The Four Modes of Learning—and How to Use them to Unlock Motivation
Welcome back! I have to say, launching this Substack has been sheer joy after a hard set of years researching and writing a book. Thank you for reading and if you like it, please do share.
When you watch your kids studying and learning new things, what do you notice?
Do they spend a lot of time coasting, always doing the bare minimum? Do they constantly burn the midnight oil trying to get top grades, often sacrificing their well-being on the altar of perfect performance? Do they avoid learning altogether, disrupting classes for themselves and others? Or do they experiment with what they care about, digging into things that matter to them and working through obstacles that get in their way? Maybe a mix of all four?
As I explained in my kick-off post, Rebecca Winthrop and I spent three years trying to figure out how to help kids be good at learning, an essential skill in an AI Age and the subject of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. We developed four modes of learning to explain the thoughts and feelings that underpin certain behaviors so you notice them and can use them when they get stuck in one.[1]
The four modes are:
• Resister: When kids resist, they struggle silently with profound feelings of inadequacy or invisibility, which they communicate by ignoring homework, playing sick, skipping class, or acting out.
• Passenger: When kids coast along, they consistently do the bare minimum and complain that classes are pointless. They need help connecting school to their skills, interests, or learning needs.
• Achiever: When kids show up, do the work, and get consistently high grades, their self-worth can become tied to high performance. Their disengagement is invisible, fueling a fear of failure and putting them at risk for mental health challenges. They need help taking on new challenges and encouragement that they matter beyond their achievements.
• Explorer: When kids are driven by internal curiosity rather than just external expectations, they investigate the questions they care about and persist to achieve goals. This is the pinnacle where kids become resilient learners and build skills to help them thrive.
This is the most important thing I am going to say here: These are not identities. Kids shuffle through these modes during a day, or a week. The mode they adopt depends on their mood, their teacher, their knowledge, their abilities, and what they ate for breakfast. But when a kid gets stuck in a mode for a significant chunk of time, that mode can become an identity. At this point, it can be a lot more challenging to get them unstuck. That’s why it helps to notice where they are and have the tools to help them move between the modes. That’s agency, and it’s life-skills gold.
Your job, dear parents, is to notice where they are and when they are stuck, and to help them develop the agency to get unstuck. To help them develop Explorer skills. I promise that you have all you need to do this: oodles of love for your kids; some pretty deep background knowledge about them; and tons of motivation to help them become the people they want to become.
The world is changing so fast. Way back when, employers used to demand strong literacy and numeracy skills. Then it became a host of digital skills. Today, it’s agile learning, knowing how to learn and unlearn and relearn. Being adaptable and flexible. Having agency.
All of which requires being brave.
[1] The book explains at length how we came up with these modes. Suffice it to say it was complicated and intense because Rebecca is a badass academic who required we do things like “lit reviews” and nationally representative surveys of tens of thousands of kids and parents, and adhere to Institutional Review Boards. It was a crash course for this journalist.
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