis, mother. And I’m like, I should join a gym. I’m motivated, I’m motivated, I should. That’s a good idea. Like and I haven’t. I have yet to sign up for one. Eventually I will, but. Or he’ll like, give me weight lifting exercise as he gets older and bigger.

Rebecca Winthrop

At home in our basement. But, I’m motivated but not engaged. So in the academic literature, engagement, is defined as having many dimensions. The four that we focus on, which are is, I think, important for your listening audience is behavioral engagement, which is what kids, do. Do they show up to school? Do they do their homework?

Rebecca Winthrop

Do they listen to instructions? Emotional engagement, which is what they feel about school? Are they interested? Do they feel that they belong? Do they like it? Cognitive engagement, which is what they think. So this is sort of deeper learning strategy, self-regulated learning strategies. And then we added it’s exists. It’s there. It’s just not very common to include it.

Rebecca Winthrop

Again tick engagement, which is what kids initiate which is are they, influencing the flow of instruction in could be tiny ways or big ways to make, their learning experience more supportive and interesting to themselves. That could be asking to write their paper on a certain topic, or asking if they could study with a friend, etc..

Rebecca Winthrop

So those are kind of the four dimensions, and they all really work together to sort of drive how engaged kids are. So Jenny passing to you for what gets in the way in terms of school structures?

Jenny Anderson

I know I’m like, where where do I start this one? I just a very.

Rebecca Winthrop

Long.

Jenny Anderson

I’m going to try to be really concise. When we think of kind of key reasons decent kids, disengaged, relevant and sort of values like do I a sense, do I see value in this for me? So that’s a relevance piece. Another one is efficacy obviously. Do I feel I can do it? Mental health challenges is another reason kids disengage.

Jenny Anderson

And I just think so much of the design of modern schooling gets in the way of a lot of those things. So it’s very hard for, you know, a teacher looking at a class to sort of figure out where every kid is. Are they in their zone of proximal development, you know, are they are they engaged to are.

Jenny Anderson

And how do I make this relevant for them? So I think that is just a really it’s a very tough design structure. Carol Bazil from ASU says like, this is, you know, this is this is not a tenable structure. You know, one, one teacher and many, many children with spanning, abilities in a classroom is really tricky.

Jenny Anderson

And one of the things that’s tricky about that structure is that we know relationships are so key to learning, right? So as you might say, you know, learning is relational and it is just hard to form those relationships and that trust and these sort of think bigger systems. And so I think that’s another thing that can get in the way.

Jenny Anderson

And I think the sort of timetabling this, you know, when you’re in elementary school, I think we really acknowledge that there is a full child to be developed and to learn to share, you need to learn to be in a group. You need to learn to respect other people’s points of view. You need to wait your turn. And then we get to sort of middle and high school and it’s like subjects and it’s so weird.

Jenny Anderson

It’s just like forgotten that they need to also be humans developing and that they’ll need lots of different ways to do that, not just through academic, siloed subjects. So subjects aren’t even often tied together in ways that kids can make sense with. And so I, I just think that kids want things that feel real, that feel relevant, that feel connected to them, that feel connected to their communities, or that connect them to their communities and all of that stuff gets them engaged.

Jenny Anderson

And unfortunately, so much for the way we’ve designed schools doesn’t lend itself to that. And I didn’t even start on assessment. But assessment obviously is sort of the tail, the wag the dog. So, you know, once we’ve got these assessments, then we’ve got the structure of school, then we’ve got our tests and our content areas, and we don’t have as much time for the projects in real life.

Jenny Anderson

So anyway, so that was a long answer. But I hope I hit on some of them.

Catlin Tucker

No, I love that you highlighted all those things, because when I was in the very beginning, you quote research about just the vast majority of elementary school students having just really positive feelings about school. They like school, they’re excited to be there. And then by the time we get to high school, it was like almost 65%. I feel like that we’re like, I’m, you know, kind of checked out from school.

Catlin Tucker

So there’s this total reversal. And I think your point about just the fact that, you know, we shift from being really focused on developing these, these little humans, right, teaching them how to manage their days and move around and interact with each other. And there’s so much more play based learning in elementary and more small group time in elementary and all these things that kind of disappear or as they get older and move into the secondary.

Catlin Tucker

And there is this focus on getting through content, covering skills. But I was just just thinking about all the reasons why there might be that reversal. As the school structure changes and learning becomes a little less experiential and tactile and social and all these things that they get, I think, more of in elementary school.

Rebecca Winthrop

They’re the status sort of statistic in the book for me is this one that, you know, in third grade, 75% of kids say they love school. By 10th grade, only 25%. And you know, you’ve been a teacher for a long time. We Jenny and I’ve worked with kids for ages. Kids are hard wired to love learning like it’s it’s it’s not the problem isn’t with the kids.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah, I know.

Rebecca Winthrop

It’s somehow we sort of beaten it out of them. And I do think, you know, this, this thing of switching to, switching classes from, you know, one teacher to all of a sudden having a bunch of teachers who don’t know you as well. The belonging piece is, I think, really, is really big for kids, in addition to all the things that we just talked about, Jenny just talked about and you just talked about.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And I think secondary teachers feel that tension of like weight. To your point about the assessment, it’s like I have to get to this point because this is how kids will be tested. And I need to get through the content. And yet a lot of them know that that kind of racing through the content, that direct instruction from the front of the room is leaving so many kids, you know, either bored or not engaged because they just can’t keep up.

Catlin Tucker

So yeah, it’s so complicated. One of the things I loved about the book was, and definitely how I want to spend a lot of my time, because I think teachers, I want them to know what to look for. And even in reading the book, I felt like you, you describe these four engagement modes and it helps to explain really how kids are showing up in school.

Catlin Tucker

And I think that these different kind of modes and you’re very clear that the students move between them. It can be dynamic. It’s not like they’re stuck in a mode or we don’t want them to get stuck in one, because we don’t want it to become like their identity in this particular mode. But I wanted to just kind of give listeners an overview of these kind of four modes of engagement that you use in the book to kind of talk about, how learners show up because as we deep dive into them, I just want them to have some context for them and, and maybe why you developed them as kind of a grounding

Catlin Tucker

way to talk about engagement in the book.

Jenny Anderson

So the four modes are passenger, resistor, achiever and explorer. And I love that you just, emphasized they’re not static, they’re not pigeonholing. Kids are not labeling kids. They are modes and they are dynamic. But when kids get stuck, that’s when we sort of spot the problem. So passenger mode is, as it sounds, is are the kids who are coasting along doing the bare minimum, racing through everything, looking for the shortcuts, want to hack on everything they can do?

Jenny Anderson

In the parlance of the modes that we described, they are behaviorally engaged, but not cognitively or emotionally or genetically engaged. They can be and they these kids are I think they one school had referred to a, referred to them to us as the invisible middle because they’re not causing problems, but they’re also, sort of not shooting to the moon.

Jenny Anderson

And so they get a little bit lost in the shuffle, resister mode or these kids have a lot of agency. They got a lot of gumption. They’re letting you know things are not working for them, not in the most constructive ways possible. They are often, withdrawing or disrupting, acting out. We typically call them the problem children.

Jenny Anderson

We argue in the book, they are, children with problems. But it’s really tricky for a teacher. They’ve got a whole class they’ve got to manage, and they’re these kids aren’t making it easy for them. But these kids do have agency, which means that when they can redirect their learning, their, engagement towards learning, than, they often can really thrive and succeed.

Jenny Anderson

The third mode is a cheaper mode, and it’s really complicated because she remote the kids. Everybody loves teachers love them, parents love them. These are the kids who are knocking out of the park, trying to get a gold star and everything put in front of them, who, if you give them, they will try to get through and they will do really well.

Jenny Anderson

And they are developing some extraordinary skills of work and organization and time management and getting things done. And, you know, everybody loves achievement, so it’s hard to push back on that. The challenge is that these kids, often, not always often really run the risk of becoming very fragile learners. They just want to get it right. They don’t want to take any risks, and they’re very reluctant to look inside and ask themselves what they actually care about.

Jenny Anderson

There’s a bit of a crowding out effect, which is you’re satisfying the needs of the system all the time, which means that you’re not asking, what do I like? What do I want to invest my time and energy and what do I care about? And that can really have, a negative toll on mental health, some of unhappy kids, an unhappy achiever mode.

Jenny Anderson

There’s the ones striving for perfection and not excellence. They have some of the worst mental health outcomes, mental health outcomes of all of the kids that we profiled. And finally, is explorer mode, which is the pinnacle of the engagement of not not achiever mode. And these are the kids in a genetic, who are identically engaged. They aren’t, just showing up.

Jenny Anderson

They aren’t just trying to make sense of the content put in front of them, but they’re trying to really figure out what it means for them. They’re trying to bend the learning almost to their own interests. They’re trying to advocating for the ways they want to do their work, how they want to show up for their learning, what they care about.

Jenny Anderson

They’re developing all that. And in so doing, they dig in and really generate that positive cycle of they dig in, they get better, they learn more, they want to do more. You know, that cycle that I’m sure you know, every teacher knows and tries to get so hard. So those are the four modes. Rebecca, do you want to explain how we kind of came up with them.

Jenny Anderson

Yeah.

Rebecca Winthrop

So one of the things that we realized, sort of a, you know, after our first big deep pass at this topic, was that the academic construct of emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and we would include agenda engagement is really helpful for research and getting really good, data about different dimensions of engagement, but really not helpful for practice. We to develop these modes.

Rebecca Winthrop

We had a ton of data that was coming in. One was all the conversations we had with students. One was looking at the literature around what’s effective, and another was really hearing from teachers themselves, including drawing on, really great work by Doctor Amy Berry. And basically teachers are like, what? What do you want me to do with these academic, cognitive, emotional dimensions of engagement?

Rebecca Winthrop

You could relate, Catlin, like you have a whole classroom. Are you supposed to look at each kid across all four dimensions, cut them into four slices and try to figure it out? It’s a little much. And so that’s just educators inside the classroom. And then the other is parents and caregivers who have a really big impact, actually, on engagement.

Rebecca Winthrop

But that is not a framework that they are going to be able to grab and do anything with. So we really wanted to, help create a new language in some ways that could be more accessible and that everybody could use those inside the school and those and caregivers and students themselves outside the school. So so we could all have sort of a similar conversation.

Rebecca Winthrop

And that’s where we, how we developed the four, the four modes. That’s how we came up with it. And we really were seeing kids kind of falling into these categories. And what we did see is that they moved either within one day across all four or sometimes. And this is where we would get really worried. Kids would get really stuck in one of them, in either passenger resist or even achiever.

Rebecca Winthrop

Because if you get really stuck in achiever mode, that’s where you do start getting that unhappy achiever. So that is yeah, that’s where we were most worried. And the framework can really help make that visible.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. So I did my doctoral research on teacher engagement and blended learning environments. Because teacher engagement and student engagement are reciprocal.

Rebecca Winthrop

Very kind I think.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah, that language made a ton of sense to me. But then as a parent, I was reading it. And so we’ll talk about passenger mode first because it’s the most common. I think you said in the book about half of students that are falling into this category at some point. Right. And as I was reading, I kept thinking about my son.

Catlin Tucker

He’s very social and like outgoing and active, but find school very underwhelming. And he does the work. He earns decent grades because I think he knows that’s like how he has a social life, but he’s not finding, you know, I don’t know how cognitively engaged he is in most of his classes. I don’t know that he’s feeling like emotionally connected to what he’s learning.

Catlin Tucker

And it just made me think about, like, as you guys were having all these conversations with students for the book, why do you think so many of them land in passenger mode? Why is this the most frequent mode?

Rebecca Winthrop

It’s I feel like I don’t know, Jenny, how do you think? But like, I feel like passenger mode is super rational for many reasons. I think a lot of kids want want to be engaged. They want to, you know, do well, they don’t aspire to do terribly, you know, and it’s either they’re really bored. We found so many kids who are super bored.

Rebecca Winthrop

You know, they just weren’t challenged. And so their reaction is like, all right, like I’m getting another math work, you know? Problem set. I’ll whiz through it because I already know how to do this. And, you know, it feels like busy work. Or, you know, kids were really struggling. Neurodivergent kids, kids who had missed pockets of, skills and felt overwhelmed and sort of was like, well, let me just try to do the bare minimum because I don’t really know what’s going on.

Rebecca Winthrop

It’s embarrassing. So yeah, I think it’s I think it’s pretty rational, actually. I don’t know. Jenny, why do you think.

Jenny Anderson

I think one of the big reasons is I don’t and I think we’ll talk about this maybe, in particular in the context of boys. But in general, a lot of research shows that we look for shortcuts. We look to make things as easy as possible. We look to sort of digest and make things accessible. And school gets hard pretty fast.

Jenny Anderson

So it can be very I mean, it can be the board thing, but I think there isn’t. I would just love to see more effort around kind of the rising struggle. And the fact that it can be hard and hard is good, and good things come from doing hard things. Right. And I think that’s, I think when you’re in a classroom where there’s this kind of full effort from, all right, there’s a whole different feeling.

Jenny Anderson

And that is, and sometimes, you know, girls are sort of more conditioned than boys to meet those expectations. But I do think that there is and, you know, I worry a lot about this in the context of, of I, I think, there is this sort of, sometimes default to try to find an easier way out.

Jenny Anderson

And so I think we have to design contexts that make it sort of exciting and motivating to try hard and to be rewarded for that and to build capability and to recognize that capability. And when those things happen, but that’s just very, very hard to do in big classes with a ton of different abilities and all these state standards or local, you know, district standards to meet.

Jenny Anderson

So I would just, I guess, add that one of the on the margins.

Catlin Tucker

Well, and the, the high stakes test. Right. Like we’re not being rewarded for how hard we tried or how much growth we made. It’s like we’re being students are being assessed in relation to some other standard. And and you talk a lot about the, the college, the race to college culture and the pressure on students to and all of that.

Catlin Tucker

I think, makes it hard to feel like it’s safe to push yourselves and take a risk and potentially fail and then learn from those moments, which I think is too bad. But I will say I want to talk about the boys thing, because obviously I just shared I was reading this, I was like, this just feels like my son.

Catlin Tucker

And you talk about how boys tend to be more disengaged than girls, which did not surprise me as a parent or a teacher. And you talk about the biological and social reasons for this, and that was the part that did surprise me. So I would love for you to kind of give some insight to the folks listening, who might be frustrated with some of those boys that they’re like, oh, I can’t get them to focus in class, or they seem so disengaged.

Catlin Tucker

Why is that?

Rebecca Winthrop

Well, a book to go read is my colleague Richard Reeves called The Boys of Men, and he has a chapter, on this. And part of his argument is, and it’s true that the prefrontal cortex develops two years later, the in boys and girls. And it is true that there’s a biological difference. Girls are more likely to have, you know, brain development that brings executive functioning capabilities on sooner than, boys.

Rebecca Winthrop

And then it really gets into I think it feeds as a sort of a social norm, sort of component where we really did find in our qualitative research that boys, were more likely to be passengers and girls more likely to be achievers, like, if they get stuck, more likely to be stuck like that. And a lot of that had to do with boys basically saying they did not use these words, but they don’t get social status for being tryhard.

Catlin Tucker

Rebecca Winthrop

They do that. And, you know, I remember one parent was like, you know, he my son thinks that his other friends who are like, acing calculus don’t ever study. And I was like, look, they’re paying attention somewhere like, you do not come out of the womb knowing calculus. Like whether it’s they’re just listening in class and they’ve got it and they’ve got a mathematical mind, but they’re probably studying and not telling you about it.

Rebecca Winthrop

They’re probably going over and just not talking about it around. When you jump on the phone with them or whatever or hang out. So there is there is a social dynamic to this. And girls are, you know, much more likely to be socialized for compliance. They don’t want to let their teachers down. They don’t want to disappoint their parents.

Rebecca Winthrop

They don’t want to be a bad girl. Yeah, yeah.

Jenny Anderson

I saw this firsthand. I went to an all girls, high school, and it was like, raucous. And the girls asked tons of questions, very gentle, very sort of full on. And I got to college and I was like, why is everybody so quiet? It’s so weird to me. And then I actually later looked into the sort of, you know, girls education research.

Jenny Anderson

And it’s, you know, it is a different environment, not for everybody at all. But I do think it breeds and sort of it’s a different environment for sure.

Catlin Tucker

Oh that’s fascinating. One of the comparisons you make that I think I’ll always remember is you compare student interests to two toys. You see, they’re like two toys for teens, which I loved. And it made me think about the potential of using AI in classrooms to help students engage with content through a lens of personal interest. Because when we talk about, you know, designing, learning to be within students kind of zone of proximal development, that sweet spot.

Catlin Tucker

So everybody’s getting kind of the appropriate amount of challenge. Or we talk about, you know, the role of interest in really getting kids exciting, excited and seeing the relevance of learning, like, do you guys what do you guys see? Is that AI opportunity for maybe playing a role in both of those things, both sparking that curiosity and allowing students to kind of pursue learning through a lens of interest, even in a small way, like maybe like having AI create an analogy from a perspective of something they love or they understand to try to understand something new and complex and abstract, this academic, and then also this kind of conversation around maybe now we have something

Catlin Tucker

that can help us to be more effective, designing within that sweet spot for students in terms of their ability.

Jenny Anderson

Yeah, I think that the analogy came from they’re good for, the analogy was to chew toys because they’re both good for, development. Like literally they help them develop skills and and also really good for boredom. And I think and I think the potential in AI for both of those can be good if well designed, with all the right guardrails, and sort of walled gardens to where you go with those questions.

Jenny Anderson

But to me, the great promise is the ability to sort of tailor it to the kinds of questions I was just going through. Of course, Mojo, a unit and course mojo on a Langston Hughes poem. And it was amazing. It kind of got to know the things I cared about, and then fed me questions that are aligned to the curriculum of that district.

Jenny Anderson

It was a Tennessee district. It aligned to that curriculum. So it’s asking me the questions to make sure I developed the skills that I need. But it’s incorporating the questions to some of my interests and to me, that was sort of an amazing combination, and something I have to believe is incredibly motivating to a kid because they feel seen.

Jenny Anderson

And actually one of the test cases with this technology. The kids said, it’s like the paper is talking to me, which is just such an interesting way of it coming to life. And that is it is. Some kids love to work with, you know, just pen and paper and do answer questions. And that’s schools almost designed for those kids.

Jenny Anderson

And then like tons don’t they need the paper talking to them or they need a podcast or they need, you know, another sort of format, which isn’t to say they shouldn’t be developing the kind of paper skills, but, you know, so I do think there is a lot of promise. But Rebecca is like up to her eyeballs in this stuff.

Jenny Anderson

So I want to pass to her.

Rebecca Winthrop

I am up to my eyeballs and I, but we have this big Brookings task force on AI and education that I’m chairing. But, in addition to what Jenny said, I wanted to add something else which you brought up. Caitlin, is this idea of, helping learners find their sweet spot, like I do think. And AI has been able to do this for a while.

Rebecca Winthrop

So I do think there is just a lot of promise in that adaptive learning. Not the whole time in your school day, right? But really helping, you know, partner with teachers to help kids, you know, get in that zone of proximal development and see the pieces they’ve missed. And make sure they fill those in. And, you know, we’ve had Khan Academy for a long time, which requires someone being like, hey, you missed this.

Rebecca Winthrop

Why don’t you go through this? And then the student being and motivated, engaged enough to listen and go through it, you know what I mean? Like, teachers are using Khan Academy for for many years now or but now I think it’s just more powerful like. Yeah. And I think this sort of, sort of I think there’s real possibility to be sort of less wonky, less sort of, just basically a more seamless experience in the classroom.

Rebecca Winthrop

Yeah, that’s real potential.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. I think when everybody started getting concerned about or chatting about AI, my big concern was just like, I don’t want AI to do the design thinking for educators. I want us partnering with AI because that’s how I think we really start to leverage this emerging good, the emerging technologies. Yeah, really amp up what’s happening in classrooms. But I think there’s also the the teacher design layer.

Catlin Tucker

And then it’s like the student, what are the students need. And that maybe access to what feels almost like a learning coach. So even if I like to do the pen and paper thing, I still have a resource to be like, hey, I’m confused, I need to work through this, and there’s only one teacher in the classroom. So yeah, I do think it’s really exciting to think about how that might help kind of push some of our learners out of that, like passenger mode, and get them more excited about the experience.

Catlin Tucker

All right. So let’s talk about the, the achiever mode. And I will say reading this, Cheever mode really resonated with me. One, because my daughter is a happy achiever. I would say she’s an explorer, anything science, but a happy achiever in any other subject. And as I was reading about all of the challenges around the Unhappy Achiever, I was like, that was me in high school.

Catlin Tucker

Like a fixation on perfection, feeling like I was just crumbling at the end of the day, under all the pressure that I was kind of putting on myself. So I know we’ve kind of talked about that too, but I’d love for you to kind of just explain the difference and like, maybe what parents and teachers really want to be looking for, if they feel like their kid is in a cheaper to make sure they’re in that happy spot and not slipping into that unhappy achiever.

Catlin Tucker

Jenny Anderson

I think one of the big ones is that difference between excellence and perfection. So you get a bad grade on a test. Do you feel like your life is over, or do you feel like, you’re bummed because you like achieving, but you come back and you say, you know, what do I need to do to get the A or what?

Jenny Anderson

You know, how am I going to learn this better? Or what did I do wrong? I mean, that sort of reviewing of strategies versus self-recrimination. I think that’s like a big distinction, right? Like I did something wrong. I didn’t figure this out. Everyone else got a bigger a better grade. You know, everyone else is smarter that sort of you, that kind of dangerous self-talk.

Jenny Anderson

It’s that, you know, very much there’s some Carol Dweck mindset in here, right? Like, do you feel like you’re growing or do you feel like this is who you are, like you’ve messed up? So I think that’s a big thing that parents can look for. And also just, the exacting standards that I think unhealthy achievers put on themselves, which is, a lack of self-care.

Jenny Anderson

You can always study more so you stay up super late. You, skip, I have a child who’s going through a set of incredibly intense exams and one of the most interested, very much achiever mode at this moment. At this point in time and really the lack of self-care, the, you know, skipping meals or this kid is a total athlete not exercising.

Jenny Anderson

And we’re like, this is your moment. Go exercise and, you know, eat healthy meals. And she’s got enough sleep because we’re kind of intense about the sleep and we’re really driving that. But she’s not doing that. So to me that’s a warning sign. And so that’s what we’re trying to build with her. You know hey this is certainly this is about exams.

Jenny Anderson

This is all about self-care, learning how to take care of yourself in these big pressure moments, learning how to make sure that you are compassionate to yourself right. You know you’ve put in a good day. Take a break. Let’s watch some Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Catlin Tucker

I’m also a favorite around my house.

Jenny Anderson

It’s a good one to get on. Rebecca, would you add anything to that?

Rebecca Winthrop

Yeah. No, I think I think that’s right. And, you know, you you your podcast called The Balance. Right? So, when kids get an unhappy achiever mode, they they’re out of balance. And the other thing I would point your, your listeners to is we do have for each of the chapters, we have a, sort of signs.

Rebecca Winthrop

Your kid is a habit. You promote signs. They’re an unhappy achiever mode. And when that tips and we do that for the other modes so people can consult that.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. I just think it’s interesting because that one I could see flying right under the radar and everybody’s like, this kid is great. And those warning signs of like and I love that focus on kind of self-care being out of balance. But also the the perfectionist and the kind of conversations we have with students who are achievers, who might have a moment where they don’t do as well as they had hoped, and then the language we use being even more important with maybe some of those kids.

Catlin Tucker

Right.

Rebecca Winthrop

Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah.

Catlin Tucker

So resister mode, these are the students who teachers listening, just kind of want to pull their hair out a little bit. And I was really struck by how it like, to your point earlier, it these students have agency. It’s just pointed away from learning. Right. And they might feel like the work isn’t relevant or they think they can’t do it, or they might feel disconnected from the learning environment in general.

Catlin Tucker

So I want to talk a little bit about how that sense of belonging can help shift students out of this mode. And what can teachers do when they recognize students are operating in this mode, especially the ones who aren’t just kind of like retreating, but the ones who are creating the challenges disruptive. Exactly.

Rebecca Winthrop

We, we’ve seen in our research some great, great examples, and I keep seeing stories of this when I’m out talking with district leaders or talking with, school leaders and teachers of, when kids are sort of in this resister mode. And by the way, it can start small and then grow. So it could be their class clown, and then they kind of bored and they stop kind of turning in their homework, and then they might start skipping school.

Rebecca Winthrop

And then, you know, you’re a few months away from, you know, maybe not coming to school at all with our huge chronic absenteeism rate. Or it could be very or it could be very obvious, as you say, like big disruption, you know, not following instructions, disrupting others. So when we’ve saw that when kids are actually given the opposite of what they’re normally given because a natural reaction is discipline, control, pay attention, sit down.

Rebecca Winthrop

You can’t do this. And it’s fine to send those messages about what is and isn’t appropriate behavior. We’re not saying don’t do that, that’s important. But actually when they’re given a little bit more autonomy, a little bit more leadership positions, I was just out in a school the other day and, the principal said, yet there’s just one student who was just tearing our hair out.

Rebecca Winthrop

This was an elementary school fifth grader. And, you know, we assigned her a leadership role in the school. She was the greeter who stood at the door, and we had to come a little bit early and had to welcome all the students. And so they felt good about coming to school. And she just that’s all they did. She turned around in a heartbeat.

Rebecca Winthrop

Wow. So we did find, like, if you can give a little more autonomy, leadership and or, give them something super interesting that they love, that they can dig into and often when kids are in resister mode, we take away all the enriched, interesting extracurricular elective, you know, chess club model you in football team because they’re struggling academically.

Rebecca Winthrop

And we say, well, you got to keep your grades up to do that. And that’s kind of the wrong approach.

Jenny Anderson

Yeah.

Catlin Tucker

You tell a great story about a student like that, right? Great. So yeah like some.

Rebecca Winthrop

Of the time.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. But then the and the mom thought about taking it away and then she did it and. Oh yeah.

Rebecca Winthrop

Yeah that’s a great story. Yeah. Thomas. Yeah.

Jenny Anderson

So just to bring it back to your belonging uncertainty like I think all of what Rebecca just described, all of that was creating a space for them to be a leader, but also to belong. Right. It was their way of showing that they belong and belonging. Uncertainty was just a concept. I think we were both blown away by in the research, which just shows that when you don’t feel you belong, the turn that happens in your brain that’s looking for things that aren’t going right, that’s, you know, you go from I kind of into almost threat response and you’re looking for things not to be right and to not be working.

Jenny Anderson

And you take really constructive feedback as total criticism where you see, you know, a friend doing something and you assume it’s something that you did, you know, all that is belonging, uncertainty. It’s that reaction, that you don’t belong to. You’re almost looking to confirm it. And so these opportunities for kids to have a chance to see things in a completely different light, like I do belong.

Jenny Anderson

Someone sees that I’m a leader, you know, the open. The student who’s in the intro to our book named Kia, you know, she was really totally disengaged, had gone down that spectrum as well. You said she, you know, sort of from kind of explorer to achiever to passenger to resistor. And she was given it. She was asked to share her opinions on why she hated schools so much with the Fargo, district.

Jenny Anderson

And she it was a she really describes it as this moment where I think she felt very seen. I think she felt very valued. I think she felt respected and she felt that her voice mattered. And then she was given some more opportunities to do learning in a different way. So it was those two things. It wasn’t just one.

Jenny Anderson

It wasn’t just having a voice and just the belonging. It was then having a chance to sort of show her capacity as a learner in a different way than she had. And with the two of those things, she really became this incredibly engaged learner.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And an amazing dad, it sounds like, who kept her engaged and feeding her, to which I you you really stress that, like, sometimes as parents, we can feel this can feel so out of our control like, oh my gosh, let’s just ride this out and hope they get through school. But there really is so much impact that we can have as parents for our own kids.

Catlin Tucker

And I really love the guidance around how to lean into the things we can do, like just having certain kinds of conversations with kids, and how impactful those can be. So the the pinnacle is explorer mode, and it wasn’t kind of lost on me that the, story that started this chapter, it wasn’t until the student left kind of the traditional school setting and went to more of an alternative kind of construction of school that really kind of lit, his excitement and his explorer mode.

Catlin Tucker

And then students who are in explore mode when they’re in their extracurriculars, they’re on the soccer field, they’re doing something different. So when you say explorer mode is kind of the peak of the engagement mountain, how do like, what can we as educators do to try to create the kind of classroom culture and learning experiences that invite more students to explore?

Catlin Tucker

Because I think the statistic you guys shared was that, like by the time they’re in secondary or past a certain grade, it’s like only 4% feel like they’re given opportunities to explore in school, which just kind of broke my heart.

Rebecca Winthrop

The stat, because we did this Brookings Transcend survey work was, really around school experiences, kids talking about their school experiences and that less than 4% regularly had school experiences, you know, just regularly that they that would really support, explore mode. And we drew very heavily on the work of John Marshall Reeves and his many, many colleagues, around agenda engagement and the reason we really loved it.

Rebecca Winthrop

His work, is one he frames this dimension of engagement art and calls it a gen tech engagement, which is so important in an age of AI. You need young people to be able to be wave finders and navigators of the learning journey that’s ahead for them across their whole lives. So that’s one and two. It you can do it.

Rebecca Winthrop

It’s not up a thing that’s out there that’s impossible to achieve. He really has shown across 28, almost 20 years, 18 countries, us to South Korea, to Peru, like really in very, very different contexts, that there are about seven different teaching practices, all of them somewhat small but taken together, basically supported gen tech engagement. And when kids have those practices, they achieve more, get better grades, more pro-social behavior.

Rebecca Winthrop

They’re more, more motivated. All the things that you would want as an educator for the students in your class, as well as as a parent, and the practices are are, small things. Like before you kick off a lesson, you say, for example, hey, I’m work today, guys. We’re going to talk about solar system before I start in, and we get into it.

Rebecca Winthrop

Do you guys have any questions about the solar system or anything you’re curious about? It takes 30s and then in his research, he finds that it takes almost two weeks of a teacher doing this regularly before kids start asking questions that they’re curious about because they’ve been so socialized to sit and lean back and receive before they actively, you know, do something with that knowledge.

Rebecca Winthrop

So there’s, you know, in the book, you’ll see there’s a bunch of different questions, including, you know, offering 2 to 3, different options for homework. So kids can choose, as well as providing explanatory rationales. This one I love where as teachers, as Carter’s, you know, saying, look, you need to read this chapter. It’ll be on the test on Friday.

Rebecca Winthrop

It’s not an explanatory rationale. It it really and we sometimes fall into the habit of just being like, this is what we’re doing, guys. Get with the program. But you know why I want you to read it is make it up, you know, or I’m making it up, you know, to see how a historical narrative can, both teach you about history and literature, literary devices.

Rebecca Winthrop

Right. That’s what I’m why I’m assigning this. That’s what I want you to learn. And by the way, I’m going to quiz you on it on Friday. Yeah. Jenny, what else do you want to not add on?

Jenny Anderson

The one I love the most, actually, of all the practices is sort of. And it’ll sound counterintuitive, but it will hopefully also make sense, which is less instructional and more invitational, which is, that’s that might be how we rephrased it. But what I love about that is I think it’s really strong guidance for both educators and parents and really takes into account the neurobiology of adolescence, which is they don’t want to be talked to, they want to be respected.

Jenny Anderson

They want to have opportunities to sort of, voice things that are very self-conscious, which is, you know, very normal. But they want to have a say. And so that invitational language, you know, do this because I told you do this because, you know, it’s homework. Of course you have to do it. Like, hey, we actually do homework.

Jenny Anderson

This is explanatory rationale. But kind of combined with this invitational tone, you know, it gives me a chance to see where you all are. And that’s really important to me. I want to see how you’re progressing. And if you’re missing anything, if you’re missing anything, I want to help you. I want to help you get to you know where I know you can go is so different from do it because we need to do it.

Jenny Anderson

Or, you know, how many times as a parent and I’m totally guilty of this, which, like, why do you have to do homework? I don’t know, everybody does homework to do it. What do we really have to have a conversation about this? You know what I mean? It’s like, oh no, they want to be spoken to and respected and taken seriously.

Jenny Anderson

And that invitational language inviting them into a conversation where their opinion is respected is just so much more aligned to the their biology, their emerging biology and their desire, their real desire to contribute. But that’s, you know, peppered by the environment, feeling challenged, all that stuff. So that was just one more component I really liked.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. And I think a lot of teachers there, they’re thinking about the why, the purpose, the value. It’s just like making sure we articulate that. And then I love that you’re explaining it. Yeah. And I love the invitational language. I just like do it because I said so. But here’s like again here’s why we’re doing this and this could be important.

Catlin Tucker

And I’d like you to engage in this work. So you made the point that, you know, when we talk about explore mode, it is even more important in this kind of era of AI and advancing technology. Can you speak to why you think, a shift to one? Because you talk about kind of shifting from the age of achievement to the age of agency, and a focus on helping students explore will actually set them up for success in a world where we are facing things like rapid AI advancements.

Jenny Anderson

So I just I think the kind of components of the definition are helpful because we define agency is the ability to identify a meaningful goal and the ability to marshal resources, to meet it. And if you think if you really break that down, that’s sort of the ability to identify a goal you care about. That’s self-awareness, right?

Jenny Anderson

What do I care about? What do I love? We’re talking about that in the context of, achiever mode. And then the ability to be kind of adaptable and a little bit resilient, right. Like I’m going to try this thing. Oh, that didn’t work. I’m going to try this other thing. Right. That’s gonna work. Developing those skills are much different than developing, here’s some content.

Jenny Anderson

And, you know, here’s what you need to do with it, which we know I can do incredibly well. So with me, I can do that very, very well. But even more so, this ability to identify your goals and then invest your energy accordingly in sort of meeting those goals, getting help from a teacher, getting help from your community, from your classmates, you know, to do all of those things.

Jenny Anderson

That is a whole different set of skills than just the sort of what’s the content, how do we sort of massage it for the assessment? And, oh, by the way, I can do that sort of way better than we could even dream of.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah, I but that what you just said, Jenny, makes me feel like we need to reimagine the entire structure of school. Yeah, because to cultivate those skills, students have to be able to have time and space to identify what is it that I care about that I want to work toward? How might I go about making progress on that?

Catlin Tucker

How will I know if I’ve been successful reaching this goal? Like, where do I have like even I think as a high school English teacher, I know there are specific things I was responsible for teaching, like argumentative writing, informational writing, identifying a theme in a story, but like, why do they have to write the same thing? Why can’t they develop their own prompts and still demonstrate they can produce informational writing or argumentative writing?

Catlin Tucker

Or why can’t they select a story from a short list that’s like interesting to them? I mean, even those small choices for a lot of students aren’t taking shape in classrooms. And so I just worry, are they going to develop these critical skills that they need to thrive in a world where I can do a lot of these things that we used to spend time doing?

Rebecca Winthrop

I mean, I think I think you just nailed it. Count one. That’s the big, big, big concern that, you know, in some ways to be very sort of simplistic about it. Have we designed a system that’s really about maximizing achiever mode? And then along comes a technology that can actually do the assessments that we assessed. Achiever mode by just fine.

Rebecca Winthrop

And therefore how do we reorient ourselves. And which is why we do so explore mode is really really important in this age of AI and why we, we talk about on the education side, this shift from age of achievement to age of agency. Because I do think we’re going to we’re in for a very wild ride.

Rebecca Winthrop

I do think we’ll have generative artificial intelligence very soon. Which is just the cognitive part of you know, on par with human reasoning. Being human is much, much more than that. And educating kids is much, much more than that. But it really means that we don’t exactly know when we peer into the crystal ball, what our world’s going to look like and what kids are going to have to do.

Rebecca Winthrop

And so they better be really good at learning new things. Yeah. And that’s why we need that explore mode so badly.

Catlin Tucker

Oh my gosh this has been amazing. So our final very quick if each of you are thinking about teachers listening they’re heading off into summer break. They have two plus months to think about next year. Is there any like little piece of advice or takeaway from the book you want to kind of emphasize in this moment, to just leave them thinking.

Jenny Anderson

Yeah, I mean, I would this is stuff we talked about in the book. And this is for educators and parents, but I do think we’re also facing sort of this, fragmented attention reading crisis. And so I think heading into summer is like the perfect time to be like, hey, find a book you might love and read it.

Jenny Anderson

And if you can, as an adult, read side by side with them because then you can ask questions. It’s motivating to know that they’re keeping up with you. I just think that is I’ve been talking to some different groups here, and I sort of feel like my daughter and I just read a book together, and it was amazing.

Jenny Anderson

It was just like something fun we could talk about all the time. And it was quite sophisticated for her. And there were definitely things that she didn’t understand. But because I was reading with her, she had these questions. It’s like, that’s something that summer affords. And it’s building curiosity and it’s building explorer mode, and it’s building those moments of introspection.

Jenny Anderson

This was about a this book is about tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, about a video game designer. And, you know, like, do you see yourself in like any, any party like, would you want to do that is, you know, there’s just so many questions come out of it. So I would say, to, to unleash the inner explorer, and help them find the book.

Jenny Anderson

I think that is there are so many kids who were like, I don’t even know where to start, and I need to read. And so I’m actually in the process of curating, a summer reading list by age, all recommended by young people themselves. So they’re giving me their favorite recommendations with one line as to why they loved it.

Jenny Anderson

And I’m going to post that on my Substack. And so I’m hoping that will yay be more part.

Rebecca Winthrop

Of is awesome and.

Jenny Anderson

That we can support.

Rebecca Winthrop

Awesome one. One of the things will Jen give me an idea, but, and I think the the reading is great, especially also for, for parents if they have time and they have the ability and, you know, they’re able to but for teachers, one of the things that I, I think as you’re heading into summer, so think about how you can partner with your students families a bit more around motivating and engaging them.

Rebecca Winthrop

We really, have huge respect for teachers, Jenny and I. And we say in the book, you know, we feel that teachers are kind of squished in the middle. They’re like, squished from on high with standards and things from central office that they have to do, but they’re also squished from below with like a lot of parent demands or expectations.

Rebecca Winthrop

But that relationship, the sort of teacher to family relationship is something that teachers can can make a difference in. We have a lot of work we’ve done, on that at Brookings. I’m happy to send you some links, for your readers. We have a whole playbook on family school collaboration, but you know, we also do talk about it in the book around things that, you know, both parents and educators can do to help engage kids and and parents and families to have a really big role in doing this.

Rebecca Winthrop

It IT teachers probably can’t do it all by themselves. So the more that, there is a sort of collaborative, trusting relationship between educators and families, whether that’s literally making a habit of calling it is extra work. But I promise you, it saves time later. Like calling, you know, each month rotating and making a call to your kids, families and telling them something that you really thought was really helpful and good that the kid did.

Rebecca Winthrop

Because then when you need to call and say, look, I need your help, like it’s just not turning the homework and etc., there’s a there’s a relationship you can build on and parents are more likely to show up to the table, and you’re more likely to come up with a plan that will work on how you collaborate.

Catlin Tucker

I love that well, I know we are at time, so I don’t want to keep you both, but I just want to say thank you again so much for saying yes to this conversation, for sharing your insights, and for this book. I will link to the book in the show notes. I’ll also link to the audible in the show notes and, just thank you both.

Catlin Tucker

I really appreciate you.

Rebecca Winthrop

Thank you.

Jenny Anderson

Thank you so much. This is a great a great, a great hour.

Catlin Tucker

So many aspects of this conversation that were fascinating for me. I just absolutely loved this book. I think they did a masterful job of weaving together the stories of real students and their experiences. There’s it can be easy in education, I think in the craziness of this work, to see a student who is in, you know, resist or mode and just assume they don’t care about school, they don’t like you as a teacher.

Catlin Tucker

They, are just there to kind of make distractions or create chaos. But in the background, there’s all of these other things happening for kids. And I think these stories really humanize that experience and remind us as parents, as educators, if a student is in resister mode, if a student is in passenger mode, there are reasons why. And there are things that we as loving, caring adults in their lives can actually do to help them move out of those modes of engagement into, you know, other modes like explorer mode, and that they don’t have to stay stuck somewhere.

Catlin Tucker

In fact, we want to make sure they don’t stay stuck in that one of these, these modes of engagement or disengagement become part of their identity. And so I love that there are strategies to help assist teachers and parents in helping to identify where kids are at, and giving them ways in which to engage with young people, to try to kind of shift them into a higher level of engagement.

Catlin Tucker

So I really recommend this book for anybody who has teenagers at home who is teaching teenagers. I still cannot believe I got these two brilliant women to come on the podcast. I have read the entire book. I actually listened to it again on audible to prepare for this conversation. So if you have any questions about the book, any feedback about the episode, I would love to hear from you.

Catlin Tucker

You can reach out on X at Catlin Underscore Tucker on Instagram at Catlin Tucker on Blue Sky at Catlin tucker.com. Or you can find out more about me and my work and connect with me via my website at Catlin tucker.com. So again, I want to thank you guys for joining me for this conversation. I hope you found it valuable.

Catlin Tucker

And I will link to the book in the show notes for anybody who’s interested.