Gen Z is a puzzle to many professors. Over the last year, The Chronicle has published a series of stories on attitudes and behaviors among young people that make teaching them a challenge. For a host of reasons they may seem indifferent to learning yet desperate to find meaning and purpose. They don’t do much reading outside of class and may freeze in the face of difficulty. Many are hyper-focused on grades and are blasé about cheating.
Yet professors continue to say students are some of their greatest sources of hope and job satisfaction. Many find members of this generation inspiring in their emotional acuity, authenticity, creativity, and willingness to question authority. Those professors understand their colleagues’ frustration. At a time when resources are shrinking and faculty members are taking on more responsibilities, finding ways to bring out the best in their students can feel like a herculean task. But some have managed. How?
“The attitudes of Gen Z may not always be pleasant to deal with, and I sympathize with other instructors,” says Enze Chen, a lecturer in materials science and engineering at Stanford University. “But a small shift in perspective can make a large difference.”
We asked Chen and others to describe those shifts in perspective. Here’s what we learned.
Students want to know why they need to learn something. That doesn’t mean they don’t trust expertise.
Chen was just a few weeks into the term when a student raised his hand during a lecture on symmetry, in which Chen was going through some rather dry and complicated ideas. “Why are we even learning this?” the student asked. “This is a lot of work, and I’m not sure what the importance is.”
Taken aback, Chen was reminded of his brother, a college senior, whom he often cautioned not to be so brusque. But then he thought: fair question. So Chen came up with a few examples of how the concept applied to the real world. He thanked the student after class for speaking up. And he made a few notes for how he’d approach the topic next time.
Chen often tries to put himself in students’ shoes, a practice that comes somewhat easily to him. For one thing, he enrolled in this very course when he was a Stanford undergraduate. So he knew its weak spots and what was most important for students to remember. He is also young enough to have a Gen Z sibling, so he can see how differently they have approached school despite, he says, holding the same underlying values. His brother is more last-minute in his approach to assignments than Chen ever was, and is more focused on what Chen calls “quick wins.”
There is an urgency, in short, that Chen sees in students today. They will put in the effort but expect immediate returns. That doesn’t mean they are not serious people.
On a family phone call after that lecture on symmetry, Chen described the encounter. His brother, who normally doesn’t speak much during these calls, had a lot to say: He understood exactly how the student felt; his generation is more goal-oriented and less patient, more eager to know the “why” of things.
Chen counters that everyone wants to know the “why,” but that perhaps students today are simply not afraid to speak up to reach that goal faster.
Students are not a mystery. Just listen to them.
Bryan Dewsbury, an associate professor of biological sciences at Florida International University, has been spared some of the challenges his colleagues have faced in teaching Generation Z. He says that’s because he is in constant dialogue with students.
When diving into the subject of nutrition, for example, he begins by asking students whether something is healthy to eat and how they know that. That opens the door to a discussion of where students get their information — these days, it’s mostly TikTok videos — and how to check their sources. He sets aside another class session to talk about what it was like to live through the pandemic. Asking students to share their experiences, such as finding it difficult to read three chapters a night, normalized their struggles, he says. And it allowed him to talk about learning strategies that would help them build those skills.
“One of the reasons why I never had a big shock, and ‘Oh this is a different set of kids,’” he says, “is because, through conversation, I am learning in real time how they operate and think differently.”
Discussion-based biology classes are not the norm in the way they might be in, say, history or English. But Dewsbury has been running his classes this way for 15 years. Conversation and storytelling boost motivation, he believes, because they help students connect ideas, make them feel seen as individuals, and clarify what they are getting from his classes.
Through conversation, I am learning in real time how they operate and think differently.
He might begin a session on population genetics, for example, by telling the story of his ancestors, who were brought across from West Africa by the transatlantic slave trade to Barbados. Dewsbury tells his students that he is married to an Ashkenazi Jew and his children are a mix of all these traits. He could have simply put a diagram on the board to explain genetic crossing. “But the story of genetics is the story of populations, the story of life. And the story of migration is the story of human history,” he says, adding that he still gets to the core content but always in a way that makes clear “why understanding this matters to the understanding of humanity.”
His students do well in subsequent classes, so Dewsbury, a nationally recognized teaching expert, knows that he is not sacrificing anything with his nontraditional style of instruction. But he understands why faculty members find it hard to adapt their classrooms to new generations of students. They were not taught effective teaching practices in graduate school, and many still default to the lecture.
He encourages instructors to take a few steps back and think about the strengths of their students, not just the challenges. Don’t think of them as a collective, he says. Try asking students to write reflective essays about what works well for them in class. It may be impossible to remember 200 names, but chances are you’ll learn something about your students.
“The more you can individualize the experience,” he says, “the more you can have a better understanding of who your class is, as a group.”
Students want to be released from the pressure to be perfect.
Julie Casey has been teaching for 20 years. Over time she’s noticed a shift in her students at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is a lecturer in the Liberal Arts Honors Program. They are far more open about how they feel and what they believe, a degree of authenticity that she finds both invigorating and challenging. They are also constantly worried about their image and their performance. The level of perfection students expect themselves to achieve, she says, can be “mentally crippling.”
Casey’s solution: role playing. Using a pedagogy developed at Barnard College called Reacting to the Past, she has students recreate historical events to explore and debate complex ideas about topics such as civic engagement, morality, and democratic leadership. One assignment is a recreation of the ancient Athenian Assembly and the trial of Socrates; another is set during the French Revolution.
Students have embraced the opportunity to try out different roles and argue a range of ideas, including some they don’t agree with. This generation, Casey says, has found that stepping outside of oneself is liberating. She describes it as “‘permission to intellectually play,” which allows students to “engage in the messy business of learning.”
“That’s where their ideas come out. That’s when they’re uninhibited. That’s when they don’t care about how they look anymore because it’s a character and we’re having a debate,” she says. “Once they see it’s OK to do that, that’s where they thrive.”
Her students have embraced the experience, continuing their class discussions in group chats and meeting up to strategize on the next round of debates. Their creativity, she says, is inspiring and has influenced how she teaches: less lecturing and more coaching — while continuing to hold students to high standards.
Sometimes, though, students’ passion and emotional intensity can get the better of them, she says, and they respond to their classmates more with feeling than with logic. Casey thinks this attribute derives, in part, from the tendency for today’s students to “brand” themselves, publicly aligning with a particular point of view.
But she uses these heated exchanges as teaching moments. She recalls one class where a group of students who were playing the role of a mob during the French Revolution became angry with the group playing the role of elites, who resisted every proposal to expand voting rights to people of lower wealth. The students in the mob felt like they had made good arguments, and were genuinely upset that they weren’t being listened to. She works with students in those instances to dig into why different characters think differently. Why might someone believe, for example, that you have to be educated in order to be a leader? In articulating an intellectual position, they detach their identity from it.
“They are learning to develop precision in their intellectual arguments,” she says. “I don’t think I ever was really forced to teach that aspect before. Because nobody was getting that intense about it before.”
It helps, she says, that she has Gen Z kids of her own. She sees how social media and other new technologies have shaped their understanding of the world, and how they have a level of emotional maturity she and her friends never had at that age. She’s able to see them as “not unreachable, not difficult, not warped or coddled or whatever,” she says, “but as humans struggling to adapt to the world.”
Students don’t care about credentials. They do care about authenticity.
When Denise Apodaca was growing up in South Central Los Angeles, she did not have many role models. Instead, she developed street smarts, she says, working her way out of Compton and becoming the first in her family to graduate from college. That reliance on herself, and the dearth of authority figures to help guide her, has shaped her identity as a teacher. She wants to be the mentor that she never had. And that’s exactly what students today are looking for, she says.
Apodaca is a master instructor at Colorado State University, teaching courses in music appreciation and world music. Where others might see a generation burdened by cynicism and fragmented attention, she sees young people driven by purpose and relevance. They learn best, she says, when they believe that what they are being taught matters and that their professor is invested in their success. She sees it as her responsibility to demonstrate both.
“This generation really doesn’t care about titles. They really don’t care about what awards I’ve won or where I am on the hierarchy,” she says. What they want to know is that she is genuine and relatable.
In her music-appreciation class, which enrolls about 250 students, she knows that students could easily sit in the back and not say a word. So to connect with them she asks them to write weekly reflections. Apodaca reads every one and sends them back with comments. She also seeks out music that resonates with her students. In one class, for example, a student chose a song by Selena, the late Mexican American singer, which led to a “heartfelt” discussion, Apodaca says, about cultural identity, using music to express one’s heritage, and blending traditional and modern influences.
She also is intentional about explaining why she wants students to learn about certain things. In a unit on rhythm and meter, she says, she talks about its importance not just in music but also in how we experience time and emotion. In another they might discuss syncopation in the context of a Kendrick Lamar song, to allow a deeper appreciation of the music they already love.
For extra credit she asks students to perform. Some read their own poetry, dance, or play the guitar. She has found that willingness to stand in front of classmates to be an intense bonding experience for the whole group.
“I tell my students on the first day, the only rule in this class is respect. Literally across the board, we are the same. I am here to teach you music, but you are also going to teach me,” she says. She doesn’t talk about her degrees or her awards, she says. “I tell them real stories about my childhood. I tell them that my dad was incarcerated. I tell them that’s why I started the piano.”
Her teaching approach has a spillover effect, with students telling her that her class reduces their stress levels and keeps them going. As part of a campus committee looking at ways to improve retention, Apodaca asked her students why they come to class. About 150 responded with lengthy comments: I come to class because you make me feel like I matter. I come to class because this is the most inclusive environment at CSU. I come to class because I love to see my peers give presentations.
She knows creating this level of authenticity is hard, and that many professors would rather focus exclusively on teaching their subject. She has seen faculty members shut down as she has given talks and presentations on Gen Z. Not everyone can respond to 250 students in writing each week.
Her advice: Show your students your passion for your subject; bring discussion and activities into your classroom; lecture less. “They want to know,” she says, “why they should be excited to learn what you’re teaching them.”
Students have changed. So should teaching.
Art Jipson, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Dayton, will occasionally host a game of Jeopardy in class. He encourages students who don’t like to write papers to produce videos on TikTok or YouTube instead. He uses music to teach criminology.
Jipson has been teaching for more than 36 years, and while these strategies were not part of his repertoire early on, he has learned that games and multimedia are effective ways to get students excited about what they are learning. He chooses the tools and strategies that most resonate with their lives, bringing fun and pop culture into the classroom in constructive ways. “This isn’t just about creating comfort for its own sake,” he says. “They are motivated to think about the material. Not just read the chapter, but sit back and wonder and ponder about it.”
Fun, he notes, is not the same as easy. Students in his classes can’t disappear in the back of the room or put their heads down on their desks. Nor has he scaled back his expectations. In fact, he has found that his approach has helped students retain information more effectively. They “recall more material and are able to use it correctly more often than the students in that first criminology class,” he says, “where I was much more of a traditional teacher.”
Take a game of Jeopardy, in which Jipson writes out the answers and students play the game in real time. They spend an enormous amount of time preparing for these competitions, he says, which are effectively test-prep sessions. And he has seen that music helps foster connections to the material he is teaching. Recently students got into a discussion about Johnny Cash’s famous lyric, “But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” from “Folsom Prison Blues,” to consider why the singer would write about violence as a thoughtless act.
We don’t talk to students as people. We don’t take into account all the challenges students are dealing with.
Jipson regularly asks his students to write reflective essays, including on what classroom experiences they have found most engaging. “It seemed like a lot of that came back to trust,” he says. “They felt free to play with the ideas in a nonjudgmental space.”
Sure, some students might be less engaged than others, but he does not believe the narrative that this is an unreachable generation. While he avoids finger pointing — everyone is exhausted, he notes, professors and students alike — he says that “if there are major mistakes being made, it’s that we never check in with the class. We don’t talk to students as people. We don’t take into account all the challenges students are dealing with.”
Students put work and school on equal footing because they have to. Show them how those two connect.
Many students work in order to afford college. For Tobias Higbie that fact is especially meaningful. A professor of history and labor studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, Higbie teaches students who see themselves as workers and students in equal measure. His responsibility is to help them put those lived experiences into a larger context.
Students in UCLA’s labor-studies program are primarily working class and from underrepresented minority groups. Many are from immigrant families. They have gone through the public school system and arrive in college interested in labor organizing, social justice, and practically oriented social problem-solving, Higbie says. Raised in the post-recession era, they have seen parents lose jobs, work endless hours, or juggle multiple jobs to stay afloat. They question whether a college degree will actually afford them economic security.
Studying the history of labor is tricky, Higbie notes. It can feel overwhelming to learn about the structural forces that work against affordable housing and sustainable wages. But that’s where the pragmatic part of education kicks in. It helps people figure out how to tackle bigger issues by learning about what has worked before, through studying the history of labor activism or the power of collective organizing.
Education, he says, also allows them to take a small piece of the problem and work through it in a paper or a presentation or a research project. “This idea that there’s this stark distinction between skills and knowledge or training versus education, that’s bogus,” Higbie says. “Students want both.”
Higbie thinks one reason students today can feel paralyzed by social problems is that they never received much of an education in civics. He points to the steady drumbeat of research that has captured the decline in civic associations and the growing amount of time people spend alone. “Relatively few people in the United States, regardless of age, have any direct experience with the mechanics of a community organization or a club or things like that,” he says. “It’s the diminution of our capacity to work in groups.”
One way Higbie tries to connect students’ lives to the world around them is through UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, which he directs. It runs a summer research program in which students go out into communities to conduct surveys and interviews about workers’ lives or labor organizing. More recently the program has focused on young workers and student workers. Through their research, Higbie says, the students see that other people are going through similar struggles. They may be worried about student loans, working many hours, dealing with food insecurity, struggling to afford rent.
“They are having a consciousness-raising experience through the research,” he says, “where they start to realize it’s a systematic problem. It’s not just their fault.”
That’s what an effective education does, Higbie says. It takes a topic that can seem overwhelming and breaks it down. “And maybe that’s the hopeful story. The things that professors have been doing forever and ever, some of their common pedagogies, are exactly what’s needed to help this generation come to some conclusions about how it can move forward.”
