Ask the average high school administrator about their biggest worries, and it’s likely they’ll cite serious concerns about learning loss during the Covid-19 pandemic.
But their students have a different story to tell. They find school boring.
In their own words:
“I’ve been learning the same things I have always learned. Nothing new, nothing exciting.”
“We don’t do anything that’s meaningful.”
“The work doesn’t require much brainpower.”
My conversations with students make one thing clear:They think the biggest problem with high school is that it’s a huge drag.
High school is broken. We have spent years offering teachers and students Band-Aids, achieving no long-term gains. It’s time to fix what is actually not working.
Students plug away in their classes, constantly hearing that they just have to “get through it” and that the work they’re doing is preparing them for their future in the “real world.”
But we’ve got it all wrong. For teenagers, high school is the real world. Not only is it where they go to gain knowledge and skills that matter to them, it is also where young people form their identities and begin to see themselves as independent adults.
The four years of high school are absolutely critical for young people’s cognitive growth, social-emotional development and emerging awareness of their roles and responsibilities as citizens.
Yet, instead of investing deeply in making sure that their high school experience is aligned with these essential developmental tasks, we treat high school as if it’s some kind of purgatory — one in which young people must suffer passively while we cram knowledge into their heads.
It’s no surprise then that students are tuning out — chronic absenteeism and drop-out rates are up. Confoundingly, all our interventions (early warning systems, home visits, calls and letters) just drive kids back to the classrooms they found irrelevant and inconsequential in the first place.
Related: PROOF POINTS: The chronic absenteeism puzzle
Educators see students lagging academically post-pandemic — yet have failed to seize the opportunity to offer them something exciting and new to propel them back into learning. Instead, we’ve proposed interventions like high-intensity tutoring and extending the school year. Both essentially double down on a formula that not only fails to engage students, but also fails to provide them with the skills and capacities they will need to thrive after graduating.
We seem to forget that we are developing human beings.
Yes, absenteeism and learning loss are real, and the pandemic’s impact on our students has been severe. But our collective hand-wringing hides a far more calamitous truth: The everyday instruction that we are so eager to double down on has in fact been an abject failure.
Indeed — and this is especially true for high school students — we have accepted subpar learning experiences for decades, exposing young people to dull content and rote assignments and asking them to engage in work not worthy of their talents.
The accrued cost of our complacency is the real devastation. Students are bored and disengaged and seriously unprepared to succeed in their postsecondary lives. And educators are leaving the profession in droves because they don’t have the tools they need for success. They are being asked to not only accelerate academic growth but also address students’ emotional and developmental needs.
We cannot realistically afford to continue on this path and expect positive results.
So what must we do? Fixing high school requires that we reimagine the fundamentals of teaching and learning.
Education leaders must be laser-focused on ensuring that young people are offered challenging and authentically meaningful work. Their learning experiences need to include opportunities for them to delve deeply into topics that concern or excite them, to explore cognitively complex ideas and to build skills they will use outside the classroom.
I’ve spent the last decade with my colleagues listening to students and teachers about what needs to happen to make high schools feel vibrant and alive and for learning to feel consequential.
What we came to understand is that there actually is a way forward: leverage rigor and purpose. Provide teachers with comprehensive curricular tools to create meaningful learning experiences that challenge students to think critically, ignite engagement and give them a rationale for digging deep. Support teachers to focus on facilitation rather than content delivery. And then, as students find meaning and purpose in what they’re learning, teachers can spend time coaching and providing feedback rather than managing behavior and attention. Meanwhile, students will acquire the skills to engage with substantive issues, and the confidence to know that they can make a contribution that matters.
What is so effective about this approach is that it gets at what research has made clear and what the best educators intuitively know: Academic growth is deeply intertwined with social and emotional development. When we target education reform efforts squarely at the student learning experience —and prepare teachers to facilitate rather than dictate — we can find the sweet spot for engaged learning, academic achievement, authentic preparedness and identity development.
Imagine an Algebra unit designed to teach students how to analyze short- and long-term costs, visualize data in tables and graphs and use equations to represent multiple outcomes. But the unit’s context makes students care by connecting those skills to something valuable to them: exploring potential careers and the consequences for a range of real-life decisions.
The math comes alive, with students engaging deeply as they figure out what it actually takes — and costs — to make their dreams reality.
This is what meaningful, engaged learning looks like. It’s the type of learning that young people want and need, as they gain skills that matter to them. It requires the kind of teaching that reinvigorates educators and reconnects them with what they loved about education in the first place.
The path to transforming high schools runs directly through reimagining the student learning experience. Let’s ensure high school is a place worthy of young people, honoring all that they are — and can be.
Elina Alayeva is the executive director of Springpoint, a nonprofit that partners with high schools to reimagine the student learning experience and prepare every young person to succeed.
This story about transforming high schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
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