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A couple of days ago, I worked with the school district of the Chathams (yep, two Chathams), a few miles west of Newark, New Jersey. It was a facinating and very appealing community and I was reminded, once again, how hospitable people can be and not be from the south (sorry).
Most directly, I worked with a local education foundation, which has funded a number of technology projects for the system, including projectors and interactive smart boards, video game systems (Nintendo DSes, and a cyber social learning center at the high school. They asked me to come and talk about video games, their associate superintendent having met me at an NJ conference a year ago.
I presented an afternoon workshop with educators, sandwiched between two sessions for parents and the community, one in the morning and one in the evening. It turned into a long but very enjoyable day. As you might expect, there was some initial skepticism about the educational potentials of video games, and I did not alleviate all of it– nor should I. We should all remain cautious about new technologies and new techniques. It is too easy to go overboard, blinded by the glare and seduced by the glitz.
We tend to form our opinions about what is new from our past experiences, and when talking about education, we all have fairly rich experiences to draw on — and though they not always positive experiences, they are indelible. It was during the evening session that the most push-back occurred, as I shared some findings indicating that the video game generation is more sociable and better collaborators than the previous generation. This ideas is especially difficult to easily grasp when it goes against the experiences of watching our children spend hours alone, at the screen, game controller in hand.
One particular woman challenged this idea, stating that employers are complaining that young workers are unskilled at personal interactions and do not easily adjusting to work life. I should have asked her where she was hearing this and under what circumstances, but being pressed for time, I simply responded that these video game and social networking experiences do not make our children and that we all had difficulty adjusting to our first jobs. I also brought up one of the studies, published in Got Game, by John Beck, Senior Researcher for the USC Annenberg School’s Center for Digital Futures.
Part of the message of this book is that because of their video game experiences, today’s youngsters are gaining skills and insights that may be especially useful to today’s business and industries. However, those skills may not be easily apparent, that to see and leaverge these skills we have to alter our expectations and even aspects of the work environment and schedule and even the nature of our assignments. The woman seemed less than completely convinced, but I went on.
After the session was over, a young man came up and introduced himself. He has recently taken a new job at a small publishing house, but before that worked at McGraw Hill. He said that he supervised a number of employees and that he found the younger folks to be a delight to work with — that they were creative, good communicators, and eager to please.
He also mentioned that McGraw Hill had offered generational training to its supervisors, informing them of the differences between the work styles of younger workers and older ones. He said that one thing he remembered was that younger workers want to know that they are doing a good job, that they need frequent reinforcement — an idea that makes sense in view of the constant reinforcement provided by video games, and even social networking activities.
This is not to say, again, that the kids are perfect communicators and or collaborators or that they adjust easily to new work environments. The issues are far to complex to express in one hour. However, it is essential that as we continue to value our own experiences and the lessons of those experiences, we must be willing to open our minds to the value of new ones.
It’s not a new lesson!
I hear a lot of talk about “the young people today” and how they are just not as good as they used to be. It’s a pretty constant refrain. Your post reminds me of my own encounters with this line.
I hear the complaint all the time, but I just don’t see it. Kids are different, but haven’t people always said that? I think we romanticize our own youth and forget that we, too, were prone to boneheadedness and blunders. Should it really surprise us that kids can be rude? Aside from questionable anecdotes, I don’t know that any of this kvetching is any more real than it was 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago.
Blaming what is a part of the human condition – rude adolescents – on things like technology or video games or rock music or comic books or opera (they blamed a lot on opera in the 19th century), seems misguided at best. Just look back in history and it’s everywhere. Every time this argument comes up, people always go to great pains to explain how “it’s different now”. But is it? It’s the same argument repeated endlessly in some sort of endless loop. I’d love to see us move beyond this…
I’m not sure if interpersonal skills have dimished because of the use of gaming – in my limited experience I see youth and adults some who have more natural social/interaction abilities than others. For many of us, how to hold a meaningful conversation is a skill that must be practiced, no matter your age group. That is a great reason to have units in education that help students practice these skills. An effective career education instructor (no matter the specific content discipline) will work on these “soft” skills with their students. Mock interviews, public/classroom/community presentations, and participation in projects such as community service also help reinforce workplace skills.
The most disturbing aspect of this post is the revelation that young workers require more extrinsic motivation and reward. While this may be generational in nature, I would place a great deal more blame at the feet of school, than videogames.
Not every child plays videogames and fewer yet have their value system or psyche altered by them.
Every child went to school where for the past generation, beauty, truth, relevance, self, community, inquiry and creativity have been subjugated to test scores. We went from admonitions to “never teach to the test” to “of course, you should teach to the test.”
I also suspect that some of this intergenerational hand-wringing lacks substance.
Merit pay remains the fetish of billionaire school reformers and even President Obama. Millionaire Wall Street failures whine publicly that they cannot do their jobs without exorbitant bonues. Isn’t that a manifestation of what Alfie Kohn calls, “punished by rewards?”
I have often thought that the behaviors that make students the most difficult to handle in class, especially most of the “discipline issues” are behaviors that will make these students successful in the long run. The problem is not getting students to change their behavior (which is what I often do as a teacher because that makes the classroom more comfortable for me as the teacher) but teaching students to discipline their behavior, to help them make those things they do that are getting them into trouble work for them. When a student challenges something I say by making a joke about it my initial response is to feel a bit threatened and I respond often by trying to silence the student rather than helping the student cultivate the sense of humor that produced the joke and helping the student to put a valid criticism into a form that is more likely to produce the change she or he wants; helping the student develop some of her or his diplomacy skills. Students that get in trouble are often creative, assertive, aggressive, and insightful. But being openly insubordinate will get them fired from many jobs, so they need to learn to control their impulses, but creativity, assertiveness and the rest are what will ultimately produce success for them. That requires patience from me as a teacher. That also requires a willingness to explore new avenues, like games perhaps, that will enable me to succeed at what I am trying to do while helping students learn what they need to know.
Cordially,
J. D.
VERY well said, J.D.
The statement that I focused on is “…that one thing he remembered was that younger workers want to know that they are doing a good job, that they need frequent reinforcement…”.
Don’t you think that is a part of society today? Now-a-days don’t students get rewarded for everything? We give trophies to all the people on the team now. If you participate in the local Science Fair, or Geography Bee, or Spelling Bee or whatever, you get a ribbon or an award of some kind. You don’t have to be the best athlete or even the hardest worker to receive recognition. I understand the idea that each person has something to add or that some people would never belong to a club/group without it, and of course everybody likes it when they receive recognition. But, don’t you think that it devalues the idea of getting awards for doing something better, or working harder, or doing something for intrinsic reward instead of the piece of paper or metal? I have seen many an award get left behind because “everybody got one of those”. Are these same people going into the workforce expecting to get that trophy for simply doing the job that they were hired to do?
It is important to note that the “road to work” has changed for all of us. When more of us worked in the mill or at the office for our whole careers, young people may have had a better understanding of what the workplace would be like. The world of work is different for all of us, especially in today’s economy.