Just want to note that developing curiosity and agency is not a panacea. For years I worked in a high school program where students made films. They had full creative license coupled with vast instruction on all of the tools needed to create a film. The students worked in groups, and most worked well together and did amazing work. There were a few students, however, who contributed very little to their groups. We decided to put the slackers in a group together (they were all friends), and, lo and behold, they were unable to create a film. After three months they had some B roll they never got around to editing. That was it. Whenever I read these things I want to shout "It doesn't always work!"
I'm with you, Sally. Those of us passionate about teaching are often searching around for modes of connecting and inspiring the disconnected students. The truth may be that there are some very hard limits built into human nature.
While I appreciate many of the sentiments in this post, readers should know (and I'm sure the authors know) that the "student-driven" model of education is routinely used to justify letting kids "explore" apps and websites on laptops and chromebooks. This ideology is fine in principle, and I love many of the suggestions. However, in the actual non-ideal reality of US public schools, teachers and administrators pat themselves on the back for achieving "Student autonomy" while overseeing classrooms full of children staring at screens and wearing headphones. Just something to bear in mind.
Yes! Get them out of the “boxes inside the box” school setting to really engage in their communities and the world. This does not mean more field trips (usually expensive, adult-planned and led, chaotic and disconnected). Cross-curricular learning is also valuable.
How do we "engage [them] in their communities and the world" if not through field trips or technology? I agree, but I'm a tired 11th, 12th, & AP Lang & Comp teacher who is about to retire because getting sleepy, distracted students excited about the content has gotten much more difficult over the last ten years. I still love to learn and teach, but... I'm 53 and I'm getting tired. AI is probably the added element that led me to writing and submitting my letter of resignation 8 weeks ago. There's always substitute teaching... I guess. :)
This is a great point, Nicholas, and many educators are equally frustrated about the big promises of EdTech. EdTech, like many forms of tech, make big promises about saved time and freeing up space. In reality, educators work loads have only increased while their autonomy over their classrooms has significantly decreased, at least in many parts of the US.
I was a history teacher a long time ago. Had enough after 16 years, and quit 20 years ago. One semester I had a class composed of almost entirely pretty high achieving students. (Usually it was a more mixed bag, even in supposedly "Advanced" classes.) One student in particular was probably brilliant; he would have been in an AP class except for a scheduling conflict with Band, which he would not give up.
I thought that if any class could pull off something I had wanted to do for my entire career, it would be this one, so I proposed a play. They would write then perform a play, at the end of the semester for the other history classes, that would encompass all of American history. They jumped at the idea, the brilliant student, in particular, who became the director. I have never seen a group so engaged and passionate. The important thing to note is that they still had to learn the entire curriculum and most of them – despite being pretty good students – could not be counted on to study it themselves.
Consequently, I had to cram five days worth of lessons into about 2 1/2 days, which meant nonstop lecture on my part. I was actually a pretty engaging lecturer, but they spent that time absolutely riveted and listening to every word, because they had the incentive of half the week in this self-directed project. The play ended up being wonderful – not just very comprehensive but often hilarious. They also outperformed every class in the school on the end of year standardized test.
Creativity and self direction are essential, but as a commenter noted, just sticking them in groups with devices is not going to work.
This is AN amazing example of Explorer mode. You gave them a reason to care and to invest energy. You did NOT compromise on rigor but expanded the entry point. Then, they were willing to do the content. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you, Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, for giving me a new set of terms and concepts to diagnose a crisis that I am seeing continue into higher education.
I'm a Professor of Film and Media Studies at a small English-language university in Quebec, Canada. I'm (still) passionate about my teaching, after 25 years, and excited when I find the time to get to my research (third on the list of priorities at my university, after teaching and service), so I think I'm regularly modelling "the thrill of learning" for my students. I would say that 70% of them are Passengers, who have ridden on the tracks of education past high school (and CEGEP, a unique post-secondary institution in Quebec) into university. Another 20% are Achievers, who typically ask, "where did I lose points on this assignment?" I have to explain that they've got it backwards: they start at zero and gain points from there. We do have a few Resisters (university is so cheap in Quebec that the "mindful spending" calculation is not a factor for them), and somewhere between 5 and 10% Explorers. The modes of these students rarely change in their three or four years (depending on whether they're from Quebec or somewhere else) at my school, but my colleagues and I are always really excited when a new Explorer is born. To be frank, seeing that transformation in a few, as well as offering challenging opportunities to the perpetual Explorers, makes the whole exhausting enterprise bearable. Probably the most demoralizing thing that I and many of my colleagues have noticed is that students in our Education program, planning to become the teachers of the future, are the most consistently incurious of all students.
Teaching this year has become unbearable, largely thanks to generative AI. We've been seeing the attention problems created by smartphones and social media for many years already. Then came the pandemic, which shattered students' social abilities completely; they don't learn each other's names and won't meet in person for group assignments. And now, AI is destroying the possibility of even running the most experiential of our courses, like those in creative writing. Before this year, I loved to teach my Screenwriting class because the students' investment in developing their story ideas across a wide range of projects was unlike anything I see in my other courses. It's a huge amount of work for me to offer productive feedback to all their work, but I happily did this in the past. This year, though, at least one third of my students used AI for their story ideas AND the actual writing of their screenplays, and many more used AI to read and analyze the screenplays that they were supposed to read themselves, so they could learn the form and appreciate the artistry of other writers. I could go on with anecdotes about what's happening in my Film Studies classes, where less than half of the students actually watch the movies we're studying, but suffice it to say that, if something isn't done soon to reverse the tsunami of disengagement of students, retirement for me can't come soon enough: I can't go on pretending to teach a roomful of students who are pretending to learn.
I love you. Thank you for speaking my frustration... it needed words. I teach English (11th, 12th, & AP Lang & Comp) in Indiana. I'm 53 and just submitted my letter of resignation after Christmas break. I have no idea what I'll do going forward. Teaching is my vocation, but my natural enthusiasm for learning doesn't motivate students like it once did. They are sleepy, unwilling to embrace tension or hard work, little cheaters (I say that with love).
Your response breathed some life into my bones. I seriously love you.
Hello, there. Thanks for your admiring response to my response to Jenny and Rebecca's post, which really helped me distill what I have been seeing at the post-secondary level for a long time. I'm very sorry to hear that you've had to take that additional step of leaving your vocation behind, without even some alternative path ahead. That speaks to your sincere commitment to the vocation and your courage. May those same qualities carry you onto a new and genuinely fulfilling path.
I very very rarely comment on stuff. I’m a teacher of 18+ years in really really deprived area.
There’s a lot in here that’s unexpected. I thought the authors would have a different point of view.
What about direct instruction? What about the role of cognitive load? What about EH Hirch and knowledge rich curriculum? What about the failure of progressive education in the uk?(Knowsley “wacky warehouse”🤣)
Getting kids to explore their own projects sounds bloody wonderful…until it’s been tried a hundred times and failed and the same kids from poor backgrounds are even further behind that where they were originally.
Just my opinion. Maybe I’m wrong. But having seen project based learning tried many times and being a failure each makes me very cynical.
Maybe they were just not doing project based learning “the right way”…
Same. I found this essay rather disappointing and just more of the non-concrete c-suite romantic edu-jargon that has landed us in this mediocrity-spiral in the first place. It completely neglects the reality that "creativity" and "exploration" are downstream from having developed a mundane repertoire of shared knowledge and skills. There's this great quote from Stephen Sondheim that illustrates this; he says, "I had always thought an angel came down and sat on your shoulder and whispered in your ear 'dah-dah-dah-DUM.' It never occurred to me that art was something worked out. And suddenly it was skies opening up. As soon as you find out what a leading tone is, you think, Oh my God. What a diatonic scale is—Oh my God! The logic of it. And, of course, what that meant to me was: Well, I can do that."
In my own pedestrian academic life, I still remember my 9th grade English teacher walking us through the structure of a Basic Expository Paragraph. And that was my skies-opening-up moment. Prior to that, I hated writing. It turns out I didn't need more autonomy. I actually needed specific guidance. And I needed to practice using specific content and specific prompts so I could learn to measure for myself if my writing was coherent. And to me, that was a pivotal shift in developing true agency and being able to articulate my ideas. I remember my flower-child parents making fun of the teacher around the dining table and laughing at how structured the class was. They were so wrong! And I'm grateful that my high school followed an explicit content model.
I'm also grateful that the school took on the mundane logistic of making it possible to be a well-rounded student and explore multiple interests. They had buses (including two late bus times!), an 8-period day, decent-quality but non-elite sports, and lots of electives and after-school extracurriculars. And the amazing thing was that the after-school clubs were largely student run by the academically successful Seniors, with a teacher providing advisement. For example, the school musical would be directed by a Senior who was also accomplished in band/orchestra. Theater tech was run by a Senior accomplished in shop. Science Olympiad by Seniors accomplished in science classes. There were real paths to creative autonomy and agency, but they had to be achieved through a combination of content-mastery and long-term dedication. We learned that we were actually relevant and could contribute meaningfully to our own activities, but we also had to earn that relevance because it came with responsibility for underclassmen and sustaining longstanding school clubs that engaged with the wider community.
In my opinion, the best thing K-12 can do is get out of the business of romance and emotional appeals altogether. And instead, get into the business of unapologetic passion for mundane content, scholastic activities, and logistics. Stop trying to change kids' "feelings" about reading, and instead passionately teach students about morphology. Figure out how to have school buses. Shorten class periods so kids can take multiple electives. And if there aren't enough staff to provide after-school extracurriculars, figure out how to have parent and community volunteers. And yes, this may mean that after-school extracurriculars can't be counted as transcript credit. So what!? In the name of bowing down to college applications and demanding a masters-level credentialed teacher to run everything, we are failing to provide kids with a robust high-participation school community.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I love that the Basic Expository Paragraph was your on ramp. For most kids, it’s not (see any engagement data for secondary school kids in most countries around the world). We have to do better at the why-it-matters to get to the what it is (see the above comment on the history play). We are really clear throughout the book that 1) knowledge matters hugely (as does a sequenced and challenging curriculum) and 2) more than ever, kids want to know “why” they need that knowledges. we never say don’t give it to them - we say. answer the why.
Based on the middle two paragraphs of this comment I would say you might like the book (you could hate it too!).
I'm a structural behaviorist. So to me, the "why" cannot be metacognitive. It has to be localized, particular, and readily accessible/reliable/knowable institutional structures. And often, the classroom activities themselves can be those institutional structures (I can't find the history play comment, but maybe that is the example). But you cannot cognitively cheerlead someone to engagement, nor rely upon a social-emotional hack to "unlocking" someone's style. And I worry that this essay gives the impression that you can. People often have to begrudgingly be quasi forced by repetitive structures, by knowledgeable content-experts who are decent prosocial human beings who give a fig, to do things over and over until they develop enough mastery to build intrinsic self-reinforcement. It can feel highly disengaging at times. It's often two steps engaged action forward, one step disengaged feelings backward. And because our minds have a negative bias, our overall self-report is one of feeling disengaged despite our incremental improvements. Maybe the book outlines this clearly, but I'm left wanting from this essay. "Engagement" is not a magic wand. There are no frontal lobe emotional shortcuts for developing action-based subcortical pathways. Getting better at things is hard and kids will always balk at it to some degree, it's just that some kids have more flexible frontal lobes than others and can tolerate disengaging feelings in their frontal lobes without fully disengaging their subcortical pathways. It seems counterintuitive (especially to self-assured adults with highly developed frontal lobes and verbal-thinking styles), but the kids with the less flexible frontal lobes actually need more subcortical stimulation and development (not more frontal lobe appeasement), with individual differences in what subcortical dosing is most effective. If the failures of Whole Reading have taught us anything, the frontal lobes can't experience the satisfaction of "why" and mature into explorer confidence, flexibility, and tolerance without a concurrent increase in subcortical fluency.
I am a school board member and it seems all I hear about from the district is the need for student engagement. I think you raise some fine points in this essay, but I also echo the same questions and doubts the commenter in this thread asked, “what about direct instruction, cognitive load theory, knowledge-building, etc. ?”Engagement does not equal proficiency. As an example, Building Thinking Classrooms math instruction is all about engagement, but there is no data showing students can actually do math better. For novice learners, I think the data is clear that direct instruction wins, but those are treated as dirty words in my district. I think students do need some agency and stimulation. AND they also have to develop the stamina to hunker down and do the work. To your point I also think many students are disengaged because the classroom tasks/material are not at the right level—too easy or too difficult. The just challenging enough is the sweet spot and I don’t know how teachers do that in class of 30 kids. I wonder if AI can truly help with this. Apparently the Alpha schools have cracked that code. I’m intrigued but also skeptical of their two-hour, AI-driven core curriculum.
As a Grade 11/12 teacher of Psychology and French in Canada for 38 years, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that encouraging Explorer mode through interactive lessons , and a growth mindset is key! “ in French classes, I regularly tell my students that I love mistakes, so let’s give it a try”. And then we celebrate when somebody struggles and gets it right. In psychology classes. I give students full reign to choose their own topic for their research papers and I also empower them to teach the class for 70 minute lessons so that they can truly become experts in whatever they’re passionate about. The other piece that is crucial is connection and belonging. When students feel safe in a classroom, they will explore, but when they feel the pressure of the social hierarchy, they will often shut down. This is a nuanced often complex dance for teachers but worth every moment.
Reading the other comments, this is the first about which I also feel is the core: freedom to explore and learn in any moment needing/getting to learn more("failure" reinterpreted), successes celebrated for and by all, the real experience of belonging, and I love your idea of letting them teach.
I'm a retired third grade teacher, and all this worked, also for those on the autism spectrum, most "gifted," with outside the box, and passion-based thinking, reclusive due to the onslaught of too much linear information and sensory over-load.
All the rest shared here or much of it, still felt very measured and result-driven. Where has that gotten our world? Our world is over-goal-driven, when relation, fulfillment, kindness, compassion, and following natural born curiosities-honored from the get go, building cooperative community, and honoring the land, instead of destroying it. It is taking huge amounts of energy now to support AI-development gone crazy.
Progress is good, until it goes too far.
Finland, scoring the highest for a happy society and school testing results, does not have kids in school till 7 years old, after the needed years to learn from experience, their vocabulary carrying that knowledge forward; then teachers teach deeply, so all understand math and the other subjects, before pushing forward, so it can be used well in life; a testing time to guide students forward academically, or to a loved trade...
Again, progress is good till it is pushed too far. We need time to be ourselves, each as designed, with time to smell the roses, and thus to be human.
The Explorer mode framework maps cleanly onto what I'd call high-agency AI use — and the distinction matters enormously in practice. As a sophomore English teacher and member of my district's AI team, I've found that the students who benefit most from AI collaboration are the ones already practicing the metacognitive habits this article describes: questioning their own assumptions, generating ideas before outsourcing them, and treating the tool as an interlocutor rather than an answer machine. AI doesn't create that disposition. It amplifies whatever disposition is already there.
What's missing from most of these conversations is the structural layer. Explorer mode doesn't emerge from good intentions — it requires deliberate instructional design, teacher capacity to model and assess it, and budget frameworks that treat professional development as the primary cost of AI integration, not the licensing fee. My district has been building exactly that: governance structures, human agency frameworks, and multi-year implementation plans that sequence AI use from internal operations to student-facing contexts. Without that scaffolding, "give students more agency" becomes another mandate teachers absorb alone.
One point worth adding to your six actions: AI makes the design of learning experiences more important, not less. A poorly designed task that AI can complete in forty seconds was probably a poorly designed task before AI arrived. The real opportunity here isn't resisting the shortcut — it's making the learning so genuinely interesting that the shortcut becomes beside the point. That's always been the standard. AI just makes it impossible to quietly sidestep.
I’m a school board member in a high school district. I’m also on our recently formed AI task force. Do have any materials you could share with me as it sounds like you’re further along.
This is a solid overview of where we are: https://www.washoeschools.net/directory/ai-artificial-intellegence If you want much more dense prose, check out my post on my Substack page from a few days ago. Main point is that we can use AI to support exploratory learning, but success will require much more real human thinking, not less.
I think the root cause is more basic. What incentive do student's have to care about schooling? I was in high school during the 00's and students were already looking at how the internet and celebrity culture was enabling "drop outs" to make millions. It didn't matter that the chances were low. Also the students who were on the STEM path had "gifted" programs or advance classes that rewarded and challenged their efforts. Now schools do everything they can to pad stats that students can coast to A/B's.
Thank you for the article and insights. I would encourage emphasis on your #5 recommendation of "Help students manage technology" by starting this principle from birth. I believe this is key to what has changed our kids' desire to learn. Today, kids spend 8 1/2 (10 for Black and Latino kids) hours per day with consumer tech embedded with the addictive science of "persuasive design." This science exploits our Stone Age brains by incessantly triggering users to indulge in easy rewards. This is the opposite brain skill demanded for school success. To help kids, we need to protect them and their developing brains from this addictive science so they can learn to enjoy the hard work of school and real life.
Learning Environment: Inspirational Actions, Approaches, and Stories from the Science classroom was written for teachers to model how to engage students learning in and outside of the classroom. Check it out here.
I can’t remember which state it was but perhaps Wisconsin. Anyway they would do a student engagement survey. I think it was high school students. It was just amazing to me, the idea that we would survey the students themselves about school and their attitudes towards it. Couldn't we learn a lot from that?
I know here in the Seattle region my nieces and nephews, to this day, and I'm old, but to this day their biggest word to describe school is boring. It's boring. They don't even want to go on to get post-high school training or go to college for any reason because "Oh my God, school is just so boring." Maybe these student surveys can hold feet to the fire so we can just emerge from this ridiculous "education system" and get to a point where kids are excited to learn as a whole.
Yes, engagement is so important, especially when students feel connected in their learning environment by developing connections with their teachers and peers!
I would argue another important way to improve engagement in school would be removing 1:1 devices, especially in K-8. As I recently wrote about, https://dencham.substack.com/p/a-world-unseen-the-real-social-dilemma , when children’s eyes are diverted to a screen at school rather than those around them, they miss an unquantifiable amount of opportunities to develop much needed social relationships. We use our eyes to think about our surroundings and those who are in it, it is the root of our ability to develop our social skills. Our eyes are used to notice and interpret facial expressions of others, to develop empathy, to determine what group expectations might be. It is at the core for developing relationships. When students feel connected and have a strong sense of community which is fostered by learning together, rather than independently using “personalized” learning programs, they become more engaged with their learning. Plus these “personalized” edtech programs make students feel constantly evaluated, zapping any joy from learning. From homework, class assignments, assessments and progress monitoring, kids are seeing their scores daily which often can feel defeating.
AI will destroy any fabric of human connection in school if left up to the tech industry and their well stated goals (replace teachers with AI tutors). It is not enough to expect parents to do their part in restricting tech, schools need to get on board as well. It is time to undo the death grip that the tech industry has on education and our children.
Paul Graham wrote a wonderful essay called "why nerds are unpopular" (if you haven't read it, Google it!) which explains a lot of why teens are disengaged. What they do in school does not fundamentally matter outside of school, and schools are childcare as much as they are education. What they really care about is each other's approval, so most of them focus on social hierarchy games.
"What they do in school does not fundamentally matter outside of school." This explains why mindful spending workshops, which allow young people to work on a problem that matters to them in real-time: "Should I buy this item or experience?" are so popular - and effective.
"Blue books are back. So too are in-class exams and No. 2 pencils. "
Unfortunately, they are not. I've seen how at both the high school and community college levels-- I work at an institution that spans both-- there has been almost zero effort to stop cheating.
There has been no re-thinking of course structure or evaluation formats. There is just auto-pilot and mass cheating. Even kids who wouldn't have considered using AI to write a paper a few years ago are now just going for it because there is no penalty. The penalties run the other way.
I appreciate this post, but I think it's crucial that we recognize how many incentives our education system has for not tackling obvious cheating.
One issue I see is also the ever-raised standards that are leaving students with academic struggles behind. In our effort to make everyone a STEM genius, schools no longer separate kids to teach them where they are. For example, when my 8th grade daughter suddenly began to struggle in math (her grades tanked at the beginning of the school year) her tutor told me that what is now pre-algebra was what we learned in Algebra 2. She said many kids brains just aren’t developmentally ready and, thus, the influx of expensive after school learning centers. Not only is AI an issue, the money-making industry around “excellence” is ensuring the standards continue to rise, leading more and more kids to simply give up because the system flew past them long ago and no one is willing to jump out of the speeding train to help them.
You may enjoy Ted Dintersmith's (@dintersmith) new book, "Aftermath" which delves into the math that is taught versus the math that humans use after graduation.
Thanks, Karen. I might look that up, too. It's always been puzzling to me that schools would want to teach advanced calculus to kids who, once out in the world, struggle with basic arithmetic.
Yes to this. I was a very successful student, by every metric, and yet my kindergarten was relaxed and fun. I happened to find an old report card and there was virtually no assessment of academics other than 'beginning' to know letters and numbers. Now someone has decided kindergarten should be first -second grade, and the result is stressed kids whose future achievement often doesn't support this intensity out of the gate. I have an extremely bright grandchild who about broke my heart when she commented that she had thought kindergarten was going to be fun...
It’s heartbreaking! Learning SHOULD be fun! And it should be appropriate to their developmental level, not what the state has decided are the standards.
I do understand the need for the state to set _some_ standards. But they make little sense in terms of kids' development and, as you point out, the reality of where different kids 'are.'
I didn't have an Education degree, so to get a teaching certificate I had to take a semester's worth of Education classes and student teach. The classes were mostly useless, but I do remember learning that Piaget said the transition from concrete to abstract thinking occurred, on average, around 11-12 years of age.
And yet what is the push, earlier and earlier, in elementary school? Not competence in basic arithmetic, but 'introducing' higher math. There are young people all over the place who truly can't make change if they don't have the register show them the amount, but have received passing grades in at least Algebra and usually other higher maths. Something is wrong with that.
The biggest drop off on student engagement is the transition from elementary to secondary. This is GLOBAL (see OECD, Edurio, Brookings-Transcend, US Census). It is way harder to teach a disengaged student than an engaged one. We talk a lot in the book about how badly education manages this transition
Yes, I remember telling someone, in a rather offhand manner, that middle school was mostly useless. They were shocked, but it's true, in my experience, both professional and personal.
Less able and less motivated students are lost there for good, in terms of actually learning, including those who go on to graduate high school.
It's often a wasteland for higher-achieving students. Many of them just kill time till high school.
Completely agree! This is absolutely the creep of corporate "innovation" grifting into public K-12 (and yes, even the most innovative full-of-jargon curriculum from big Ivy education program and leading guru is part of that grift!). And it goes hand-in-hand with the corporatization of school administration. For example, our district just spent tons of money and c-suite energy to "re-brand" and create a new logo and values statement. This innovation-grift leads to an inability to work within the reality of mundane never-going-away developmental limitations. And worse, it gives the impression that off-task corporate-stylized and adultified global "innovation" (whether it's STEM or elite athletics or the annual gala) is more important than daily child-focused on-task mundane reality at a highly localized level.
Honestly, the point about "passive consumption" vs. "active agency" is the biggest takeaway here. We're so worried about what's happening on the screens that we forget how much the physical environment at home dictates a kid's engagement levels.
I actually went through this recently—my kids were basically disappearing into their rooms with tablets because our old house layout was so closed off. We decided to do a full kitchen remodeling (https://qualityrenovation.com/services/kitchen-remodeling) project to open things up and create a massive island specifically so they’d have a "project zone" right in the middle of the house. It sounds simple, but moving them from a desk in a dark room to a bright, communal space where they’re forced to interact while I’m cooking has done more for their "engagement" than any app ever could. If the home is designed for isolation, don't be surprised when kids isolate.
Just want to note that developing curiosity and agency is not a panacea. For years I worked in a high school program where students made films. They had full creative license coupled with vast instruction on all of the tools needed to create a film. The students worked in groups, and most worked well together and did amazing work. There were a few students, however, who contributed very little to their groups. We decided to put the slackers in a group together (they were all friends), and, lo and behold, they were unable to create a film. After three months they had some B roll they never got around to editing. That was it. Whenever I read these things I want to shout "It doesn't always work!"
I'm with you, Sally. Those of us passionate about teaching are often searching around for modes of connecting and inspiring the disconnected students. The truth may be that there are some very hard limits built into human nature.
I completely agree. Finding motivation innately doesn't always happen.
While I appreciate many of the sentiments in this post, readers should know (and I'm sure the authors know) that the "student-driven" model of education is routinely used to justify letting kids "explore" apps and websites on laptops and chromebooks. This ideology is fine in principle, and I love many of the suggestions. However, in the actual non-ideal reality of US public schools, teachers and administrators pat themselves on the back for achieving "Student autonomy" while overseeing classrooms full of children staring at screens and wearing headphones. Just something to bear in mind.
Yes! Get them out of the “boxes inside the box” school setting to really engage in their communities and the world. This does not mean more field trips (usually expensive, adult-planned and led, chaotic and disconnected). Cross-curricular learning is also valuable.
How do we "engage [them] in their communities and the world" if not through field trips or technology? I agree, but I'm a tired 11th, 12th, & AP Lang & Comp teacher who is about to retire because getting sleepy, distracted students excited about the content has gotten much more difficult over the last ten years. I still love to learn and teach, but... I'm 53 and I'm getting tired. AI is probably the added element that led me to writing and submitting my letter of resignation 8 weeks ago. There's always substitute teaching... I guess. :)
This is a great point, Nicholas, and many educators are equally frustrated about the big promises of EdTech. EdTech, like many forms of tech, make big promises about saved time and freeing up space. In reality, educators work loads have only increased while their autonomy over their classrooms has significantly decreased, at least in many parts of the US.
I agree with this and have seen it as well.
I was a history teacher a long time ago. Had enough after 16 years, and quit 20 years ago. One semester I had a class composed of almost entirely pretty high achieving students. (Usually it was a more mixed bag, even in supposedly "Advanced" classes.) One student in particular was probably brilliant; he would have been in an AP class except for a scheduling conflict with Band, which he would not give up.
I thought that if any class could pull off something I had wanted to do for my entire career, it would be this one, so I proposed a play. They would write then perform a play, at the end of the semester for the other history classes, that would encompass all of American history. They jumped at the idea, the brilliant student, in particular, who became the director. I have never seen a group so engaged and passionate. The important thing to note is that they still had to learn the entire curriculum and most of them – despite being pretty good students – could not be counted on to study it themselves.
Consequently, I had to cram five days worth of lessons into about 2 1/2 days, which meant nonstop lecture on my part. I was actually a pretty engaging lecturer, but they spent that time absolutely riveted and listening to every word, because they had the incentive of half the week in this self-directed project. The play ended up being wonderful – not just very comprehensive but often hilarious. They also outperformed every class in the school on the end of year standardized test.
Creativity and self direction are essential, but as a commenter noted, just sticking them in groups with devices is not going to work.
This is AN amazing example of Explorer mode. You gave them a reason to care and to invest energy. You did NOT compromise on rigor but expanded the entry point. Then, they were willing to do the content. Thank you for sharing.
I'm super impressed. ❤️
Thank you, Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, for giving me a new set of terms and concepts to diagnose a crisis that I am seeing continue into higher education.
I'm a Professor of Film and Media Studies at a small English-language university in Quebec, Canada. I'm (still) passionate about my teaching, after 25 years, and excited when I find the time to get to my research (third on the list of priorities at my university, after teaching and service), so I think I'm regularly modelling "the thrill of learning" for my students. I would say that 70% of them are Passengers, who have ridden on the tracks of education past high school (and CEGEP, a unique post-secondary institution in Quebec) into university. Another 20% are Achievers, who typically ask, "where did I lose points on this assignment?" I have to explain that they've got it backwards: they start at zero and gain points from there. We do have a few Resisters (university is so cheap in Quebec that the "mindful spending" calculation is not a factor for them), and somewhere between 5 and 10% Explorers. The modes of these students rarely change in their three or four years (depending on whether they're from Quebec or somewhere else) at my school, but my colleagues and I are always really excited when a new Explorer is born. To be frank, seeing that transformation in a few, as well as offering challenging opportunities to the perpetual Explorers, makes the whole exhausting enterprise bearable. Probably the most demoralizing thing that I and many of my colleagues have noticed is that students in our Education program, planning to become the teachers of the future, are the most consistently incurious of all students.
Teaching this year has become unbearable, largely thanks to generative AI. We've been seeing the attention problems created by smartphones and social media for many years already. Then came the pandemic, which shattered students' social abilities completely; they don't learn each other's names and won't meet in person for group assignments. And now, AI is destroying the possibility of even running the most experiential of our courses, like those in creative writing. Before this year, I loved to teach my Screenwriting class because the students' investment in developing their story ideas across a wide range of projects was unlike anything I see in my other courses. It's a huge amount of work for me to offer productive feedback to all their work, but I happily did this in the past. This year, though, at least one third of my students used AI for their story ideas AND the actual writing of their screenplays, and many more used AI to read and analyze the screenplays that they were supposed to read themselves, so they could learn the form and appreciate the artistry of other writers. I could go on with anecdotes about what's happening in my Film Studies classes, where less than half of the students actually watch the movies we're studying, but suffice it to say that, if something isn't done soon to reverse the tsunami of disengagement of students, retirement for me can't come soon enough: I can't go on pretending to teach a roomful of students who are pretending to learn.
I love you. Thank you for speaking my frustration... it needed words. I teach English (11th, 12th, & AP Lang & Comp) in Indiana. I'm 53 and just submitted my letter of resignation after Christmas break. I have no idea what I'll do going forward. Teaching is my vocation, but my natural enthusiasm for learning doesn't motivate students like it once did. They are sleepy, unwilling to embrace tension or hard work, little cheaters (I say that with love).
Your response breathed some life into my bones. I seriously love you.
Hello, there. Thanks for your admiring response to my response to Jenny and Rebecca's post, which really helped me distill what I have been seeing at the post-secondary level for a long time. I'm very sorry to hear that you've had to take that additional step of leaving your vocation behind, without even some alternative path ahead. That speaks to your sincere commitment to the vocation and your courage. May those same qualities carry you onto a new and genuinely fulfilling path.
I very very rarely comment on stuff. I’m a teacher of 18+ years in really really deprived area.
There’s a lot in here that’s unexpected. I thought the authors would have a different point of view.
What about direct instruction? What about the role of cognitive load? What about EH Hirch and knowledge rich curriculum? What about the failure of progressive education in the uk?(Knowsley “wacky warehouse”🤣)
Getting kids to explore their own projects sounds bloody wonderful…until it’s been tried a hundred times and failed and the same kids from poor backgrounds are even further behind that where they were originally.
Just my opinion. Maybe I’m wrong. But having seen project based learning tried many times and being a failure each makes me very cynical.
Maybe they were just not doing project based learning “the right way”…
Same. I found this essay rather disappointing and just more of the non-concrete c-suite romantic edu-jargon that has landed us in this mediocrity-spiral in the first place. It completely neglects the reality that "creativity" and "exploration" are downstream from having developed a mundane repertoire of shared knowledge and skills. There's this great quote from Stephen Sondheim that illustrates this; he says, "I had always thought an angel came down and sat on your shoulder and whispered in your ear 'dah-dah-dah-DUM.' It never occurred to me that art was something worked out. And suddenly it was skies opening up. As soon as you find out what a leading tone is, you think, Oh my God. What a diatonic scale is—Oh my God! The logic of it. And, of course, what that meant to me was: Well, I can do that."
In my own pedestrian academic life, I still remember my 9th grade English teacher walking us through the structure of a Basic Expository Paragraph. And that was my skies-opening-up moment. Prior to that, I hated writing. It turns out I didn't need more autonomy. I actually needed specific guidance. And I needed to practice using specific content and specific prompts so I could learn to measure for myself if my writing was coherent. And to me, that was a pivotal shift in developing true agency and being able to articulate my ideas. I remember my flower-child parents making fun of the teacher around the dining table and laughing at how structured the class was. They were so wrong! And I'm grateful that my high school followed an explicit content model.
I'm also grateful that the school took on the mundane logistic of making it possible to be a well-rounded student and explore multiple interests. They had buses (including two late bus times!), an 8-period day, decent-quality but non-elite sports, and lots of electives and after-school extracurriculars. And the amazing thing was that the after-school clubs were largely student run by the academically successful Seniors, with a teacher providing advisement. For example, the school musical would be directed by a Senior who was also accomplished in band/orchestra. Theater tech was run by a Senior accomplished in shop. Science Olympiad by Seniors accomplished in science classes. There were real paths to creative autonomy and agency, but they had to be achieved through a combination of content-mastery and long-term dedication. We learned that we were actually relevant and could contribute meaningfully to our own activities, but we also had to earn that relevance because it came with responsibility for underclassmen and sustaining longstanding school clubs that engaged with the wider community.
In my opinion, the best thing K-12 can do is get out of the business of romance and emotional appeals altogether. And instead, get into the business of unapologetic passion for mundane content, scholastic activities, and logistics. Stop trying to change kids' "feelings" about reading, and instead passionately teach students about morphology. Figure out how to have school buses. Shorten class periods so kids can take multiple electives. And if there aren't enough staff to provide after-school extracurriculars, figure out how to have parent and community volunteers. And yes, this may mean that after-school extracurriculars can't be counted as transcript credit. So what!? In the name of bowing down to college applications and demanding a masters-level credentialed teacher to run everything, we are failing to provide kids with a robust high-participation school community.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I love that the Basic Expository Paragraph was your on ramp. For most kids, it’s not (see any engagement data for secondary school kids in most countries around the world). We have to do better at the why-it-matters to get to the what it is (see the above comment on the history play). We are really clear throughout the book that 1) knowledge matters hugely (as does a sequenced and challenging curriculum) and 2) more than ever, kids want to know “why” they need that knowledges. we never say don’t give it to them - we say. answer the why.
Based on the middle two paragraphs of this comment I would say you might like the book (you could hate it too!).
I'm a structural behaviorist. So to me, the "why" cannot be metacognitive. It has to be localized, particular, and readily accessible/reliable/knowable institutional structures. And often, the classroom activities themselves can be those institutional structures (I can't find the history play comment, but maybe that is the example). But you cannot cognitively cheerlead someone to engagement, nor rely upon a social-emotional hack to "unlocking" someone's style. And I worry that this essay gives the impression that you can. People often have to begrudgingly be quasi forced by repetitive structures, by knowledgeable content-experts who are decent prosocial human beings who give a fig, to do things over and over until they develop enough mastery to build intrinsic self-reinforcement. It can feel highly disengaging at times. It's often two steps engaged action forward, one step disengaged feelings backward. And because our minds have a negative bias, our overall self-report is one of feeling disengaged despite our incremental improvements. Maybe the book outlines this clearly, but I'm left wanting from this essay. "Engagement" is not a magic wand. There are no frontal lobe emotional shortcuts for developing action-based subcortical pathways. Getting better at things is hard and kids will always balk at it to some degree, it's just that some kids have more flexible frontal lobes than others and can tolerate disengaging feelings in their frontal lobes without fully disengaging their subcortical pathways. It seems counterintuitive (especially to self-assured adults with highly developed frontal lobes and verbal-thinking styles), but the kids with the less flexible frontal lobes actually need more subcortical stimulation and development (not more frontal lobe appeasement), with individual differences in what subcortical dosing is most effective. If the failures of Whole Reading have taught us anything, the frontal lobes can't experience the satisfaction of "why" and mature into explorer confidence, flexibility, and tolerance without a concurrent increase in subcortical fluency.
I am a school board member and it seems all I hear about from the district is the need for student engagement. I think you raise some fine points in this essay, but I also echo the same questions and doubts the commenter in this thread asked, “what about direct instruction, cognitive load theory, knowledge-building, etc. ?”Engagement does not equal proficiency. As an example, Building Thinking Classrooms math instruction is all about engagement, but there is no data showing students can actually do math better. For novice learners, I think the data is clear that direct instruction wins, but those are treated as dirty words in my district. I think students do need some agency and stimulation. AND they also have to develop the stamina to hunker down and do the work. To your point I also think many students are disengaged because the classroom tasks/material are not at the right level—too easy or too difficult. The just challenging enough is the sweet spot and I don’t know how teachers do that in class of 30 kids. I wonder if AI can truly help with this. Apparently the Alpha schools have cracked that code. I’m intrigued but also skeptical of their two-hour, AI-driven core curriculum.
As a Grade 11/12 teacher of Psychology and French in Canada for 38 years, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that encouraging Explorer mode through interactive lessons , and a growth mindset is key! “ in French classes, I regularly tell my students that I love mistakes, so let’s give it a try”. And then we celebrate when somebody struggles and gets it right. In psychology classes. I give students full reign to choose their own topic for their research papers and I also empower them to teach the class for 70 minute lessons so that they can truly become experts in whatever they’re passionate about. The other piece that is crucial is connection and belonging. When students feel safe in a classroom, they will explore, but when they feel the pressure of the social hierarchy, they will often shut down. This is a nuanced often complex dance for teachers but worth every moment.
Reading the other comments, this is the first about which I also feel is the core: freedom to explore and learn in any moment needing/getting to learn more("failure" reinterpreted), successes celebrated for and by all, the real experience of belonging, and I love your idea of letting them teach.
I'm a retired third grade teacher, and all this worked, also for those on the autism spectrum, most "gifted," with outside the box, and passion-based thinking, reclusive due to the onslaught of too much linear information and sensory over-load.
All the rest shared here or much of it, still felt very measured and result-driven. Where has that gotten our world? Our world is over-goal-driven, when relation, fulfillment, kindness, compassion, and following natural born curiosities-honored from the get go, building cooperative community, and honoring the land, instead of destroying it. It is taking huge amounts of energy now to support AI-development gone crazy.
Progress is good, until it goes too far.
Finland, scoring the highest for a happy society and school testing results, does not have kids in school till 7 years old, after the needed years to learn from experience, their vocabulary carrying that knowledge forward; then teachers teach deeply, so all understand math and the other subjects, before pushing forward, so it can be used well in life; a testing time to guide students forward academically, or to a loved trade...
Again, progress is good till it is pushed too far. We need time to be ourselves, each as designed, with time to smell the roses, and thus to be human.
I couldn’t agree with you more Peggy. Your students were lucky indeed to have you.💕
The Explorer mode framework maps cleanly onto what I'd call high-agency AI use — and the distinction matters enormously in practice. As a sophomore English teacher and member of my district's AI team, I've found that the students who benefit most from AI collaboration are the ones already practicing the metacognitive habits this article describes: questioning their own assumptions, generating ideas before outsourcing them, and treating the tool as an interlocutor rather than an answer machine. AI doesn't create that disposition. It amplifies whatever disposition is already there.
What's missing from most of these conversations is the structural layer. Explorer mode doesn't emerge from good intentions — it requires deliberate instructional design, teacher capacity to model and assess it, and budget frameworks that treat professional development as the primary cost of AI integration, not the licensing fee. My district has been building exactly that: governance structures, human agency frameworks, and multi-year implementation plans that sequence AI use from internal operations to student-facing contexts. Without that scaffolding, "give students more agency" becomes another mandate teachers absorb alone.
One point worth adding to your six actions: AI makes the design of learning experiences more important, not less. A poorly designed task that AI can complete in forty seconds was probably a poorly designed task before AI arrived. The real opportunity here isn't resisting the shortcut — it's making the learning so genuinely interesting that the shortcut becomes beside the point. That's always been the standard. AI just makes it impossible to quietly sidestep.
I’m a school board member in a high school district. I’m also on our recently formed AI task force. Do have any materials you could share with me as it sounds like you’re further along.
This is a solid overview of where we are: https://www.washoeschools.net/directory/ai-artificial-intellegence If you want much more dense prose, check out my post on my Substack page from a few days ago. Main point is that we can use AI to support exploratory learning, but success will require much more real human thinking, not less.
I think the root cause is more basic. What incentive do student's have to care about schooling? I was in high school during the 00's and students were already looking at how the internet and celebrity culture was enabling "drop outs" to make millions. It didn't matter that the chances were low. Also the students who were on the STEM path had "gifted" programs or advance classes that rewarded and challenged their efforts. Now schools do everything they can to pad stats that students can coast to A/B's.
Thank you for the article and insights. I would encourage emphasis on your #5 recommendation of "Help students manage technology" by starting this principle from birth. I believe this is key to what has changed our kids' desire to learn. Today, kids spend 8 1/2 (10 for Black and Latino kids) hours per day with consumer tech embedded with the addictive science of "persuasive design." This science exploits our Stone Age brains by incessantly triggering users to indulge in easy rewards. This is the opposite brain skill demanded for school success. To help kids, we need to protect them and their developing brains from this addictive science so they can learn to enjoy the hard work of school and real life.
Learning Environment: Inspirational Actions, Approaches, and Stories from the Science classroom was written for teachers to model how to engage students learning in and outside of the classroom. Check it out here.
https://www.jaredfox.education/learning-environment-the-book
I can’t remember which state it was but perhaps Wisconsin. Anyway they would do a student engagement survey. I think it was high school students. It was just amazing to me, the idea that we would survey the students themselves about school and their attitudes towards it. Couldn't we learn a lot from that?
I know here in the Seattle region my nieces and nephews, to this day, and I'm old, but to this day their biggest word to describe school is boring. It's boring. They don't even want to go on to get post-high school training or go to college for any reason because "Oh my God, school is just so boring." Maybe these student surveys can hold feet to the fire so we can just emerge from this ridiculous "education system" and get to a point where kids are excited to learn as a whole.
Yes, engagement is so important, especially when students feel connected in their learning environment by developing connections with their teachers and peers!
I would argue another important way to improve engagement in school would be removing 1:1 devices, especially in K-8. As I recently wrote about, https://dencham.substack.com/p/a-world-unseen-the-real-social-dilemma , when children’s eyes are diverted to a screen at school rather than those around them, they miss an unquantifiable amount of opportunities to develop much needed social relationships. We use our eyes to think about our surroundings and those who are in it, it is the root of our ability to develop our social skills. Our eyes are used to notice and interpret facial expressions of others, to develop empathy, to determine what group expectations might be. It is at the core for developing relationships. When students feel connected and have a strong sense of community which is fostered by learning together, rather than independently using “personalized” learning programs, they become more engaged with their learning. Plus these “personalized” edtech programs make students feel constantly evaluated, zapping any joy from learning. From homework, class assignments, assessments and progress monitoring, kids are seeing their scores daily which often can feel defeating.
AI will destroy any fabric of human connection in school if left up to the tech industry and their well stated goals (replace teachers with AI tutors). It is not enough to expect parents to do their part in restricting tech, schools need to get on board as well. It is time to undo the death grip that the tech industry has on education and our children.
Paul Graham wrote a wonderful essay called "why nerds are unpopular" (if you haven't read it, Google it!) which explains a lot of why teens are disengaged. What they do in school does not fundamentally matter outside of school, and schools are childcare as much as they are education. What they really care about is each other's approval, so most of them focus on social hierarchy games.
"What they do in school does not fundamentally matter outside of school." This explains why mindful spending workshops, which allow young people to work on a problem that matters to them in real-time: "Should I buy this item or experience?" are so popular - and effective.
"Blue books are back. So too are in-class exams and No. 2 pencils. "
Unfortunately, they are not. I've seen how at both the high school and community college levels-- I work at an institution that spans both-- there has been almost zero effort to stop cheating.
There has been no re-thinking of course structure or evaluation formats. There is just auto-pilot and mass cheating. Even kids who wouldn't have considered using AI to write a paper a few years ago are now just going for it because there is no penalty. The penalties run the other way.
I appreciate this post, but I think it's crucial that we recognize how many incentives our education system has for not tackling obvious cheating.
As a classroom teacher, 100% this. I can’t BELIEVE we’re not talking about it!
One issue I see is also the ever-raised standards that are leaving students with academic struggles behind. In our effort to make everyone a STEM genius, schools no longer separate kids to teach them where they are. For example, when my 8th grade daughter suddenly began to struggle in math (her grades tanked at the beginning of the school year) her tutor told me that what is now pre-algebra was what we learned in Algebra 2. She said many kids brains just aren’t developmentally ready and, thus, the influx of expensive after school learning centers. Not only is AI an issue, the money-making industry around “excellence” is ensuring the standards continue to rise, leading more and more kids to simply give up because the system flew past them long ago and no one is willing to jump out of the speeding train to help them.
You may enjoy Ted Dintersmith's (@dintersmith) new book, "Aftermath" which delves into the math that is taught versus the math that humans use after graduation.
I’ll look that up!
Thanks, Karen. I might look that up, too. It's always been puzzling to me that schools would want to teach advanced calculus to kids who, once out in the world, struggle with basic arithmetic.
Yes to this. I was a very successful student, by every metric, and yet my kindergarten was relaxed and fun. I happened to find an old report card and there was virtually no assessment of academics other than 'beginning' to know letters and numbers. Now someone has decided kindergarten should be first -second grade, and the result is stressed kids whose future achievement often doesn't support this intensity out of the gate. I have an extremely bright grandchild who about broke my heart when she commented that she had thought kindergarten was going to be fun...
It’s heartbreaking! Learning SHOULD be fun! And it should be appropriate to their developmental level, not what the state has decided are the standards.
I do understand the need for the state to set _some_ standards. But they make little sense in terms of kids' development and, as you point out, the reality of where different kids 'are.'
I didn't have an Education degree, so to get a teaching certificate I had to take a semester's worth of Education classes and student teach. The classes were mostly useless, but I do remember learning that Piaget said the transition from concrete to abstract thinking occurred, on average, around 11-12 years of age.
And yet what is the push, earlier and earlier, in elementary school? Not competence in basic arithmetic, but 'introducing' higher math. There are young people all over the place who truly can't make change if they don't have the register show them the amount, but have received passing grades in at least Algebra and usually other higher maths. Something is wrong with that.
The biggest drop off on student engagement is the transition from elementary to secondary. This is GLOBAL (see OECD, Edurio, Brookings-Transcend, US Census). It is way harder to teach a disengaged student than an engaged one. We talk a lot in the book about how badly education manages this transition
Yes, I remember telling someone, in a rather offhand manner, that middle school was mostly useless. They were shocked, but it's true, in my experience, both professional and personal.
Less able and less motivated students are lost there for good, in terms of actually learning, including those who go on to graduate high school.
It's often a wasteland for higher-achieving students. Many of them just kill time till high school.
Completely agree! This is absolutely the creep of corporate "innovation" grifting into public K-12 (and yes, even the most innovative full-of-jargon curriculum from big Ivy education program and leading guru is part of that grift!). And it goes hand-in-hand with the corporatization of school administration. For example, our district just spent tons of money and c-suite energy to "re-brand" and create a new logo and values statement. This innovation-grift leads to an inability to work within the reality of mundane never-going-away developmental limitations. And worse, it gives the impression that off-task corporate-stylized and adultified global "innovation" (whether it's STEM or elite athletics or the annual gala) is more important than daily child-focused on-task mundane reality at a highly localized level.
Honestly, the point about "passive consumption" vs. "active agency" is the biggest takeaway here. We're so worried about what's happening on the screens that we forget how much the physical environment at home dictates a kid's engagement levels.
I actually went through this recently—my kids were basically disappearing into their rooms with tablets because our old house layout was so closed off. We decided to do a full kitchen remodeling (https://qualityrenovation.com/services/kitchen-remodeling) project to open things up and create a massive island specifically so they’d have a "project zone" right in the middle of the house. It sounds simple, but moving them from a desk in a dark room to a bright, communal space where they’re forced to interact while I’m cooking has done more for their "engagement" than any app ever could. If the home is designed for isolation, don't be surprised when kids isolate.