To Motivate Teens, Ask Them “Who’s Your Future Self?”

In 2019, high school junior Gil Leal was surprised when he came to school for his AP Environmental Science class and ended up in a strawberry field not far from his home in Gardena, California. 

Accustomed to classrooms that isolated academic topics like soil decomposition or deforestation from real-world problems, he was delighted to find out that the information could be used to improve his own life, and the lives of people in his small farming community. 

The course also opened a window into his future. Intrigued by the way his new AP class connected his current studies to himself, his community, and their respective futures, Leal enrolled at UCLA as an environmental science major. 

His unique classroom experience was documented in a 2021 study—funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia—that looked at the effect of project-based learning on AP courses in science and history. Students like Leal who proposed real-world irrigation and soil regeneration solutions as part of their AP science curriculum, or studied constitutional principles and took part in a simulation of an electoral caucus in an AP Government class, outperformed peers in traditional classrooms on AP exams by eight percentage points.

Indeed, a growing body of research confirms that when adolescents are given the opportunity to project themselves into the future, engage with complex civic issues, and think about how what they’re learning might alter the course of their lives, they find more meaning in classroom work, reflect more frequently on who they are and what they want—and perform better academically. 

Harnessing this deep motivation to learn is especially useful when the going gets tough in the classroom. A 2014 study by eminent researcher David Yeager and colleagues summarized things succinctly: When teens have a “personally important and self-transcendent ‘why’ for learning,” they can "bear even a tedious and unpleasant ‘how’.”

Asking Big (and Very Big) Questions

Perhaps the most important discovery in this recent wave of research—you might think of it as a confirmation—is that teens are biologically primed to think big. A novel, 5-year study of 14-18 year-olds by USC researchers concluded that teens possess an innate desire to dwell on the world beyond themselves, and are wired to consider material through the lens of “cultural values and associated emotions to infer social and ethical implications.”  

Classrooms in middle school and high school that continue to operate within the narrow confines of immediate, “concrete” concerns, while ignoring questions of broader purpose and future goals, work against their students’ nature, the research suggests. 

The findings were derived from brain scans that revealed increasing coordination between two regions of the adolescent brain associated with “reflective, autobiographical and free-form thinking,” and “effortful, focused thinking.” This increased brain interconnectivity, the research said, is associated with improved identity formation and self-awareness, social relationships, and mental health, even years after students graduate from high school.  

The research has “important implications for the design of middle and high schools,” lead researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang told Neuroscience News, and underscores the importance of regularly asking teens to think through difficult, future-oriented questions and emotions in the classroom.

During her ecology unit, for example, North Carolina middle school science teacher Jessica Guidry asks her students to role-play as scientists persuading the United Nations to protect a given biome—such as a large grassland or forest—despite the UN’s intention to eliminate it to make room for the world’s population growth. Students must think through how their assigned biome benefits the world now and in the future, and what might be lost if it were replaced. 

In Erin Fisher’s AP Government course, meanwhile, students don’t just read about influential Supreme Court cases, they inhabit the role of justices themselves, and argue for or against big decisions related to contemporary national issues, such as immigration or Second Amendment rights. 

“Ultimately,” the researchers wrote, asking students to think beyond their current circumstances “may be to the adolescent mind and brain what exercise is to the body: most people can exercise, but only those who do will reap the benefits.”

Reflecting on Higher Purpose

In a series of longitudinal studies, Yeager and his colleagues discovered that simple writing and reading exercises asking teens to connect what they’re learning to a future career or personal goal helps them surface deeper motivations for learning, persist through “unpleasant” academic tasks, and earn higher course grades. 

In one experiment, the researchers asked 300 ninth grade math and science students to read and respond to a prompt about their values:  

Sometimes the world isn’t fair, and so everyone thinks it could be better in one way or another. Some people want there to be less hunger, some want less prejudice, and others want less violence or disease. Other people want lots of other changes. What are some ways that you think the world could be a better place? 

The brief essays that resulted touched on issues like war, poverty, and justice. “Without discrimination,” one student wrote, conjuring up a better future, “there would be much less violence and war in this world.” Another wrote that “the hunger problem can be solved if we have proper energy sources.” In a follow-on activity, students were asked how they might make their own positive contributions to the world—using the knowledge they were currently learning in the classroom. 

One ninth grader in the study wrote that they’d spend their future career as a genetic researcher to “improve the world by possibly engineering crops to produce more food.” Another, interested in the world’s “energy problems,” wrote that their science classes would provide them with a “good base” for their future career in environmental engineering. 

The activities took less than a class period to get through but led to improved grades for all students, especially for students who were struggling academically. Later phases of the study conducted with college students showed that purpose and motivation were deeply intertwined: Students who completed the activity spent nearly twice as much time persisting through “boring but important” math problems.

Finding Purpose in Daily Classroom Routines

Helping students find the relevancy in academic work doesn’t have to be limited to a one-off writing activity. In a 2009 study led by researcher Chris Hulleman, students who regularly summarized recently learned concepts—and then took the next step of thinking through how the material might be useful to themselves, their loved ones, or their community—improved their course grades and their sense of purpose in the work. 

In the study, nearly 300 high school science students were asked to write up to eight short essays during the semester. Some of the students submitted simple exit tickets summarizing the big takeaways of the lesson, while others added on to this activity by answering the following questions: “How might the information be useful to you, or a friend/relative, in daily life? How does learning about this topic apply to your future plans?” These students were also given the option of either writing responses, or drawing detailed sketches or concept maps to express their answers. 

The students who regularly connected their academic work to the real-world reported a higher interest in science and earned higher grades than their peers. Those who struggled with lower grades at the outset of the course made the most gains, improving by two-thirds of a letter grade, a jump researchers note is “comparable to other social-psychological interventions aimed at reducing the black-white achievement gap.”

Setting aside a little time for students to journal, aided by prompts like “how might today’s lesson on the chemistry of plastics be used in the real world?,” allows them to process materials in a purposeful way. Alternatively, you might invite guest speakers from the community to talk about their work. Local investment bankers and traders, for example, can speak to how probability plays into decision-making in financial markets, while local doctors can talk through how they apply specific principles they learned in high school biology, like cellular functions, to treat patients.

Introducing…You

High school English teacher Cathleen Beachboard has kids thinking big right out of the gate. During the first week of school, she plans a “Future Goals Gala,” asking students to imagine they’re going to have a 30-year class reunion and sending them home with questions like "What places do you really hope to go to?” or "What kind of impact do you hope to have in your community in your field of study?” to help them imagine their lives 30 years in the future.

She also asks them to think about how they might reach those goals: “How are you going to get there? How does your education fit into those plans?” 

On the day of the reunion, students introduce themselves to peers as their "future selves," and furnish proof of their successful lives: “They'll bring in Photoshopped pictures of themselves on Mount Everest; their cure for cancer in a vial; a cake that they decided to make as a Michelin chef,” Beachboard said.

As students make the rounds, Beachboard takes notes and uses the information to weave student passions into her lessons. If a student is really interested in birds, for example, “I'll do a whole lesson where we’ll read something about birds and they can be the expert in the room,” Beachboard said. 

In addition to providing her with useful information about her students at the start of the school year, Beachboard said the activity makes teens feel like they have agency over their lives. “A lot of the time, teenagers feel like they’re not in control, but by giving someone the idea of their future goals, it reminds them that they can control the person they hope to be,” she said.