"Struggling" Adolescents

I have heard the phrase "struggling adolescents" too many times throughout my education classes and observations at local middle and high schools. That phrase assumes that the problem lies in the student, not the teacher.

Perhaps that assumption is wrong.

David O'Brien conducted a study on such "struggling adolescents" with a focus on increasing student engagement through multimedia activities. His study looked to answer two questions:
1. Why do adolescents who "struggle" with reading print text--a complex processing act--competently engage in these media-rich practices and choose to engage in them?
2. What is the nature of that competency and how is it connected to engagement?

To any reader, pre-service teacher, current teacher, student, former-student--anyone!--which activity sounds more exciting to you:
Choice A: Read The Outsiders and write an essay about the effect violence has on the Greasers and the Socs.
Choice B: Use a range of different sources, print and electronic-based, to show the effect violence has on adolescents.

Choice A seems connected to any typical English class assignment. Many students will not be interested or engaged in that assignment. Choice B seems more relevant to their own lives, more authentic, more interesting, thus a higher engagement would result in this activity.

O'Brien discovered that student competency and engagement increased when he introduced Choice B to his research subjects. He discusses our transition from the "print-centric" world to the "media-centric" world. We used to solely live in a print-centric world, but now we also live in a media-centric world. We need our students to keep up with the world we currently live in, not just the traditional world that was around years and years ago.

I want to add some lines from the text that speak so loud to me, for I have seen these exact points in my own observation:

"Low achievement led to low perception about abilities, which resulted in increasing disengagement from reading, which, in turn, resulted in lack of practice, low fluency, lagging decoding skills, and the absense of strategies."

"When students discover, early in their academic careers, that they are not doing well in reading, and they attribute success to stable factors outside their control, success is perceived as unattainable, universal, and permanent."

"Helplessness is learned as a response..."

The last quotation is probably the most valuable lesson I attained at my recent observations in a middle school. Students would not do assignments because they would either get the answer from a teacher/observer who would tell them the answer, or they would not do the assignment and there would be no punishment. Helplessness was something that these students did not master in this class alone; this problem seemed to stem somewhere earlier in their academic careers.

So what does the teacher I observed do from there?

She has students who have learned helplessness and use it as a result. They are in a classroom that specifically targets Choice A above. They have little resources in their school, but they could perform Choice B at home or in the Mac lab at their school.

Why do I think this would be successful in this particular classroom?
These students are so busy texting on their cell phones and talking about TV from the night before that they can't listen to the teacher speaking to them. So, keep their focus on what they are talking about in the classroom, and put ELA skills to use on that topic.

The students I observe behave in ways described in the above quotations. I only see one school, but I am sure this is the case for many classrooms all around the state. Think about the points raised in this blog in order to change something in school systems now. Consult Hobbs, consult Richardson. These students are only "struggling" because we allow them to.