"Bueller? ... Bueller?" Could there be a more boring classroom? (And we sure didn't learn much about tariffs!)

“In elementary school, in early years about 75% of kids are truly engaged in their learning and by the time you get to high school it’s flipped – only 25% of kids are engaged in learning. If you understand how important engagement is to learning, that should be a five-alarm fire for everybody” T4. In their new book, Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop address the crisis in engagement among today's adolescents.

Over half of secondary students in Anderson and Winthrop's survey were in "passenger mode," coasting through school with little investment. Importantly, they are NOT lazy, and many of them don't "understand the point of school. And so they check out." But what happens in the classrooms matters. 

Anderson and Winthrop argue that a good chunk of the problem lies with the traditional, and still dominant, model of instruction. "Schools that push kids to not only master essential knowledge but also to think deeply and apply what they know in class to solve real-world problems" remain on the fringe. Importantly, we still need more Authentic Pedagogy.

See Anderson and Winthrop's article The Teen-Disengagement Crisis in The Atlantic, February 26, 2025.