Walking across the campus at San Francisco State some years ago I bumped into a close colleague who told me that he was very frustrated with how students were responding to his lectures.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “Students used to be very engaged in my lectures and now they seem bored and tuned out. Is it just my impression or is the quality of students going down?”
I think about that conversation every time I hear a teacher complain about disengaged students and every time I read some commentary about student motivation that suggests that, in this era of digital devices, teachers face an almost insurmountable challenge. Another colleague recently said jokingly, “if only the students were better, I’d be a better teacher.”
These complaints fit well with what Kevin Ryan, co-author of the book “Those Who Can Teach,” described as another case of blaming the victim.
My question to my colleague, stated as caringly as I could, was, why do you think students don’t seem to pay attention to your lectures as much as they used to? These kids have grown up in such a different environment than in the past. Do you think that might be it? I urged him to talk with some of them, to ask them why they felt bored.
Let’s look at their reality for a moment. Kids grow up in a television- and computer-dominated world. Between that and their mobile devices, they have absorbed far more information at earlier ages than they used to. They can get many of their questions answered just by asking Google. They’ve been conditioned by quick images one after another in music videos, ads and even TV shows. Everything is moving fast. Technological and social changes are happening even faster. Students’ minds move fast, with darting brains and frequent restlessness.
There is also an increase in anxiety on the part of many students that relates to their parents. Over the years, there has been a decline in parent presence (because of dual working parents) and parental authority (because there are so many other competing “authorities”). Parents also feel the pressure of increasingly distressful outside events and the strains on their lives. Their kids feel the related anxiety.
So many students do not have the adult guideposts to help them navigate their school experiences. It would be foolish to think this doesn’t affect their psyches and their focus in class. The anxieties felt by students, as well as concerns about their futures, can significantly interfere with the classroom attention.
I’m sure this doesn’t cover all the issues. Nor do each of these factors affect every adolescent. But keep it in mind as you imagine what it’s like for most when they enter a classroom today. Most classroom environments are slow in comparison to the media and computer worlds they live in outside, especially if the teacher just lectures. They have multiple choices on television via remote controls and instant computer access to information and have learned to turn these things off when they are not interesting.
In the classroom, the remote control usually has only three choices: “on” (paying attention to whatever the teacher provides), “off” (through varied forms of withdrawal) or “disrupt” (through varied ways of acting out). This may be over simplified, but you get the idea.
The transition from both the social and technological changes in the world they inhabit outside school to that of the classroom is naturally very difficult for students and for many will interfere with their motivation and engagement.
I have a strong bias. I want both teachers and parents to reach adolescents far more effectively, to more easily get their attention – formally in classrooms and informally at home. This must begin with understanding, not blaming, the students. There are effective ways of accomplishing it.
I’ll describe what teachers and parents can do in my forthcoming column next month.
Mark Phillips of Woodacre is a professor emeritus of education at San Francisco State University.
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