Millennial Generation Traits and Teaching with Bud Gerber and Mike Wilson

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Millennial Generation Traits and Teachingwith
Bud Gerber and Mike Wilson
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Millennials Rising The Next Great Generation
(2000, William Strauss and Neil Howe)(currently
the dominant generational paradigm)
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Strauss and Howes Seven distinguishing
traits of the Millennial generation

• Specialolder generations have inculcated in
  Millennials the sense that they are,
  collectively, vital to the nation and to their
  parents sense of purpose
• ShelteredMillennials are the focus of the most
  sweeping youth safety movement in American
  history
• ConfidentPossessing high levels of trust and
  optimism and a newly felt connection to parents
  and future Millennial teens equate good news
  for themselves with good news for their country
• Team-orientedWith teamwork emphasized from their
  daycares forward, Millennials are very accustomed
  to working in teams, with strong team instincts
  and tight peer bonds
• AchievingMillennials are on track to become the
  best-educated and best-behaved adults in the
  nations history
• PressuredPushed to study hard, avoid personal
  risks, and take full advantage of the collective
  opportunities adults are offering them,
  Millennials feel a trophy kid pressure to excel
• ConventionalMore comfortable with their parents
  values than any other generation in living
  memory, Millennials support convention the idea
  that social rules can help

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Provide options within a stable framework

• Give them options and choices wherever possible
  e.g., grade weights, project topics, testing
  formats
• Consider letting some parameters of the class be
  cooperatively designed by students and instructor
  -- e.g., elements of the course syllabus,
  goals, rules, and assignments

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Provide the option for team work

• Create opportunities for small group work --
  Millennials like team work, but many prefer
  smaller teams of 2 or 3
• Give them a clear structure for team management,
  including a fair mechanism for ejecting
  slackers from the team -- dont rely on them to
  manage team problems unless youve also given
  them a clear structure for doing so
• Incorporate their preference for team-style
  activities by emphasizing collaborative and
  active learning pedagogies e.g. jigsaws --
  over traditional lectures

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Provide incremental rewards and frequent
feedback

• Mimic the structure of video games by offering
  students incremental rewards and frequent
  feedback e.g., note that video games are built
  upon actions/consequences, and effort/reward
• Incorporate a grading system which provides them
  with multiple ways to maintain and improve grade
• Give them ongoing rather than infrequent feedback
  e.g., with a mixture of quizzes, exercises,
  reports, papers, etc., rather than only a
  2-test structure

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Provide ways to reduce stress

• Consider a pre-planned mid-semester reduction in
  class workload Millennials perceive themselves
  to be more over-worked than previous generations
• Consider breaking up assignments into modules and
  sub-modules, thus creating more manageable units
• Incorporate flexible deadlines e.g., offering
  reduced grades for late submissions rather than a
  no late papers policy
• Offer study guides which include some questions
  that will appear on subsequent tests and exams

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Give them shelter

• Deliberately overestimate their need for clarity
  e.g., highly detailed syllabi, pre-exam
  instructions and review
• Provide safety-net options like extra-credit
  assignments and make-up exams -- Millennials tend
  to be risk-averse
• Reduce the amount of content in General Education
  courses thus allowing more time for extensive
  processing and critical thinking work

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Consider their work success basis for confidence

• Explain and illustrate at the beginning of the
  semester that hard work by itself, in the absence
  of skill and ability, does not always guarantee
  high grades
• Indicate what type of effort on their part is
  more likely to be rewarded e.g., authentic
  close reading vs. skimming and summaries
• Provide model examples of successful papers,
  exams, and other assignments

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Consider their stance on social conventions

• Clearly define acceptable rules of classroom
  behavior and link violations of that code to
  grade reductions e.g., cell-phone use, text
  messaging, and expectations of attentiveness and
  civility
• Carefully discuss any assignment that requires
  students to go beyond standard classroom and
  topic models e.g., service-learning activities,
  field trips, student research
• Rigorously guard against cheating e.g, through
  assignment types that resist easy Internet
  plagiarism

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Alternate Paradigms for the Millennial Generation
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Everything Bad is Good for You How Todays
Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter
(2005, Steven Johnson)

• argues that contemporary media consumption
  habits, in particular video gaming, the internet,
  television and film, are in fact cognitively
  beneficial for consumers
• Argues that by almost all of the standards we use
  to measure readings cognitive benefits
  attention, memory, following complex threads, and
  so on the nonliterary popular culture has been
  steadily growing more challenging over the past
  thirty years
• Argues that consumption of contemporary media
  hones different mental skills that are just as
  important as the ones exercised by reading books

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Millennial Students and Video GamesJohnsons
analysis of video games in terms of cognition and
learning

• By forcing gamers to manage long-term and
  short-term objectives, gaming encourages
  constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and
  moving through the tasks in the correct sequence
  --perceiving relationships and determining
  priorities
• Are best compared to word problems rather than
  literary complexity of theme and character
  teaching abstract skills in probability, pattern
  recognition, and understanding causal
  relationships
• Tap into the brains natural reward circuitry,
  the dopamine system that drives the brains
  seeking circuitry and propels us to seek out
  new avenues for reward in our environment
• Offer rewards everywhere in game-worlds, clearly
  defined and incrementally achievable by exploring
  an environment no other form of popular
  entertainment offers that combination of reward
  and exploration
• Conclusion Millennial student gamers have been
  trained to prefer that interactive
  system of quick feedback and reward

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Generation Me Why Todays Young Americans
Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled And
More Miserable Than Ever (2006, Jean M. Twenge)

• Post-Baby Boomers seen as a single generation,
  Generation Me -- unapologetically
  individualistic, with little concern for the
  social good
• Self-expression, self-esteem, narcissism,
  assertiveness, entitlement, creativity and
  suspicion of social rules and norms are the
  dominant characteristics of the Me Generation
• Gen Me has inflated/unrealistic expectations for
  income, celebrity, and occupational prestige,
  creating an obsession with appearance, extreme
  materialism, and extended adolescencethus these
  neologisms Twixers, Youthhood, Adultesence
• Incompatibility of inflated expectations and
  grade-market/job-market realities leads to
  crippling anxiety and crushing depression (p.
  109)
• Twenges work links to those of R. Kadison, M.
  Levine, and A. Robbins, who document increasingly
  high levels of student stress, use of
  psychotropic medications, and suicide.  
• Gen Me exhibits high levels of externalityi.e.,
  the conviction that their lives are dominated by
  outside forces over which they have no control.
  Externality correlates with cynicism,
  jadedness, and the attitude that failures are
  not my fault.
• Coupled with the suspicion of social norms,
  externality helps explain the epidemic of
  cheating documented by many researchers.

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Recent Generational LiteratureA Semi-Annotated,
Limited Bibliography

• William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations The
  History of Americas Future, 1584 to 2069 (New
  York Harper Perennial, 1992)
• This is a leading big picture text in the
  field. The authors, drawing on the work of Karl
  Mannheim and others, present a sophisticated
  theory of generational phenomena and a dauntingly
  comprehensive scheme for looking at all of
  American history as a succession of four
  different generational type. Although
  over-structured, their framework is an
  indispensable one. Note William Strauss died in
  December of 2007.
• _____________, Millennials Rising The Next Great
  Generation (New York Vintage, 2000)
• This book applies their general theory to
  the present generation of youth, seeing them as
  worthy successors to the GI Generation. Most
  noteworthy for our purposes is the very
  optimistic picture that Strauss and Howe develop.
  Whereas Gen Xers have been radically
  disengagedespecially from politics and civic
  workthe Millennials are moving out strongly and
  confidently into society. They share with their
  GI grandparents a sense of their own power and
  will re-make America by their concern, energy,
  trained ability and ambition. The authors
  maintain a valuable website http//lifecourse.com
  /.

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• _______________, Millennials Go to College
  Strategies for a New Generation on Campus
  (Washington, D.C. American Association of
  Collegiate Registrars, 2003) There is a second
  edition
• Strauss and Howe became expensive consultants.
  The new edition of this valuable but slender text
  will cost you over 50.
•  
• Chuck Underwood, The Generational Imperative
  Understanding Generational Differences in the
  Workplace, Marketplace and Living Room (BookSurge
  Publishing, 2007)
• Underwood is a consultant, speaker and writer
  who relies very heavily on Strauss and Howe. If
  you want him to come and speak, visit
  http//www.genimperative.com/
• Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me Why Today's Young
  Americans Are More Confident, Assertive,
  Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before
  (New York Free Press, 2006)  
• This much-quoted author, a psychology Ph. D. who
  teaches at San Diego State University, rejects
  the distinction between Generations X and Y
  (Millennials), seeing post-Baby Boomers as a
  single generation, one that is unapologetically
  individualistic, with little concern for the
  social good. Self-expression, self-esteem,
  assertiveness, entitlement, creativity, inflated
  ambition and suspicion of social rules and norms
  are the dominant characteristics of the Me
  Generation. A key trait is generational
  narcissismindeed, youth narcissism is to be the
  topic of Twenges next book.

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• Rebecca Huntley, The World According to Y Inside
  the New Adult Generation (Crows Nest, New South
  Wales, Australia Allen and Unwin, 2006)
• An Australian free-lance writer (with a Ph. D.
  in Gender Studies), Huntley has produced a book
  that has balance and wit. Just acquired.
•  
• Peter Sacks, Generation X Goes to College A
  Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Post-Modern
  America (Peru, Illinois Open Court/Carus,1996
  7th printing 2000
•  
• Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson, The
  Ambitious Generation Motivated But Directionless
  (New Haven Yale University Press, 1999)
• This often cited work has become something of a
  modern classic in the field of sociology. It
  brilliantly contrasts the life-chances of high
  school graduates in the 1950s with those of
  today, finding a completely transformed and very
  diminished horizon of opportunity.

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• Barrett Seaman, Binge Campus Life in an Age of
  Disconnection and Excess (Hoboken, NJ John Wiley
  and Sons, 2005.
• A former writer for Time magazine, Seaman
  visited and carefully studied twelve selective
  schools Hamilton, Harvard, Dartmouth,
  Middlebury, Virginia, Duke, Indiana, Wisconsin,
  Berkeley, Stanford, Pomona and McGill. What he
  finds is a drastically different undergraduate
  experience than the one he had in the 1960s. It
  is marked by excessive drinking and hook-ups
  serious mental health problems a distanced
  faculty intellectually disengaged students and
  seriously compromised academic standards. While
  he finds Strauss and Howes description of
  Millennials helpful and partially true, the
  picture to him is more one of anxious, coerced,
  and fragile. Throughout, the book Seaman praises
  efforts to introduce small residential colleges
  to combat some of these problems.

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Our Student Survey evaluation of S Hs seven
traits

• Special
• 18 felt that their generation will be able to
  solve almost all the major problems of your
  time, 70 some of the major problems, and 12
  a few or none of the major problems
• Sheltered
• 70 felt that safety was emphasized about the
  right amount, with 24 feeling that it was
  overemphasized and 6 not emphasized enough
• Confident
• 81 felt that yes, they could succeed in
  anything they pursued, 13 maybe depending on
  circumstances and luck, and 6 no, depending on
  their own strengths and weaknesses
• Team-oriented
• 18 preferred to work in teams of five people or
  so, 64 in teams of two or three people, and 18
  individually
• Achieving
• 24 ranked their own education and achievements
  as excellent, 67 as good, and 9 not as
  good as they might have been
• Pressured
• 94 felt that parents and teachers put about
  the right amount of pressure on you to succeed,
  with only 3 feeling too much pressure to
  succeed and 3 feeling not enough pressure
• Conventional
• 76 said that social rules have advantages and
  disadvantages, with 15 feeling that social
  rules are necessary and 9 that social rules
  stifle individual expression