Teaching Teenagers - Unlocking Potential in the Young Adult Classroom, by Teresa Bestwick and Fiona Mauchline
Reviewed by Wesley Benito
So often in the ELT world, teacher training and development focuses on teaching young learners or on teaching adults. Online teaching and capitalizing on the AI boom have also drawn much recent attention. But what I feel I need more help with is teaching teenagers, as I often find myself at a loss for how to deal with their lack of motivation.
There seems to be a disconnect between what we expect from our teenage students and the way these students view our lessons. This disconnect often leads to a lack of rapport between the teacher and their students, and even between the students themselves. ‘Boring’ classes create a negative association with the English language.
Teaching Teenagers - Unlocking Potential in the Young Adult Classroom attempts to alleviate these shortcomings in our teaching approach to the teenage classroom. This book is highly insightful for those teachers struggling to build rapport with their students, personalise content, and make English ‘fun’ by focusing on the student’s perspective, and their attitude/feelings toward activities.
Some of the activities recommended in the book may not work for all teachers, nor in all contexts. The activities provided are designed to be used as warmers and coolers, with a few being homework-based.
Content
Teaching Teenagers is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on teenage development. The second section contains a multitude of activities for the classroom. Finally, the third section serves as an FAQ and conclusion.
The Teenage Development section invites the reader to reflect on their own experience as a teenager, and the challenges they faced. In addition, the reader is asked to think about which teachers in school they liked and which teachers they didn’t, and why. However, the book notes that even this exercise is insufficient to put oneself in the student’s shoes, as there are generational differences such as technology that create new challenges for the students of today. This serves as an important introduction to thinking about our classroom approach with this age group. The development section then briefly discusses the science behind brain development at the adolescent age. The most significant part of the book in my opinion has to be found on pages 20-28. These pages delve into the teenager’s social anxieties and encourage the reader to rethink their approach to some classroom activities.
The second section of the book contains around one hundred short activities, organised into several development categories. Each activity is then provided with the skill it focuses on, age and level, and the specific vocabulary/grammar content it is related to. These activities are primarily in the 10-20 minute range. The activities are provided in a manner that is easy to understand and apply in the classroom. They provide opportunities for students to reflect and apply language to their own lives and opinions. Students are encouraged to interact with each other to share ideas and support each other with building vocabulary.
The third section of the book acts as an FAQ section, addressing many of the problems that teachers commonly face when teaching teenagers, such as their not doing homework, or not using the target language in class. The teacher is also given several tools to self-reflect on their lesson planning and delivery in order to continue to self-improve.
Takeaways
For any teacher struggling with classroom behaviour and developing rapport, or for any teacher complaining, “My students just don’t want to do anything”, I would highly encourage them to read pages 20-28. Student identity and I would add, behaviour is often linked to their relationship with their peers. Students want to fit in and integrate in the group (pp21-2). Often, when we start an activity with students, they groan and are reluctant to participate, especially when it comes to activities where they have to do group work or stand in front of the class. However, when the students begin, they get into the activity with a little bit of encouragement. It usually starts with one or two of the students feeding energy into the activity. Then the other students follow suit. The book refers to this as ‘social contagion’, with this also serving to explain the emergence of behaviour issues. (pp23-4)
Although the book doesn’t directly mention alleviating behaviour issues, it provides insights into preventative techniques, focusing on building rapport and avoiding social anxiety situations. Two examples stick out in particular. The first is through teacher modeling activities, by being honest about your own feelings. “Confessing to students on a Monday morning that you may be more annoyed than usual because you slept badly will not only help to build rapport and trust but will also allow them to notice your facial expressions, tone of voice and so on, and how it matches up to the emotions you have told them about” (p24). This honesty can extend to all modeling practices (although, of course, they needn’t and shouldn’t be necessarily negative).
The other example refers to task completion and involves ‘transferable skills.’ “Many teenage learners will struggle to see why they need English in life. … We should use English to teach teens to do other things that they do see as relevant” (p27).
Although some activities presented do not appeal to me as fitting for my particular groups, that’s the beauty of teaching. Some activities will work great with some groups, and some will not. The book provides such a variety that any teacher is bound to find something that they will immediately want to try in their classes. Most activities can also be applied to a plethora of vocabulary and grammar contexts.
One activity in particular that I am keen to try in my own classroom is the ‘Snowball Fight’. Students are asked to write on small scraps of paper questions related to the target grammar structure, such as the past simple. Students then scrunch up the pieces of paper and have a snowball fight in two teams. The learners then pick up the ‘snowballs’ and ask each other the questions on their papers. This is undoubtedly a fun solution to practicing speaking and listening.
Another activity that encourages student creativity is ‘On the Spot Pictures’. Ask your students to take six photos between lessons, of which they will choose four to share with their peers in the next lesson. Students can share what they see in their picture and share with each other why they decided to take this particular picture. They may have to look up vocabulary related to their picture. This relates directly back to the ‘transferable skills’ idea that the authors discuss in the first section of the book. There are many other activities that are very useful.
More than half of the book is dedicated to these various activities, so it is definitely worth a look-through for any teacher short of ideas.
The book ends on a strong front with the third section, the FAQ section. In particular, the authors provide solutions on how to approach L1 use in the classroom and grammar lessons. Whereas the beginning of the book is extremely useful in developing rapport with the students, this final section is full of solutions to address common behavioural issues.
Criticism
As good as the book undoubtedly is, there are a few criticisms to be levelled at Teaching Teenagers.
Teenagers are not like other groups of learners, hence the book; but nor are they monolithic. Any guide to younger learners will differentiate between the very young, say two or three years of age, and more mature and capable seven-year-olds. It is strange, then, that teenagers in this book are treated as just that, teenagers - with no consideration of what it means to be thirteen versus nineteen, or a teenage boy versus a teenage girl. Many of the activities here would work better for the younger end of the teenage spectrum; even my favourites, such as the ‘Snowball Fight’ described above, might be a hard sell with a group of seventeen year-olds, especially if there was a mixture of boys and girls in the class - with all that that means. Yet the book recommends the activity for all ages.
Likewise, establishing rapport with a student of thirteen is a very different proposition to rapport with an eighteen-year-old preparing to leave school - and that is putting to one side the potentially harmful situation of a middle-aged male teacher seeking to establish any kind of rapport with learners passing through their puberty.
Perhaps interesting to some, the brain development section doesn’t seem completely necessary, and the space it takes up could have been invested in a more subtle rendering of the target demographic - teenagers deserve such discrimination, and their teachers would be thankful for it too.
Conclusion
My few reservations aside, Teaching Teenagers - Unlocking Potential in the Young Adult Classroom is a must-read for teachers looking to improve their teenage classes. More than likely, if you are interested in the topic and reading this book review, then you are curious to improve in the areas of rapport and behaviour, in which case this book is an excellent resource.
I particularly appreciate that the authors do not focus on teaching specific grammar or exam skills. This is not the purpose of the book; for that, there are other resources. I highly recommend this book to other teachers, in particular new teachers who are still keen to develop their approach. Even experienced teachers can reflect on their own teaching, and will be able to identify why their specific approach tends to be successful with teenagers - or not!
Biography
Wesley Benito is an EFL teacher at International House Bielsko-Biała in Poland. He has also previously taught in Slovakia, and lived in France and Spain. In addition, he is a private teacher focusing on teenage exam preparation and adult conversational lessons. On the side, he also does freelance translation work.