One of the challenges facing schools and VET providers alike, and some would argue a growing challenge since the COVID-19 pandemic and move to remote (and often unsophisticated forms of online learning) is helping disengaged teenagers learn.
If this is a challenge you find yourself dealing with then a recent episode of Top Class: The OECD education podcast might be worth a listen.
Speaking on this episode of the podcast are the OECD’s Director for Education and Skills, Andreas Schleicher, and Rebecca Winthrop, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Universal Education and the Brookings Institution.
Schleicher starts by noting that:
“The most frequently cited reasons for why people were skipping school was ‘I got bored.’ If you were running a supermarket and every day you see from a hundred customers, 30 walk out without buying anything, and you see that today, tomorrow, in a week, in a year, you change your inventory. And that has not happened in school. We still offer very much the same kind of learning environment. And so yeah, it is getting worse and we can expect it to get even worse. And I think the pandemic has shown young people there is actually a life without school and it is now much harder to motivate people to get back.”
He goes on to note that:
“… generally vocational education and training is doing far better with school attendance. So when young people work with real people, they work on real problems. They make mistakes that have real consequences. That seems to be more conducive to student agency and student motivation. But there are two other factors that are worth mentioning. One is the perceived support by students from their teachers, we see very clearly from PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) when students have teachers where they feel ‘my teacher knows who I am’, ‘my teacher understands who I want to become,’ ‘my teacher accompanies me’… When the quality of the student-teacher relationship is strong, you can see that students are much more independent learners, which is relating to motivation, but also much more intrinsically motivated. So I think that focusing on making learning experiences less transactional, more relational is one recipe to do things better.
Both researchers discuss the role of parents and the importance of having them engaged in teenagers’ education, as well as the vital role of mental health which can on the one hand support student engagement in learning, but on the other hand a poor schooling/learning experience can have a negative impact on mental health and discourage engagement.
Prof. Winthrop goes on to cite research showing that encouraging students to explore, to take small risks, to find things that deeply engage them, is a real positive in supporting learning. She also cautions parents and teachers not to try and rein those interests in. And then explains how critical it is for teachers to have enough time “to have to relate to students, not just in the classroom setting but also outside the classroom setting”. And states that in countries like Denmark and Finland a portion of “instruction time is devoted to the relationship with students outside the classroom setting, it could be supporting learning, it could be social, emotional support. And, not surprisingly, those are education systems where you have the kind of cognitive, social emotional outcomes which are very strong.”
Obviously teachers in Australian RTOs and secondary schools are not funded to have this much time available to them to engage and support their students outside of the direct learning environment – but that does not mean we should not be looking to find more ways to offer our teenage students the support they need to engage more with their learning and to explore and ignite their passions. And to note that VET’s ‘real world problem solving’ is much more engaging for some disengaged teenagers.
The podcast episode has a range of other practical, data driven insights on teenager engagement in learning.
