Recently, I was facilitating a workshop at a conference and a teacher asked a question that’s been a staffroom conversation for generations: “Have kids changed?”
It’s a fair question, and although the quickest and easiest response in the short 90 minutes that I had with them was, “Yes, definitely”, I felt it needed a bit more unpacking.
There is plenty of research that will tell you that students seem less resilient, more anxious, more distracted, or less willing to persevere through challenge. Further to that, social media, changing family dynamics, technology, or the pace of modern life are all pieces of evidence that today’s young people are fundamentally different from those who came before them.
The cumulative result of these factors is that teaching is hard work at the moment, and lots of these things are beyond our control.
But as I reflected on the question, I found myself thinking about a recent piece from Ben Crowe, the mindset coach for plenty of well-known professional athletes, including Ash Barty and the Richmond Football Club. I’m a fan of Ben’s work because he has a remarkable ability to shift our focus away from what we can’t control towards what we can. He also reminds us that while circumstances evolve, the fundamental human needs underneath them remain pretty consistent.
So… have kids changed? I don’t think it’s as simple as yes or no. Maybe a better answer is both yes and no.
The world they are growing up in has certainly changed. The pressures are different, the distractions are more constant, and the expectation of comparison is real.
But beneath all of that, I believe kids are still just kids. What I believe hasn’t changed is that young people have an innate desire to belong, to feel safe, to be known, and to know that they matter. I feel the gap is that sometimes they don’t know how to articulate it or demonstrate it.
So, in an attempt to answer the question about whether kids have changed, the teachers I was working with found their way to a conversation that was less about whether the kids had changed and more about the adults, and their willingness to evolve and respond to the changes in front of them.
Sometimes, the most productive work in education is not the work we do on young people, it’s the work we do on ourselves. When we become preoccupied with whether kids have changed, we can inadvertently focus our attention on things outside our control. When we focus on our practice, our responses, our expectations and our relationships, we place our energy where it can actually make a difference.
I’m talking about the importance of deliberately building classroom cultures where young people belong.
Belonging isn’t a poster on the wall or a slogan in a strategic plan. It’s a lived experience. It’s created through the thousands of interactions that occur every day. It’s built when students are greeted warmly, held to high expectations, challenged firmly, fairly and consistently. It emerges when classroom culture tells every student, “You matter here, even when things aren’t going well.”
Acknowledging that the challenges in our classrooms are hard work at the moment, the conversations about student engagement, behaviour, and wellbeing can’t simply just be about young people in isolation. Changing the behaviour of someone else is hard. A better investment of our energy might just be in conversations about culture, which is led by the adults.
Regardless of how much the world changes, our influence still begins with the environment we create and the relationships we build. Society will keep shifting and every generation will continue to bring new challenges, but every child who walks into a classroom is in some way shape or form still asking the same question, “Do I belong here?”
Every day, through the culture we create and the way we show up as adults, we have the opportunity to put a dent in this problem of a changing generation.
