Louanne Piccolo is a native English speaker living in France who is also an English language teacher. As a regular reader and contributor to our blog, she’s written an article all about top teaching tips for teens!
Although teenagers have a greater learning potential than younger children, they are more difficult to motivate and manage. It also takes longer to build up a trusting relationship with a teen. Once you find the right balance of respect and authority, though, teaching teenagers can be a rewarding experience.
What you need to know about teenage learners
We were all teenagers once but it’s sometimes difficult to remember what it was like and how we felt. Here are some ideas of what being a teen means:
- They go through a difficult developmental stage between 13 and 19 and, even though they would never admit it, authority and stability is reassuring to them. They also have a heightened sense of what is right and what is not. Teens need to be treated with respect and fairness by their teacher even though they may still be unsure of their own personal value, capacity and intelligence.
- They crave authenticity and ‘real’ people. A teacher who pretends to be cool to impress students will quickly lose their respect. Academic closeness is acceptable between teachers and teenagers but anything friendlier is generally thought of as suspicious.
Four tips for teaching teens
Here are some ideas for motivating teens:
- Teenagers want to identify with what they are learning. Use this to personalise their lessons with what is going on in their lives at the moment. Keep up to date with technology and current events that interest them and exploit them in class. It’s vital to getting and holding their attention.
- Teenagers are self-centered. They are emotional and enjoy talking about themselves, their lives and their opinions. Let them write journal entries or articles on a blog they have created. Social media and the Internet create opportunities for platforms that are so much more interesting for teens to work on than a sheet of paper. Let them talk freely and endlessly about a topic they are interested in: themselves.
- Teens want to know why they are doing something, how it can help them and how it relates to their lives. Motivate students by making lessons relevant to them. Their own experiences are more useful than any resources you could find in books or on the Internet. Let them vote as a class on a list of topics they would be interested in working on.
- Teenagers want to be taken seriously and be treated as individuals with their own ideas. Let them participate in classroom decisions so that they feel some ownership of, and commitment to, the learning program while keeping decisions about learning and assessment for yourself. Striking a balance between teen participation in decision-making and total teen control is important.
Do you have tips on teaching teens that you’ve found handy?
If you enjoyed Louanne’s article, make sure you read her blog post all about using graded readers to teach grammar.