Educational Leadership - September 2010

starting to chart their course as adults (Yelowitz, 2007).

We see teens delaying getting driver’s licenses that their parents once raced to obtain; we see delayed financial independence; we even see delayed interpersonal independence, typified by the remarkable 13 times a week that the average college senior now contacts his or her parents (Kennedy & Hofer, 2007). We may have noticed that adolescence now seems to go on forever—but we’ve failed to notice how this change can affect teens.

Imagine that one morning you wake
up to find yourself in a twilight-zone
world. Walking outside, you see your
neighbor across the street, a surgeon,
who remarks that, instead of operating
on live patients, he spends his days
just cutting up cadavers to practice his
craft. As you move through your day,
you realize that lawyers now argue only
mock cases, plumbers practice repairing
fake leaks, and airline pilots fly only on
flight simulators. In your own job as a
teacher, instead of teaching students,
you stand at the front of an empty
classroom talking to a video camera.
The meaning of your work is gone, and
increasingly, you feel bored, restless,
apathetic, and even lazy. Then it dawns
on you—you’re now experiencing the
life of a typical high school student!

schools lie at the epicenter of the Big Wait, and they feel the shocks regularly; but they are also in a unique position to provide solutions.

Anthropologists who have studied adolescents in hundreds of other societies provide an important clue to those solutions. They’ve found that problems such as juvenile apathy, rebellion, and delinquency are largely nonexistent in societies that routinely ask teens to engage with adults in adultlike work (Schlegel & Barry, 1991). The notions about hormones and immature brains that we sometimes cling to as explanations for adolescent problems don’t predetermine teen behavior in those societies.

Rooted in the experience of such societies, and of our own society not long ago, solutions begin to emerge. Our students will come alive if we can reintroduce elements of real adulthood into their teenage years.

How do we do this? We can start by asking, What motivates us as adults? What makes us take our work seriously and put in effort even when it’s hard? The answers can be distilled into what we call the four Rs of an adulthood-oriented approach to teen learning: relevance, real-world feedback, responsibility, and respect. These terms are not new, but when we view them from the perspective of adult motivation, we may begin to see our students differently.

Making Adolescence More Adult
The good news is that once we rec-
ognize how the Big Wait affects
teens, we gain a new leverage point
for tackling many problems that we
may have come to view as wired into
these students’ behavior. Teachers and

Relevance

The teacher’s first task in any class is to let students know why they should bother to learn the material. “Because your grades are important” just won’t go far with most teens. If we’re really going to engage them, we need to take on the mission from day one of showing them how what they’re learning may someday be useful in the adult world.