As a health educator who supports the use of pharmaceutical medicines to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease, I admit to wrestling sometimes with where to draw the line between behavioral habits and the use of chemicals. When I make a choice to consume high-fat fast foods over fresh fruits and vegetables, I understand the risks associated with high-cholesterol and heart disease. Should this choice become a standard eating habit, there is a high probability that sometime down the road, I will need a prescribed cholesterol medication to combat my poor choices.

Grappling with this concept of allowing myself to need a prescription because I made certain choices in my life, along with the opioid epidemic we are now facing in this country, I have concerns related to our reliance on prescriptions. And this concept of over-prescribing is not exclusive to medicines. Tim Elmore and Andrew McPeak in Generation Z Unfiltered opened my eyes to the ways “we assume Gen Z needs a prescription.” Without even addressing the issue of how much more medication is being prescribed to emerging generations, there are numerous other avenues where prescription can be problematic.

“Parents are prescriptive in their leadership, scheduling each day. Teachers are prescriptive in their lesson plans, teaching for the test. Coaches are prescriptive on their instructions for practices and games. YouTube and Netflix are prescriptive, suggesting what videos to watch next. Amazon is prescriptive suggesting other products you might like. Employers are prescriptive in their formula to reach the numbers they need. Social media apps are prescriptive in their format to keep you watching,” shares Elmore and McPeak. Do we have a tendency to be over-prescribed today?

After addressing several damaging ways that over-prescription is disabling Gen Z, the authors suggest moving away from “prescriptive leadership” and towards “descriptive leadership.” Equipping students for real life comes in the form of an antidote to Lose the Prescriptions known as metacognition. “Simply defined, metacognition is the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. It is essentially thinking about thinking. When students practice metacognition they quite literally take ownership of their own learning… It means that in our classrooms, our homes, our practice fields, and our workplaces, we prepare our young people to become the drivers of their own learning and stop waiting for adults to do that work for them.”

Moving from prescriptive leadership which “sets a goal, then furnishes the precise steps a learner should take in order to reach the goal” and towards descriptive leadership which “meets with the learner to describe the goal, then allows him or her to come up with his own steps to reach it,” the leader/mentor empowers ingenuity and creativity. In my sport marketing course this transition was made when I asked students to develop a learning module on their assigned topic. After modeling several topics where various types of learning are introduced, students are then allowed to create activities which highlight the methods in which they learn best. Hopefully, by the end of the semester, students have gained information on content within sport marketing, have learned the art of conversing about their topic, and have experienced multiple techniques for learning about something new, especially in ways this knowledge might be applied in real life.

Losing the prescriptions in my class is challenging as my default is to verbally share my knowledge on the topic, which is typically the method in which I was instructed, but my research on Gen Z informs me this is not the best methodology for them! In order to be effective with metacognition, Elmore and McPeak share three elements that are needed which include risk, responsibility, and reward. As sport marketing students navigate the unknown, they experience risk in what they attempt as they might not fully cover the most important content; they take responsibility that requires ingenuity in that they determine how their peers will learn; and finally, they experience the reward or a sense of satisfaction when engaging discussion results as an ending to their module. One of my favorite quotes from Unfiltered comes here. “Too many students today are renting their education instead of owning it. One of the advantages of equipping students to practice metacognition is that they begin to own what they’re learning and how they learn it. And when you own something instead of renting it, you take much better care of it.”

Please feel free to share in the comments below successful ideas to move away from prescribing for Gen Z and towards describing so that they become a Flourishing Generation.