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S1 E1 Why Teaching Feels Harder Now – The Challenges of Engaging Today’s Learners

Teaching@Tufts: The Podcast
Teaching@Tufts: The Podcast
S1 E1 Why Teaching Feels Harder Now - The Challenges of Engaging Today’s Learners
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Today’s episode launches our pilot season Engaging Today’s Students: What the Learning Sciences Tell Us.  This season will explore the cognitive, emotional, and environmental factors shaping how students learn today—and what instructors can do to meet them where they are.

In Episode 1, “Why Teaching Feels Harder Now – The Challenges of Engaging Today’s Learners“, Carie Cardamone, Dana Leeman and Nicholas Covaleski from Tufts’ Center for the Enhancement of Learning & Teaching explore the cognitive, emotional, and environmental factors shaping how students learn today. Drawing on the science of learning and instructors experiences, we provide concrete strategies that don’t require radical pedagogical overhaul – practical moves you can try this week.

Strategies for Instructors

1. Device Breaks with Purpose: Ask students to put devices away for 15-minute focused activities using prompts like: “What are your top five takeaways from the 15 minutes we just had?” or “What do you know now that you didn’t know an hour ago after being in this class?

2. Chunk lectures into small digestible segments

3. Adopt a Compassionate Mindset: Remember students bring their whole selves to class. Maintain clear expectations while showing grace and recognizing that these challenges affect everyone, not just students

Listen now on Spotify

Resources & References

CELT’s Website

Music Attribution: Inspiring and Energetic by Universfield — https://freesound.org/s/749933/ — License: Attribution 4.0

Transcript: S1 E1 Why Teaching Feels Harder Now – The Challenges of Engaging Today’s Learners

Carie Cardamone [00:00:00]Welcome to Teaching at Tufts: the podcast. This podcast comes from Tufts’s University Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching. My name is Carie Cardamone, and I’m joined today by my colleagues, Dana Leeman and Nicholas Covaleski. Say hi, Dana and Nick.  
Dana Leeman [00:00:15]Hello.    
Nick Covaleski [00:00:16]Hi there.      
Carie Cardamone [00:00:17]Teaching at Tufts the podcast offers teaching tips, practical strategies and highlights from recent developments in higher education. For the busy instructor on the go, Today’s episode will launch our pilot season – engaging today’s students, what the learning sciences tell us. It will explore the cognitive, emotional and environmental factors shaping how students learn today, and what instructors can do to meet them where they are, to start us off today, we want to dig into why teaching feels harder now the challenges of engaging today’s learning. Maybe you’ve noticed in the last year or two, some students are unwilling to engage in a classroom discussion that for years you’ve had great success with, or perhaps more students are failing to turn in assignments or missing class or pushing back against some of the readings you’ve assigned in ways you haven’t seen before. There are a lot of external factors that could be causing shifts in how students are engaging in their classrooms today. So, we’re going to talk to Dana about some of these major themes and research on this. Dana, I know you’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Could you tell us a little bit about what is impacting today’s learners and some of the research around it?  
Dana Leeman [00:01:26]So, I’ve been thinking about this really, for the better part of a year, and had spent a lot of time last summer delving into literatures and neuroscience and neuropsychology from the United States, other parts of North America, Europe and Asia. And this is not a question that we’re asking in a vacuum. It’s being asked and has been asked, actually, in lots of different places for different reasons, but essentially, it’s this understanding of the kind of high amounts of distractibility and disconnection. And I think for me, what brought this into my thinking and why I wanted to do more work on it was I was hearing increasingly from faculty, a kind of bifurcation, an us-versus-them, that the students were somehow different. They lacked a kind of grit for learning. They were always challenging them for a grade, a point or two on a grade, but not necessarily up for willing to do the hard work of learning. And as I kept hearing this, I thought, you know, educators and students are sort of supposed to be kind of on the same team. And what I was hearing was more of an us versus them mentality, where the students were being judged and weighed wanting. And I thought that’s what brought me to this work.  
Carie Cardamone [00:02:41]That’s really interesting, because I feel like it’s something that is perennially right around “Oh, students don’t do reading like they used to”, “students these days”, and yet it feels different now than it did when I started teaching and I heard the same things from my seniors.  
Dana Leeman [00:02:57]Well and I taught graduate students and still heard those things Even at the Masters and Doctoral levels. So, I would say, in a nutshell, that what I learned from consuming a lot of research was that our brains are changing, and that the students were teaching their brains have changed, and it’s been primarily because they’ve been they’re digital natives who were introduced to screens and devices, sometimes from near infancy. And this is not it’s important that folks listening don’t hear this as any sort of a scathing commentary on kids today. It’s the reality of the world they’ve grown up in, and the exposure to screens has changed the way their brains are developing. When you change the dura in the brain, it changes the way neuronal connections and pathways are formed, which then impacts social, emotional and cognitive functioning. And we’re seeing those kids come of age in undergrad and in graduate programs with fundamentally different anatomy than maybe I had have, and even you have because of being a certain age and not being a fully digital native. So that’s really the essence of what I distilled from all of the stuff I read.  
Carie Cardamone [00:04:09]Could you give us an example of some of the ways this is impacting a student in the classroom?    
Dana Leeman [00:04:16]Yeah. So, one of the things when the prefrontal cortex thins, and I want to say I am not a cognitive scientist. I’m not a neuroscientist. This is the way I came to make meaning of the literature. So those of you who are experts in the field may find my interpretation somewhat reductive, but this is how I came to understand it. Is that when the brain the prefrontal cortex, thins, it impacts the way neuronal pathways are created. There are actually MRIs that show humans at different ages, and those pathways are actually they look messy.  Not that they’re neat and pretty packaged in our brains, but they refer to the thinning of prefrontal cortex as causing neural disorganization. Those impact, oh gosh, so many different functions, executive functioning, communications that can affect the way a student is able to attend to information or learning for a protracted period of time, which we see distraction. And there are lots of other reasons we can get into why students may be distracted. But there is kind of this biological causation. Other things: they may have a very difficult time managing conflicts and that may, gosh, that may manifest in a whole host of ways in the classroom. So might be if you’re having a contentious conversation, students may become more agitated, or you may see evidence of more emotional dysregulation. So, I think the ways in which I’ve heard faculty say, you know, the things that students aren’t able to do to kind of show the maturity and that sort of persistence in learning environments, to continue learning, to be resilient learners. Some of that is because their brains are different, and so screens are part of it, but there are other contextual, socio political, other factors that also affect how they show up and how they engage with each other, with faculty and with the content.  
Carie Cardamone [00:06:17]Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I mean, it’s not just the screens, right? that you’re describing that are impacting executive functioning and social interactions. It’s the engagement with the social media, it’s the constant notification they’re getting from the screens, and it’s the change in the culture around them, right? Even if they themselves don’t happen to have a cell phone or use it in particular ways, they’re with their peers who are doing that, and that must change the dynamic.  
Dana Leeman [00:06:42]It absolutely does. I mean, I think when I think about the brain: I think about, so what’s going on in the world that’s impacting their ability to have as full a cognitive bandwidth as possible, and then that all of these things going on are sort of taking chunks out of that bandwidth. It’s getting smaller and smaller. And so I think about worries they have about climate, and about their future on this earth and coming of age on an Earth where there are concerns about climate and resources, in a sociopolitical environment that has been incredibly volatile. And I think that there’s also this pretty, frightening geopolitical situation that there’s so much conflict happening around the globe, not just what’s going on domestically. So, I think that all of those things can contribute to the way they present in class. Mental health disturbances, those have been on uptick for the last 10 to 15 years. Covid continues to impact the way students engage. I think some of the students we’re seeing enter into college, you know, they were young during Covid, and they missed out on some pretty critical pro social learning and engagement in that way. So, I think of this sort of the screens distract them, the screens keep them awake at night so they’re not getting enough sleep. And this starts pretty young, too. The sociopolitical, all of those contextual factors that I think are very weighty and frightening and are causing students to wonder, you know, what is the future going to look like for them, I think now we have that little thing called AI, which has thrown a real wrench into their educational experience. So, I think all of those factors conspire to make it harder for students to fully be present ever. The thing you say about social media, which I think is important, is that I have come to see the influence of social media as being like a presence in their lives that is so incredibly intrusive. Even if they’re enjoying being on social media, this idea that you kind of curate a presence on social media that needs constant tending. People are constantly reacting to it. It doesn’t go to sleep. You know, it’s not like when I left school when I was a kid. There was no interaction. We had a phone in our house, and there was nothing beyond that. You could take a break. They don’t have a break from it. And I think they’re not learning how to and they’re not they’re not learning within contexts that are helping them. I think that’s beginning to change, but I just think the constant pressures of that, I can’t even begin to imagine how challenging that is, and how distracting that, how that affects your day, how it affects your sense of self.  
Carie Cardamone [00:09:31]Nick, I’m wondering, you’ve been teaching a lot of students these days, and I’m wondering if you’ve seen anything in the classroom, in your classroom, that sort of might, might be tied, of course, we don’t know in any particular case that might, align with some of what Dana is suggesting.  
Nick Covaleski [00:9:44]Yeah, absolutely all the time. It’s hard to pick just one or two examples. I think much of what Dana just said manifests in a lot of different ways. I think one that comes to mind was simply I was teaching last year, fall of 2024, a group of freshmen in a writing seminar. And this has to do with just the distraction and the technology. And I had a pretty, I think, run of the mill policy around cell phone use, which was basically, try not to use it in class. It’s a distraction to yourself and others, but if you have to step outside and use it. And that had, for me, worked in the past, of course, in past previous classes, there were typically students trying to conceal it, trying to hide it, and their books are under the desk or whatever. But I was really taken aback by the group who I was teaching last year, the resistance to that. Cell phones constantly out on their desks, out in front of them, even while their classmates, or even while I was talking, they would have it in front of them like they were texting or on social media. And it was eye opening. It was, it was the most, you know, for several class periods I had to, you know, remind them of the cell phone policy. And eventually it got to a place where it was manageable, but it was, it was quite a struggle, and it really again, kind of opened my eyes to how I think for many young people today, that cell phone is quite literally a part of them. It’s an extension of their body and of their mind. And to ask them to put it away for however long can be, can be quite challenging for them. As far as the broader some contextual factors that that might be going on. One case stands out in particular in my memory, which was, was quite, quite sad, actually, but I was teaching a class or a unit on moral enhancement. And for those of you who don’t know it’s this kind of speculative philosophical idea that humans might use technology to artificially enhance our morals. And one of the reasons, or the reasons why people argue for this is to address issues like climate change. The argument being that us humans, we just aren’t equipped mentally to deal with such a huge issue. And so, I asked students to weigh in on whether they thought moral enhancement could be a potential solution for something like climate change, and a young woman, 18 years old, raised her hand and very thoughtfully started articulating her objections, saying that, no, I don’t think moral enhancements the solution. And started to articulate and voice all the reasons why it you know, the problem was much bigger than that. And then she kind of slowed down, and her eyes began to well up, and she began to cry, and it was an incredibly moving moment, and she got up and she left the classroom, but again, just eye opening to, of course, changing climates on all of our minds, but, but the weight of that for young people who have so much to look forward to in their life, but so much going on that’s rendering the future uncertain. So definitely seeing that a lot.  
Carie Cardamone [00:13:00]I think we’ve all seen examples of this in our classroom and arising for students in different ways. Dana, I’d like, before we end this episode, for you to bring us together with some practical tips that might help instructors, at least frame their thinking around this, to start helping their students in their class learn.  
Dana Leeman [00:13:18]Well, I really do draw from the learning sciences when I recommend these things. And I also want to say to faculty, there is no need to radically change your pedagogy, but there are some things you can add throughout the course of a class. These are also things you can do in a clinic or a nontraditional learning setting. I think it’s really important to ask students to take breaks from devices. I am not someone who is an advocate of banning computers or devices, because I think for some students, they’re incredibly important part of their learning, actually, but I think it’s okay to ask them to put them away for, you know, 15 minutes and do an activity where you’re asking them to recall, you know, what is part of the conversation we just had? Or if you gave a mini lecture, and mini lectures are really important, as opposed to long, extended lectures, where you are chunking information that you are delivering, people can attend to it, and they’ll get more from it. But also, I would sort of ask them, you know, to just write down sort of bullet, you know, or your top five, five takeaways from the 15 minutes we just had conversation or lecture, you know, what’s a new idea you just had? What’s you know, we could do? Muddiest Point, clearest point. One of my favorites is, what do you know now that you didn’t know an hour ago after being in this class? What can you do now that you couldn’t? And maybe there’s no answer to that, but maybe there is, if it’s if it’s a skills focused lesson, what is something you could teach to a friend who is absent today? So, these are different things you’re asking them to do, but you’re asking them to write it down, asking them to reflect. And those are also really helpful retrieval practice. So those are really. Kind of metacognitive strategy. So that’s one this. So, it’s the taking the break from the devices, to think for themselves, to write in an analog way, is important. And the other thing I is less of a practical tip Carrie, it’s more of a mindset that I think I would ask faculty to adopt is that when the human in front of you is standing before you and presenting challenges, and as an instructor, it’s not just this one human, it’s an entire class. It may be, you know, 300 students, and there’s only so much bandwidth you have, but I think what feels incredibly important is that you think about the learner in this context, not that you should be looking at a human going, Okay, your brain is different. But think about all of the things they care. They bring their whole selves into that class. You have to be mindful of the whole self, but also be really clear what the limits are. And a student may not like it, a student may push back, but it doesn’t mean you should keep moving the line in the sand. So be really clear and be compassionate and show grace. And I think what I stopped hearing in some of the conversations that led me to do that research was that there was a lack of appreciation or grace for what this this young, developing human, was going through and what they were facing similar to it. Nick just shared, I would ask you to please, as hard as it is on you, please don’t forget all that they’re carrying because you’re also carrying it too. You just have more experience and maybe more life skills to cope with it.  
Carie Cardamone [00:16:32]I appreciate that as a closing thought too. I mean, today we’ve been talking about all of these impacts that students are seeing in terms of their physical development, their cognitive development, their social development, the peers that they’re with, and how this is changing, some of the ways they think, some of the skills from executive functioning and attentional skills that they’re drawing on. And I love that, that piece of having empathy, not only for the student, but also having empathy for yourself, because there is only so much you can do, and those limits are important for you too. They’re important for the student to be working within limits and bounds, but they’re also important for you as the instructor to realize that you can only do so much. You can’t make 300 separate accommodations for a given quiz, right? So, you need to think about what is practical. So, we encourage everyone listening to try out these activities. This entire season is going to be addressing different aspects of the learning sciences. So, we’re going to keep coming back to that. Today’s show notes will include links to articles and books referenced in today’s episode. Until next time, keep teaching, keep learning, and don’t forget to take care of yourself too.  

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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