Read the full transcript of Episode 79 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features authors Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop joining host and NAIS President Debra P. Wilson to talk about their book The Disengaged Teen. They share recommendations for parents and educators in the age of rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI).
Debra Wilson: For the past five years, Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop have been investigating why so many children lose their love of learning in adolescence. Now, weaving extensive original research with real-world stories of kids who transformed their relationships with learning, as well as background research that touches so many different aspects of education, they offer a powerful toolkit and set of insights that shows you exactly what to do (and stop doing) to support kids’ academic and emotional flourishing.
Their research identifies four modes of learning that students use to navigate through the shifting academic demands and social dynamics of middle and high school, shaping their internal narratives about their skills, potential, and identity.
We’re thrilled that Jenny and Rebecca will be joining us as speakers at our upcoming AI Symposium in December.
I’m so excited to kick things off today with a conversation about their new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids to Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.
Hello friends, welcome back to New View EDU. I am so excited. Rebecca and Jenny, thank you for joining us today.
Jenny Anderson: Thanks for having us. Great to be here.
Rebecca Winthrop: Lovely to be here.
Debra Wilson: Excellent. Rebecca, I'm going to start with you. What inspired you to dig down into this topic, into this book? And I love this book, The Disengaged Teen. What inspired you to go down this road?
Rebecca Winthrop: Yes, well, it was inspiration from my kiddos. I had an aha moment during COVID. I have two boys and when COVID hit, where I live, they're in public schools and the schools went offline, remote and pass-fail. And I thought my oldest kiddo was going to be great. He was in middle school. He was getting straight A's, loved school, super competent. And I thought, no problem, not going to have to worry about him.
I'm working from home. Everybody's working from home, stressed out. How are you going to get your kids to also go to school? And that my little one was the one I was going to have to focus on. Literally two months before COVID hit, he'd been diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, which explained a lot, was really helpful because he had totally absorbed this idea that he was not capable, not competent, and he'd basically given up trying altogether and hated school. It was very hard to get him to go.
And what I found was that the opposite happened. When my oldest one went pass-fail, he told me, Mom, if it's not counted, it doesn't matter. And I said, no, no, what? Of course it matters. It's the learning. You need the skills. You're going to go back. This is important stuff. It's not just a hamster wheel that you're running around. And he just lost all motivation, stopped trying altogether. And my little one totally blossomed, free from keeping up with his peers and with some amazing, amazing teachers who helped him navigate the dyslexia thing. He caught up to grade levels.
And I had known how important parental support on student motivation and engagement was. I founded this big global network on family engagement with that, in collaboration with schools. And I just thought, gosh, if I misjudged my own children with all my educational expertise, it must be very hard for other families and caregivers to really see how engaged their own kids are.
And I really knew that storytelling had to be a big part of any project like that, and have loved Jenny's work for ages and ages, and we'd known each other and I literally begged her to join. It's not an exaggeration, to join me. So, finally succeeded.
Jenny Anderson: Rebecca's incredibly persuasive, as anybody who has spent time with her knows.
I had been actually a finance reporter for a long time and I switched to education, and I was really surprised when I did it how little kind of investment there was in the space and how little attention it got and how kind of, in the the realm of the paper I was at, I was at the New York Times, kind of how unsophisticated the conversation was. It was very much about kind of the politics, and I really wanted to know about this stuff.
I had kids as well. It's like, I really want to know about how kids become who they become and how do you make sure they become good learners? Like among other things, you know, reporters are kind of lifelong learners and it just didn't seem to be that that was the focus, it was charters or not charters, or you know, unions and you know, all this stuff, and – all of which is super important, not to undermine that, but like the teaching and learning bit didn't seem to be getting attention.
So I really dove into that and ended up spending five years on that. And when Rebecca came along and said, do you want to do this book? I did say no, only because I had written a book before and I knew it was a treacherous process. And I thought, I think this is going to be tough. But she was persuasive on a couple of points. Number one, there was a hole in the market, which was really about supporting teenagers in their learning in and out of school.
And that we had a lot about the emotional lives, supporting the emotional lives of teens, Lisa Damour's work, which we loved and relied on, and she's a friend. But this idea of like really just thinking, honing in on what happens in school and trying to understand, what are the skills that we need for the future? How do we teach those? What role do parents play?
And I was also really, really swayed by a data point that Rebecca impressed upon me, which is that parents really do have a lot of influence, even in the adolescent years. I knew that we were massively consequential when they were little and kind of when they're still listening to you, but I genuinely remember being a teenager and not thinking and not listening to anything my parents said, sort of starting age 16. And I thought they had no influence. And then of course, when you really think about it, of course they had tremendous influence, but she of course came out with data and research and said, no, we have influence. We can make a difference. We can actually make a huge difference.
We just have to figure out what to do. And so that's how, that was the kind of inspiration to, okay, let's dig into this and let's do the work and figure out what we can do and try to be helpful to parents. I find parenting stressful and I overthink way too many things. So trying to get at what I should be overthinking and what I can let go of felt like a worthy endeavor.
Debra Wilson: I love that. And when we work with our schools at NAIS, we talk a lot about the parent-school partnership. And you highlight in your book how so much important learning actually happens at school outside of the classroom, and how we recognize what's happening with kids. What does their journey look like?
And so, you talked to a lot of kids. You have a lot of great stories in here. So tell me, what are some of the main messages you heard from kids?
Rebecca Winthrop: We do not ask enough of adolescents. They are so capable. They are so creative. They want to make a difference. They are really eager to be relevant, and to be given hard problems and to try to lend their voice and have, be part of the solution to things they see around them. That could be in class, it could be in the school, it could be at home, in the community, it could be in the world.
And we somehow have gotten so fixated on making sure that they check all the boxes to get into higher education, at least the boxes that we think higher education institutions want them to check. And I think there's a whole question there of what, really, higher education institutions really want, that we sort of narrow our ask of them, of adolescents, and make it smaller and more mechanical and don't let them really practice building their agency and their voice. And I think that's what they really want. That's my biggest takeaway.
Jenny Anderson: Yeah, think mine sort of fits onto that. I think Roald Dahl, who we cite in the book, has this beautiful, very succinct way of describing adolescence. It's, the neurobiological imperative is, you separate from your caregiver, you find a mate, you find a tribe. And to do that, you have to go earn status and respect on the savanna. You have to make contributions. You have to earn your prestige. And that's why teens are so eager to both, as Rebecca said, contribute and do real meaningful, impactful things because they're actually trying to earn that prestige and to be respected. And that was super enlightening for me, because we know about the heightened sensitivity. It's often been attributed to hormones, which is clearly a driving force, but in a negative way.
And instead of sort of seeing it in that negative way, and we are, we're putting them in these little boxes and saying, get an A in this and write an essay on that and, you know, do this sport, not even sort of directly, but kind of indirectly. Like we just architect the whole system that way. And we're not letting them be or become the people, you know, very, very variable people that they want to be. Look around, look at your friends, they’re all quite different and they have different interests and they live and exist in the world in different ways. And we have to find ways in schools and out of schools to give young people opportunities to do that standing out and fitting in.
Rebecca Winthrop: Debra, one of the data points that we came across in the research for this book was a researcher who'd done a study of rules, how adults versus children, and adolescents are subject to – this is US research– two times as many rules as incarcerated felons. So that just gives you a sense of what we mean. And if you think about it, a big chunk of their lives is in school and they have to ask permission to stand up, or permission to pee, or permission to speak. When you step back and reflect on it, it does give you pause.
Debra Wilson: It can be very confining.
Rebecca, you sort of opened the door to this. So I'm going to ask this, because it's come up in other conversations with educators. Student lives seem, in some ways, I mean, broader than ever with technology, the things they have access to, but also more confined than ever, whether it's the routine of school or what people feel is being asked of them to get into higher education.
We have Jeff Selingo coming on later in the season to talk about Dream School and that piece of it. But a Head said something pretty provocative to me a few weeks ago. And she asked me if I thought that high schools, and particularly in some ways independent schools, are sort of becoming a last bastion of the liberal arts that a lot of students will experience before they get into higher education.
Is there additional pressure kind of coming down on this generation as higher education has gotten more transactional, you know, larger universities are very focused on what skills, what job are you going to have when you come out? I mean, what do you think about that concept of sort of this compression on adolescence and what's happening in high schools and how high schools have developed, and middle schools too, I think to some degree?
Rebecca Winthrop: We really do have to rethink the purpose of high schools and secondary education, particularly in a world of generative AI, and particularly in a world where a lot of young people coming out of higher ed institutions won't have the experience they need for entry level jobs, because entry level jobs are now being done by artificial intelligence.
And I gave a talk a couple months ago to the Education Commission of the States with lots of, you know, sort of state and district leaders and said, look, I do think that higher, it's on us in education, I'm not sure who else is going to come in, sort of high schools and higher ed to partner with employers to try to build those skill sets so young people can access the world of work. How else are we going to be able to do this?
But it does bring up the question of: Are we going to try to squeeze too much in for this current generation? Are they going to be sandwiched somehow in this transition period where they're trying to do the, satisfy the old system, while the new system is being created? Which is almost, seems like an impossible task.
Jenny Anderson: Yeah, I mean, there's an obvious tension between programs like World of Work and Gahon Valley, which we see, which really sort of expose kids to a lot of work earlier. And then this pressure that we feel and we heard from kids, 100%, that they feel like they need to have it figured out sooner.
I think we can try to separate them a little bit more, which is the exposure is part of bringing relevance and excitement into the classroom, which relevance is something when you asked us what we heard, kids felt like what they were doing in class a lot of the time was not preparing them for the world and was not relevant. And I think if we can use work as a means, not the only means, as a means to sort of say, hey, these are things that we're learning: Physics, math, you know, history, civics, all of this stuff is literally happening all around us and it is real and important and so relevant.
And multiple pathways, people, there are always multiple pathways and, you know, a million ways to do a million things and the world needs so many different skills, right? And so I think if somehow we can balance those two messages, which is use the exposure to work as a way of kind of, you know, tying things more to the real world, making kids feel that they're being prepared for what's on the other side, but also just letting them know that it's not so that they have it figured out. They don't have to have it all figured out. They can really be engaged in the process of learning in K-12, that that is a thing, that that is a muscle, a productive struggle is real, that struggle you feel to get through the fractions, like that is super real and super important, and that too is serving you.
Debra Wilson: I love that. That's, I'm hearing a little silver lining in there in some ways, like, because AI and technology have, I think, made relevant work more accessible in some ways, right? Like, that's, I think, a very real thing. And particularly when we're talking about middle schoolers and high schoolers, as they're doing the hard work of becoming people, right? That's a big chunk of this gig that they're all involved in is becoming people.
So you talked to a lot of kids and then I know you talked to a lot of parents and you talked to a lot of educators. Like what were your main takeaways there diving into this work?
Jenny Anderson: I think we overwhelmingly heard that parents feel very in the dark about what's happening in their kids' learning lives. At one point, actually, a title for the book was The Secret Learning Lives of Teens, which I really liked. Nobody else liked that title. But there was this sense of, obviously in elementary school, you have a handle as to both where they are kind of with their learning and what they're doing, because you're sort of part of it and you see it and you're part of their lives.
And then secondary school happens and you know so little, you're so disconnected from the school for some appropriate reasons, right? This is part of the independence and the separation, but there's too much, right? There's just too much of a, we're in the dark, we don't know what's happening. And I think a lot of struggle with connection. So this kind of concept of how we connect before we can actually have any impactful conversation about anything. Technology 100% featured here, right? We're all so busy arguing about the phones that it's hard to get past that to get to the conversations about, can we talk about what you're learning in biology and are you struggling?
We also heard a lot that it was, parents often figured out things weren't going well when it really kind of blew up. So engagement is a continuum. And some of the behaviors we see early on that we can kind of shrug our shoulders and say, that's just, you know, teens being teens, right? To sort of bring that negative construct in. And some of it is, for sure. Like I don't want to freak out parents unnecessarily, but sometimes seeing those behaviors continuously and not digging into them then was like, kids get to a point where they're telling themselves, there's no point. I'm not going to try at anything. And it's because they failed a test and didn't want to tell anyone or didn't know how to ask for help. So those are, those are kind of some of the big learnings I would say from parents.
Rebecca Winthrop: I would add for educators that they feel really squished in the middle. They feel pressure from above, standards, get through the content, make sure kids ace X, and Z. And then they feel pressure from below, from parents, largely, around, please help do everything you can for my individual kid, even though they have a large group of kids. And that it's really hard for educators to try to center motivation and engagement because of that pressure.
And then the second thing we heard from a lot of educators is they didn't really know how to. They deeply cared, knew it when they saw it, but didn't feel like they had a good lens, necessarily, on how to see engagement. This actually was a big insight, both as Jenny said, parents didn't quite know what was going on because their feedback loops largely were around grades and behavior. And educators said, I really know when my kids are showing up and doing the work, but it's hard to tell sometimes if they're really happy, engaged, thinking, curious.
I think a lot of educators index on behavioral engagement and really struggle to see sort of the emotional and cognitive engagement that lies underneath.
Debra Wilson: You know, you lay out these personas in the book, recognizing, because I was reading these, and I was like, well, that's my daughter from like 8:30 to 9:30. She's somebody else from four to five. Recognizing these are not static. Let's talk a little bit about that, because I think for educators and parents who are both listening, I think understanding kind of how, like, what sort of frameworks you lay out, I think would be helpful.
Rebecca Winthrop: We found that there were four modes of engagement. These are four different ways that students engage in their learning. They are passenger, achiever, resistor, and explorer. And we say it in that order in the book on purpose, because we first laid it out, resistor, passenger, achiever, explorer, sort of, the” worst” mode to the “best” mode. And we found it wasn't quite that way.
Jenny Anderson: So passenger mode is as it sounds, coasting along, doing the bare minimum, kind of racing through homework, lots of attention for sort of Fortnite, zero attention for math, really showing up, but not doing a whole lot of learning. Achiever mode, as Rebecca said, is the next one. Lots of engagement and learning, showing up, trying to get a gold star in every single thing you do, but often really very focused on the outcomes and not on the learning itself.
A lot of kids in Achiever mode, who spend a lot of time in achiever mode, are very fragile learners. They have the highest rate of mental health challenges. They are really trying to satisfy a system that is deeply insatiable, and sometimes lack the sort of self care and systems around them to sort of take their foot off the accelerator.
Resistor mode, lots of agency, but not a lot of engagement. These are kids who are acting out, withdrawing. They are dubbed in the system, the “problem children,” parents feel terrible. They feel very judged for having these kids. These kids are really a struggle for teachers. They're causing a lot of problems in the classroom. These kids typically have a big problem and we really have to get to the bottom of what's going on there.
And then there is Explorer mode, which is the peak of the engagement mountain for us. The top right hand corner in a beautiful little two by two. And that's where sort of curiosity meets drive. Kids both have a sense, they've taken the time to develop their, the self-knowledge to know what they care about, and strategies to go after it. They're flexible, they're adaptable, they're willing to go after something if things don't work out, they pick up, dust off, you know, try again, try a different strategy. So there's a real resilience to explorer mode, and kids, we found in our research, that kids in this mode perform better academically, they have better mental health outcomes, and in some cases, they have better pro-social outcomes. So it really is a sort of like, it's a win-win.
It doesn't...Being in Explorer mode doesn't mean staring at your navel and thinking about the meaning of life. It actually means being able to really dig into the stuff you care about and go after it in a sort of agentic way.
Debra Wilson: So tell me how all these things like mashed together, because it definitely gets, it gets messy. Like I was really intrigued that like, Resister mode actually involves a lot of agency, which you're also seeing with explorers too, right? And it strikes me that high achievers, particularly when they hit that wall and they're feeling...particularly if their mental health is impacted, they just can't take it anymore. That switch can flip pretty quickly to resistor mode.
Rebecca Winthrop: Yeah. Well, one thing before I maybe just give a story or an example of how it all plays out in practicality is that underneath each of these modes, we really indexed on four dimensions of engagement, which is behavioral, showing up, doing your homework, et cetera, following instructions.
Emotional, do you feel you belong? Are you enjoying your learning? Are you interested? Cognitive, deeper learning, self-regulated learning strategies, and then agentic engagement. And this is defined as having, you know, sort of influencing the flow of instruction to make learning more meaningful and supportive to yourself. And it's really important, as Jenny laid out.
And what we did find was that that Explorer mode was really the only place where you had that agentic engagement, sort of agency and engagement together. We also found that these modes are totally dependent on the context. Virtually every kid can get into explorer mode. We found a lot of kids in passenger mode in school and a lot of kids in explorer mode outside of school. And we found that you could be engaged like achievers and be learning to be great followers, if that's what the system is asking you to do.
And so we found that kids move from, yeah, move from mode to mode, depending on the teacher they have, in school, out of school. So it is quite fluid. And the piece that we get quite worried about is when kids stop sort of shifting between modes based on the context and when they really take on an identity with one of the modes.
Particularly what we worry about is sort of the identity of the resistor, a noun versus a mode, a passenger, an achiever, and sort of get stuck. We had one young man tell us, he was 15 years old in 10th grade and say, well, in eighth grade, I pretended I didn't know what was going on in school because I wanted to be cool. So I pretended like I didn't know how to, I didn't really study and I don't know when the exams are, I don't know when the homework is, I don't know what the reading is. And he said, but now I'm, I really don't know what's going on in school. I couldn't possibly tell you. Like I've been so stuck in this mode as a sort of trying to distinguish myself, as Jenny said earlier, standing out to fit in. I'm the sort of cool kid who is too cool for school. Now I really can't succeed today, even though I want to turn it all around.
Jenny Anderson: Yeah, I think one of the most powerful ways parents and educators can use these modes, and there is a danger to sort of introducing them to kids and really, we have to really encourage them to understand that they're not nouns and they're dynamic, but it's to let kids know that they have agency over how they show up in their learning. So it's like, you turn up a certain way and you can change things and actually noticing what works to help you change modes is so powerful, right?
Cause we all feel, listen, we all spend a lot of time in passenger mode and some of that's probably fine. But there are moments where you got to kind of, know, shift up, right? We got to shift into a different gear. Might be achiever mode, might be whatever. But this idea that we really, it's a sort of metacognitive strategy that we have agency over our own learning and how we show up and what we put into it. And that by talking about it, we demystify it. This isn't magic. It isn't like some days you learn and some days you don't.
There are things in your environment. There are things in yourself. There are things in your relationships that all affect how you show up for your learning. And your goal is to try to get into explore mode as much as possible. So what do you notice about what it takes to get there, and what might it take? And that's not a conversation you're going to have like the night before they have final exams and they're super stressed out. Then it's just like, head down. Do you need more chocolate chip cookies? Right. But like when a test doesn't go well, it's a really nice antidote to like, Oh my God, you, you think you flunked?
Like the reaction to that is like, Hey, let's go back over what you did and what strategy worked and what didn't, because obviously we all bomb tests sometimes, that is part of learning, but it's probably cause we, you know, you didn't do something and we can do it differently next time.
That is such a different message. That is about what are the strategies we need to build notice, reflect, change, adapt, move on, do that all over again. That is actually empowering. So that's how I see the best way to use the modes.
Debra Wilson: I love that, and particularly to make it sort of an active part of the conversation. So I'm going to ask you both a personal question, because I found after reading this book, I thought differently about how I talk to my kids, because I actually think some of this, these are leadership skills. Jenny, I think to your point, we show up in different ways in different spaces, and depending on your role or your role relative to any project or whatever you're doing, you might be kind of in a different mode.
I think arguably, if you feel yourself falling into resistor mode, my guess is you're, as an adult, you're experiencing burnout. There are other things kind of going on there, but did you find that after doing this research and talking to kids, talking to parents, talking to educators, that you talk to your kids differently now? And what does that look like from your experience?
Rebecca Winthrop: The one that I used a lot, really shifted how I interacted with my kids was getting out of the nagging procrastination loop from hell. Again, I have boys who are happy-go-lucky, lovely, lovely, lovely human beings, love them to pieces, don't often care about doing their homework on time, or at all, sometimes.
I was really in the, I really actually didn't pay attention and didn't care actually. And I would have a sidebar with their teachers in elementary school being like, do you really want 40 pages of worksheets? And most elementary school teachers were like, no, I'm just doing it because the parents are crazy and think it's rigorous, and you don't have to do it. And I was like, great, he's going to play outside. But once you get to high school, you got to do your homework. And I was very stuck in the, You have any homework? When are you going to do it? Have you done it? Go away. Have you done it now? Did you finish it? We're having dinner. And it would just be this horrible experience for both of us.
To really shifting to the, Okay, what's your plan on how to do your homework? Are you going to do it before dinner or after dinner? And just tell me what your plan is. And I had to do a little scaffolding on how to make a plan, because some kids pick it up naturally and some don't. And you know, three things, what do you have to do? How long is it going to take? When are you going to do it? And that was helpful, a helpful skill.
And so if they didn't do their homework, I would let them suffer the consequences the next day. I was not prepared to let them bomb their final exams or mess up their PSATs or whatever it is. There's a balance, but that actually helped, helped me quite a bit.
Debra Wilson: And I love that. I think you, is it called the procrastination loop from hell in the book?
Rebecca Winthrop: Yes, the nagging procrastination loop from hell. Yes.
Debra Wilson: Well, and then, and then there's the healthier loop too. So for those who are listening who, and I think it's a helpful, my kids do well with visuals. So it's a helpful thing actually to show kids to be like, there is actually, and again, this is a, it's a helpful skill for anybody, right? Like how do you get something off the ground? How do you plan on how you're going to manage that work? So.
For those who are looking for what Rebecca's talking about, it is in fact in the book and yeah, I flagged that too.
Rebecca Winthrop: Yes. The learn, switch to the learning to learn cycle from the procrastination nagging cycle is what we call it in the book, in the toolkit. The second half of the book is a toolkit. Lots of tips for parents and leaders and teachers.
Jenny Anderson: Yeah, so I mean, kind of on brand for some of what we found in the book, my, one of my kids is very much, spends a lot of time in achiever mode. And I think I definitely have, she got great joy out of the validation of many people, teachers, ourselves included, were very achievement oriented people, her parents.
And so I think I always just thought when she brought us her achievements, I did X, my enthusiasm for that achievement was exactly what she was looking for. And I'm sure it kind of was, but I definitely learned to detour to commenting on strategy more, asking if she had a big test, actually really making a point of not asking about the test, which felt a bit of an insult to her because I know she's coming home wanting to talk about it, but I'm saying sort of like, hey, how was, I knew you had strength and conditioning today. How did that go?
And you know, we really need this thing for dinner. Would you mind running over to the store and getting some? It's almost like this very purposeful, like you are not just that, you are so much more than that, and really calling out the sort of stuff that I believe are some of her most wonderful qualities, incredibly generous, wonderful friend, real team leader. So seeing that and calling that out, not in an achievement sense, like you guys won nationals. You're a good captain. That's exactly the wrong message. I mean, I would say that when it was true, but like, hey, you know, I noticed you're, I noticed you helping your friend who was struggling. God, I admire that so much about you.
I think that like, catching them being good, in good character moments, versus good achievement moments, that's what changed the most in me. I will say that my daughter is often asked, have you read the book? And she often says, have I read it? I live it. So, we're loving it. We're really loving it.
Debra Wilson: My daughter did sigh. Like I had it out on the counter and she's like, mom, really? But, but Jenny, it sounds like you were leaning into, know, some of Jennie Wallace's work around mattering, right? Like just this, this idea that it's sort of fundamental to being human, knowing that you matter outside of the scope of all of these things that we measure, you know, honestly, particularly in school, you know. Who gets their picture up on the wall or whatever the thing is.
And that sort of leads me into like, you had a really interesting distinction, and it gets back a little bit to, we were going down the road earlier, I think Rebecca, you talked about kids double tracking these days, and you talk about this age of achievement and this age of agency.
And I do think that our students have been asked to dual track for a long time, show us what you can achieve, but also show us that you have all of these, you know, we call them durable skills now. We are in this age where so many things are possible, and we know so much about the development of adolescents. We know so much about the neuroscience of learning. We know about the importance of engagement and belonging and mental health and how all these things work together.
So are we making this shift from this age of achievement to the age of agency? And what should education look like if we're going in that direction?
Rebecca Winthrop: Well, we argue in the book that we need to make a shift from what we call the age of achievement, where through no fault of anybody inside the system, virtually every education system around the world, just how it has been designed from eons ago, is about ranking and sorting.
Otherwise, we wouldn't have grades. Do you know what I mean? We wouldn't have that. That is the core. The purpose really was, ages ago, sort of funneling up into higher ed. How do you select? And so we're saying, we are definitely seeing the strains on that design. You see it through chronic absenteeism. You see it through adolescent mental health. You see it through the sort of, you know, Jennie Wallace’'s work is brilliant on all that work coming out of the CDC around highly competitive schools, very relevant to your network, and the kids' mental health burdens that come from that.
We see it even in this huge apathy around lack of relevance in school, et cetera. So our argument is, you are seeing the strains of the age of achievement design and that we should move into an age of agency design where you put explore mode at the center.
And we were horrified in our work with Transcend to learn that less than 4% of kids in middle and high school regularly get time in explore mode. And we're not saying you need 100% of time in school to be in explore mode, but a heck of a lot more than that. Because explore mode is what is going to prepare them with the agency and engagement and motivation to navigate this crazy world of generative AI that we are in, in particular.
And I will hand to Jenny, because we do point to sort of signals that systems are moving in that direction. I would not say that wholesale we have moved, but I think if we're going to move, now is the time.
Jenny Anderson: Yeah, I think there is evidence the system is changing and we can talk about that. But I actually think, and I'm sure your schools are seeing this, I think what's very interesting is the quote unquote customers are voting with their feet. And so, and I don't even mean away from the independent schools. I mean, I am hearing across the board from independent schools that more kids are opting out of traditional sort of pathways. Clearly, the majority are still going that way, but there is just a much broader conversation about a different path after high school.
So if school didn't work for you for whatever set of reasons, like take the break, try a different path, try work, try traveling, try gap year, try, these things have always existed. I just think that they are being accelerated and that's in part because I think the conversation about the value of college, which is a very good conversation to be having at the price point that it sits and the amount of debt that exists. So I think that's one thing.
I actually think that there is a broader pathways conversation. I think the value of higher ed is being questioned and interrogated, and it has a value. It has a deep and important value and I believe in my heart of hearts it will be sustained. But I hope for the sake of young people that we get much better at saying, there are multiple pathways for success and for development of skills and for pursuing interests and careers and kind of trying to take that explorer mode into rigorous, you know, mastery level directions.
I think some of the sort of system level changes that we're seeing are things like the college board saying, you know, boredom is a major problem and APs are part of it, right? Like there is an acknowledgement that you would not have heard David, you know, Goldman saying that on stage at South by Southwest, like we are part of creating the problem. Now, whether they have the incentives to change that, I don't know. Like they'll clearly create more interesting APs, but whether we can design an AP that is, you know, exploratory enough, I don't know. That, you know, remains to be seen.
But I think then the sort of elephant in the room is of course AI. I think there is this question of, is the system changing? Will the system change fast enough? And then here comes the tsunami and it is going to force a level of change.
And I don't mean to say that like, schools don't have agency and they can't decide what's going to happen and we shouldn't be protecting and guardrailing all sorts of important things. But that might be the sort of earth shattering thing that moves things in a way that other technologies haven't. This is different from every other technology that we've faced in our lifetime. And I see it fundamentally changing everything.
How are we going to prioritize relationships in schools? We've been talking about that forever. Guess what, like with emotional companions, like, okay, now we really need to prioritize relationships in schools, and kids having face-to-face time with other kids and projects and hands-on stuff. Like we need to do that in schools to make sure that it happens, because this technology is kind of everywhere.
So I don't want to say I'm hopeful, because I think that sounds a little naive. I'm actually at this point, if I'm honest, I'm super worried. I'm sort of seeing the power of tech companies and I'm very worried about a lot of aspects about AI, but I do think the impetus for change in the system, both from some of the negatives, the mental health problems, chronic absenteeism, which Rebecca was talking about, and this technology coming, and young people just saying they want something different, and it seems adults are a little bit more inclined to listen to what they're saying about their own experiences of school. I think there is more possibility for change right now than there probably has been in a really long time.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, AI to me, it's like a meteor, right? And you don't really know what the impact is going to look like. To me, it's, there's so many plus sides. I do, I worry about the liquid expectations created by AI in terms of like, what that means for parents, what that means for students, like that kind of thing.
And I worry about things like, you know, the Jed Foundation put out a statement about, you know, students not using chatbots as mental health companions, right? I mean, we've seen some really alarming stories recently on that front. So collectively, like, which way do you two, which way do you two lean on? I'm generally AI positive. I'm not all the way over on positive, but I think it can have a positive impact.
It's going to require, I think, some sort of personal regulation on the parts of schools and parents and educators in general to be really thoughtful about how we use AI, how we think about AI, how students are introduced to it and how they think about it. But I generally lean pretty positive, which would, do either of you have a leaning or is the jury still out?
Rebecca Winthrop: So I'm in the midst of Brookings, of running a global task force on AI and education. And the focus has been to do a pre-mortem, which we should have done when social media started, because we knew when social media started being rolled out that social comparisons aren't healthy for adolescents. That was well established. So let's do the same type of forethought that we should have done then, now with generative AI.
That's the purpose of our pre-mortem. It's really looking at what we know about children's learning and development, looking at sort of AI and what it can do and how it's being rolled out and saying, what are the risks? How do we mitigate them and how do we harness the real benefits?
But in general, what I will say is we have got to find a new way of solving problems in the education sector because the vast majority of AI access that is harmful is outside of school.
And it's with open-ended, independent sort of engagement with large language models or AI friends or companions that do not have vetted content, have very, very few guardrails. The products are different. So some are much safer than others. But in general, the ones that are massively being used are not optimized for children.
We have got to have a whole society approach. You know, this ever, I am a huge fan of family school collaboration. We have a whole research initiative on it and building relational trust. But, you know, man, this is a time that we really need to bring parents into AI literacy. You know, often we think about rolling out AI literacy for educators, school leaders, students, and we forget about families. So we really need this sort of whole society approach to make it a positive and to mitigate the risks.
Jenny Anderson: I'm optimistic in schools, especially sort of well-resourced schools that have the kind of capacity to do some experimentation and decide on policies and take an informed approach. I think we can, as I said before, I think we can get way more creative about what we do in schools and start maybe prioritizing some of the stuff that we've been talking about prioritizing.
I am super negative on parents. I think the number one thing that parents and teens argue about is social media. And I think this will be just another frontier for conflict. It'll be cheating. It'll be, how are you using that? It'll be, you know, we talk a lot about sort of how to have constructive conversations with kids. And a lot of the unconstructive conversations come from a place of fear. And parents are scared, are really scared right now. They're very anxious. They don't quite, a lot of parents don't really understand what these models can do and what kids are doing with them. And so they're on the back foot and that doesn't, that's not going to lead to a good place.
And I just think the fact that we have, I mean, it just, it infuriates me that this was kind of dumped on our laps at a, sort of a peak moment. You think about sort of generations, sort of, we gave them social media and then we, and then we had COVID and now it's like, Oh, and here's this. By the way, entry level jobs are going away and you need to upskill. And this technology is everywhere all the time. I'm just, yeah, I'm not…
Debra Wilson: This is not a beat you want to dance to anytime soon.
Jenny Anderson: I'm good at harnessing my anger towards constructive ed and so I'm hoping to do some work, like Rebecca was saying, on sort of supporting parents in sort of community, to be brave enough to experiment with these things and have conversations with kids. We don't have a choice at this point, so as Rebecca said, it is everywhere all the time and if we're not having conversations our kids are at risk and so…
We didn't ask to be on the front lines of this at all. We did not need another thing on our to-do lists, but here we are. But I am actually more optimistic for schools.
Debra Wilson: Yeah. Well, this is a fabulous place to end for now because we will see you in Houston for the AI symposium in December. And I think this tees up that conversation nicely. So thank you both so much for being with us today on New View EDU.
Rebecca Winthrop: Thank you.
Jenny Anderson: Thanks for having us.