February 5, 2025 • 42 mins
Many attempts at influencing adolescent behavior fail. In this episode, David S. Yeager joins us to the use of a mentor mindset by faculty members can increase student motivation and academic success.
David is the Raymond Dixon Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is best known for his research with Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and Greg Walton on interventions that influence adolescent behaviors. David has served as a consultant for Google, Microsoft, Disney and the World Bank, and is the recipient of over 15 awards for his work in social, developmental, and educational psychology. He has published extensively in scholarly publications, and his research has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many, many other places. David and Carol Dweck and others have also created a MasterClass on The Power of Mindset. His most recent book is 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.
A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.
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(00:00):
Many attempts at influencing adolescent behavior fail. In this episode, we examine
how a mentor mindset may be used to increase student motivation and academic success.
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective
(00:24):
practices in teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted by
John Kane, an economist... ...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer...
...and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more
inclusive and supportive of all learners.Our guest today is David S. Yeager. David
(00:51):
is the Raymond Dixon Centennial professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin,
and a co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is best
known for his research with Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and Greg Walton on interventions that
influence adolescent behaviors. David has served as a consultant for Google, Microsoft, Disney and
(01:13):
the World Bank, and is the recipient of over 15 awards for his work in social, developmental,
and educational psychology. He has published extensively in scholarly publications, and his
research has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal, Scientific American, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many, many other
(01:35):
places. David and Carol Dweck and others have also created a MasterClass on The Power of Mindset. His
most recent book is 10 to 25 (01:43):
The Science of Motivating Young People. Welcome, David.
Thanks for having me.Today's teas are:... David?
Are you drinking any tea with us today?Uh…. No, I am not. I read a short story about tea
recently, so that's the closest tea story that I have for you.
Alright, we'll count it, we'll count it, we'll count it. I know you have water with you,
(02:07):
which is, as we know, the foundation of tea. It's pre tea.
It's pre tea. How about you, John,I am drinking a spring cherry green tea,
continuing the trend of cherry-based teas. Yes, the theme continues. I've reverted
back to the blue sapphire tea.And I thought the spring cherry tea was
particularly good with a couple feet of snow that we've had in the last few days here.
(02:31):
And it is currently snowing very hard out my window, John.
I don't have windows here, so it's perfectly nice here until I leave. So we've invited you
here today to discuss 10 to 25 which brings together a large volume of research findings
concerning student motivation in a very accessible manner. Educators at all levels
have been raising growing concerns about student motivation. That's always been there, but it seems
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to be a little bit more serious in the last few years, while many students report that educators
seem to be out of touch with their lives and their experiences, so this book is extremely well timed.
How did this book project come about? Yeah, it's a great question. It’s kind
of a convergence of a few different things. So one was just my observation over years
that as a society we are so bad at changing and influencing adolescents. One program
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after another seems to not work, and probably the impetus for that was I was asked to write a paper
for the special issue of something called the future of children, like 2017, it's on social
and emotional learning, and it’s an awesome group of scholars and led by Stephanie Jones, who I
admire very deeply, and I was asked to write the chapter on adolescents. So what works for social
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and emotional learning for adolescents? And tell you what, like I kept looking in the literature,
and nothing really worked. And then when you look at the meta analyses, it seemed like there was
this negative trend where the older the kids in the study, the less effective the program.
And the programs that did seem to work weren't social and emotional learning programs, they were
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something else that later somebody labeled social and emotional learning. It was like Facing History
and Ourselves, which is like a history curriculum. And the side effect of good history education was
some better social and emotional outcome. But it wasn't like they were teaching you square
breathing or meditation or something. And I just wanted to get to the bottom of it and I was like,
why is it the case that we've got all these things that seem to work with younger kids? Because SEL
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programs did have pretty good results, third, fourth, fifth grade, maybe even younger. So like,
what's going on, seventh grade to 12th grade? And what I discovered was that in general,
we kind of have the wrong view of young people, and therefore we keep defaulting to the same kinds
of wrong programs, and then we're shocked that they don't work, but it's because they come out
of a particular mental model. So everything from DARE to Just Say No to anti-bullying programs,
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and the list goes on, and I went on sabbatical at Stanford about 10 years ago to try to get to
the bottom of this and figure it out. And this book involved a lot more than that, but that's
what started it. And so it's really been kind of 10 years of work to expand on that idea.
So you just mentioned DARE, and you talk about this and many other educational interventions in
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your introductory chapter. And similarly, college faculty who give students detailed feedback on
their writing often see little feedback being implemented in follow-up submissions. Can you
talk a little bit about why many interventions that are designed to improve the lives of
adolescents are just so unsuccessful? The first kind of passive insight was that
there's two things (05:36):
One is that what the programs are trying to change, like the basic hypothesis
they're going after wasn't the right thing to be changing. And the second is that even if they were
targeting the right thing, they didn't say it in the right way. So just take anti-bullying.
The most common way to reduce bullying is to teach kids social skills. It's like, “Well,
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the reason why you're bullying is you don't have a way of dealing with social conflict
that is productive, that you have an unproductive habit.” And the research ended up suggesting that
actually, for young kids like third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade, bullying is associated
with poor social skills. It's kids like some of my kids, where they're ADHD and they just kind of get
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a rise out of bothering people and saying things repetitively, or getting a rise out of somebody.
But for middle school and high school, often bullying is associated with better social skills,
because the kind of bullying you're doing is strategically destroying someone else's reputation
while maintaining plausible deniability, so the adults can't get you in trouble,
but then all of your friends see it, so that way you gain status and you look powerful,
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and that's actually very sophisticated to do that. Real world bullying is more sophisticated
than what you see in Mean Girls. And it's not the case that kids need more social skills,
because, in fact, the more social skills they had, maybe the better they would be at bullying.
So what you often saw actually was an increase in bullying as a result of middle school or high
school anti-bullying programs. So that was one big issue. And the second big issue is that even if
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you were working on the right stuff, and the right stuff, by the way, would be something about trying
to maintain your reputation and gain status in a productive way, rather than by destroying others,
would be an alternative, for example. But the way the programs are often framed is super
lame. I mean, it's like, DARE is like someone with a neon fanny pack throwing out headbands,
like wearing socks and sandals and like, 0% of kids are like, “Oh yeah, you're right.
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Next time someone I have a crush on offers me a cigarette, I'm gonna be like, ‘no, because I
dare to resist drugs.’” No one's gonna say that. And in fact, like, if you think back on DARE,
they teach skills through scenarios, but like, what are the scenarios? It's like, you do a skit
in front of the class, and like, one kid stands up and they offer the other kid drugs, like, “Hey,
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man, you want some cocaine?” And then the other kid's supposed to be like, “No way, dude.” And in
every case, the kid offering the drugs looks way cooler than the nerd who says no, and all you've
done is prove in front of everyone that awesome people offer everyone drugs. And so again, like
drug use, on average, goes up in response to DARE and similar programs. So the way to summarize this
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is that you have to be attuned to the adolescent desire for status and respect, their desire to
maintain a good reputation in the eyes of people whose opinions they care about, and if you don't,
then you might just push them away, or you might even make the bad behavior more enticing. And so
that's a launching off point for this book, where I try to suggest better approaches.
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One of the other things you talk about and you've written about is how to provide feedback
effectively to students. And one thing that many people have been taught for a very long time and
still are is to use that compliment sandwich where you put some critique in between two
positive comments. And it turns out that that's not very effective. One of the things you suggest
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is that a wise feedback strategy may be more effective. Could you talk a little bit about why
the compliment sandwich doesn't work and why wise feedback may be a more effective way of providing
feedback that students will respond to? Yeah, so I'm starting from this premise that
young people are like exquisitely sophisticated in they're thinking about their reputations and
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how others are perceiving them socially, and given that, when they're critiqued by a teacher
or a coach or a manager or anyone who has power over them, then they're not just processing it
as information to include in their mental model of perfecting a skill, there's a social implication:
“Who is this person who's implying that I'm not good enough yet? And why do they feel entitled
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to very publicly say that I'm inadequate? And furthermore, do they think I'll ever be not
inadequate? Like, is there any possibility that I could grow and improve?” So they're
asking these big, existential questions that have their roots in concerns about their status
and reputation. What is the adult thinking? Well, they're thinking, I don't have to give you any
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feedback at all, like you're lucky that I'm even spending any time on you, and don't complain,
stop whining, and the least I'll do will be to try to soften the blow by being a little nice,
but if you don't like that, then you're entitled, and you're a wimp. That's kind of a lot of adults’
approach. And so what occurs to them is to be like, Alright, well, I don't want you to cry,
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so I'm gonna do the compliment sandwich. And the compliment sandwich is something like, “Look,
I love your enthusiasm.” It's a nice thing. And then it's a negative thing, like,”All of your work
is terrible and has to change.” And then there's the nice thing, like, “Thanks for turning it in on
time.” And we do our mental math. It's like we're balancing a stoichiometric equation. And then we
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say “Net positive. So you should thank me for this feedback.” But again, you haven't addressed the
core question in the young person's mind about their status and their worthiness in our eyes.
And so the alternative is to directly address the concern that young people have no value, that they
have no potential, they have no future, et cetera, by using something that Geoff Cohen, a Stanford
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professor, one of my mentors, has called wise feedback. And wise feedback is very simply saying,
I'm giving you these comments because I have very high standards, and I know that you can meet them.
So it's first an appeal to a high standard, and second an offer of support so that way they can
meet it. And it turns out that that comes across as a very respectful thing to say, and therefore
it builds trust, and it puts the young person in a place in which they're open to criticism,
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because you've addressed their main fear, which is that we view them as incompetent.
So in 2014 you were the first author on an experiment involving wise feedback. Can you
talk a little bit about this study? Yeah, so in one experiment that, again,
was led initially by Geoff Cohen, my collaborator, and other great people like Valerie Purdie-Vaughns
at Columbia, we partnered with a school in the East Coast, and we had teachers assign their
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seventh grade students an essay to write. So kids write a standard five-paragraph essay, and then
the teachers cover them in comments so they do whatever the six plus one writing tactics are,
and they kind of do their worst, and then the kids have a chance to revise the essay or not.
And the question is, when do kids get their essays back, covered in red ink and say, “This is great.
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I'm really happy for all of these ways in which I can improve. So thanks for pointing out my flaws,
and I'm excited to fix them. So here we go.” When did they say that? And when do they say,
“My teacher is such a jerk that he spent his whole weekend trashing the essay in the ego of a seventh
grader.” And we found that in the default control group, where we didn't do any wise feedback, only
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about 40% of kids even turned in their essays. But we also had teachers append handwritten notes
on the essays that said, “I'm giving you these comments because they have high standards, and I
know that you can meet them.” And then they sealed the essays in an envelope and handed them back,
so that way kids didn't know which got that note or which got a control group note that
didn't convey any new information. And then a week later, kids had the chance to revise,
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and what we found is that 80% of kids revised their essay in the wise feedback group. And
for me as a parent, you know, I have four kids, and so if twice as many of my kids listened to
the things I told them to do, then at least two of my four kids would have pants on by the time
it's time to go to school, and my life would be better. And I was a middle school teacher,
and I remember spending all weekend grading essays and thinking, “Oh man, they're going to
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be so grateful for all this feedback. They're gonna carry me on their shoulders like Robin
Williams at the end of Dead Poets Society and be a hero.” And instead, they were just like, “Why
is this guy such a jerk?” And my life would have been a lot better if I knew about this research
at the time. But I will say it's been interesting since we published that study. There's a tendency
to over claim how important it is. Obviously this is just one assignment one time. I'm not claiming
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this is a magic bullet. The author, Dan Coyle, in his book The Culture Code, called it magic
feedback. And I don't like that. I don't think it's magic. To be honest, what I think the magic
is is the feeling of dignity and respect when you're in a vulnerable position and someone is
looking down on you, and they instead assure you that you are a person of worth and value, that,
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I think is magical. It might happen to the post it note might not. There's a lot of other ways you
can show that, but I think when you do that, then you start tapping into what's going to motivate
adolescents to change. And the more we do that in schools, I think the better off they would be.
Is this something that cuts off once you pass adolescence? Could this also refer to
the feedback from reviewer two on that paper? It's funny, I've grown less patient as a reviewer
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over my time as a reviewer. I'm only mean to a specific kind of author. I lose my patience if
you're like, at the University of Chicago, and you have every resource at your fingertips and
you still wrote a lazy paper, then I'm like, “I don't have time for you.” Anybody else,
I'm wise feedbacking away. But anyway, I guess I would say that I'm not arguing there's a magical
cutoff of 10 years old, all of a sudden you need wise feedback at 25 you need it, in 25.1 day you
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don't it's really more that the window of 10 to 25 is like the onset of puberty until the adoption of
an adult-like role. And that just tends to be a period where your status is very precarious
and ambiguous and it's uncertain to you if you're going to be taken seriously, if you're going to be
afforded the rights and privileges that you think you deserve. Like a good example is this wonderful
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study I love from 1998 nobody cites by Ruck and colleagues, and it's on self-determination needs.
And it's very simple idea. They ask kids at what age do you think you should have a certain right
or privilege? And then they ask adults, at what age should kids have it? So an example is being
able to write a letter that's critical of the principal and publish it in the school paper.
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So seventh graders are like, “Yeah, I should totally be able to do that.” And adults are like,
“Not till 11th grade.” So you've got this gap. So you got, like, four years or more, depending on
the measure, there's variation in that outcome. But like, you've got 1, 2, 3, 4 years where a
young person is ready for some right and privilege and society’s saying, “No way.” That's what I call
the adolescent predicament, that your status and respect is in question because of that gap and
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mismatch, and I think you could experience that later in life. This one interesting guy read my
book and emailed me. He's a general counsel for a large like Fortune 100 company, and he's like,
“Man, I really have to worry about giving feedback to my junior associates, like when they write
a brief.” So he's thinking of himself as the mentor. And then it came out that he's actually
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doing a master's in education because he's about to retire from being a lawyer, and he's going to
go be a classroom teacher for the sunset of his career. And I was like, as a 60 year old, but
first- year teacher, if there's a principal in the back of the room sitting there with a clipboard
making notes on every single thing you're doing in the classroom, are you going to feel nervous
and worried? He's like, “Oh, absolutely.” So he's gonna feel back again like a 13-year old
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getting his essay criticized. So I really think that the operational definition of adolescents,
at some level, is this adolescent predicament, this mismatch between the status and respect you
think you're ready for, that you desire, and then what you're afforded by your context.
Beginning early in your book, and through much of it, you talk about the mentor’s
dilemma. Could you talk a little bit about what that is and how we can address that?
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Yeah, the mentor's dilemma is, again, something coined by Geoff Cohen. It's the simple idea that
it's very hard to simultaneously criticize someone and motivate them. And the reason why
it's a dilemma is because it feels like you have two bad choices, like one choice is “I'm going
to be really honest and tough and impossible to please and tell you all your flaws, but sacrifice
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your motivation and crush your spirit.” Or the alternative is “I'm going to be nice and friendly
and supportive, but I'm not going to tell you the truth. I'm going to withhold feedback.”
And neither of those really feels satisfying. It feels like they're not what you're supposed to
be doing. And what we've found, and what we've proposed, is that the solution to the mentor's
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dilemma is something we call the mentor mindset, and that's kind of being the walking, talking
embodiment of the wise feedback note, where in all your interactions with young people, you're
neither too harsh nor too much of a pushover. You are very tough, you have high standards, but your
supports are as high as your demands. So that way young people can meet that demanding standard.
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Can you give us some examples of how this mindset might be implemented
in a day-to-day student interaction? Yeah, so mentor mindset is something that
comes up a lot in let's just say, how you deal with a student mistake. So in our work, we have
this fellowship program for math teachers. Carol Dweck and I and several others developed a new
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program called FUSE, Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement. And the idea is that the culture
teachers create in the classroom can influence whether students benefit from our instruction.
So I get to spend all day giving you illustrative math or Eureka math, and correcting all your math
misconceptions. But if, fundamentally, the kid thinks that the reason why they made a mistake
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is because they're a lazy slacker that the teacher is looking down on, because the teacher explained
it clearly and you didn't do it, and therefore you weren't paying attention, if that's your default,
then you're not going to engage with this conceptually demanding, cognitively sophisticated
curriculum. You'd be like “No way, because if it's not clear to me right away, then it's a threat.”
So as a teacher, you need to have a culture in which mistakes are your friend. Otherwise you're
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stuck doing a curriculum in which students only ever master things at 100% and they're
never confused, they're never lost. Therefore, in order to create that culture, you have to
have good routines for troubleshooting mistakes with students, because you can't just blame and
shame them or yell at them for making mistakes, nor can you avoid the mistakes altogether. And so
I spent some time observing great mentor mindset teachers, teachers who had very high standards and
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were very supportive, and they make students own their thinking, and they ask tons of open-ended
questions, and the students squirm sometimes. And a normal novice teacher, like I would have done,
they feel uncomfortable. They think the student's head's gonna explode, that they're sitting there
not knowing the answer, but their wait time is unbelievable for these great teachers. And
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there's a routine that I call collaborative troubleshooting, and there's three steps.
One is validating what the student has done, so like finding something right about the student's
answer. Next is asking questions to understand (20:19):
so where did this come from? What was your reasoning?
And that ends up being super important, because a lot of teachers immediately jump in and presume
they understand the student's mistake. Oh, you forgot to carry the two. So next time, carry the
two. But sometimes we're wrong, and what teenagers hate is when adults make assumptions about them.
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And furthermore, when you make assumptions and you're not right, you end up telling them
solutions that were already obvious to them, and then that's also insulting, like imagine
you were lost and you pulled over to ask someone for advice on where to go, and then they're like,
“Did you think about checking Google Maps?” You're like, “Yes, I thought about checking Google Maps.”
It’s a very insulting thing to say, like it's the most obvious thing. So a lot of times when
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students come to teachers, that's how they react, is they tell them to do something obvious that the
students already tried. So great mentor mindset teachers don't do that. They ask questions to
understand before they tell and then, last, they kind of ask leading questions to build a bridge to
a better understanding, and they wait for the student to piece it together in their minds.
Novice teachers don't do that because they feel anxious that the student is stressed, and then
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they rush in to tell the answer. This goes back to classic research from Mark Lepper on expert
tutors in the mid 90s. Mark Lepper, a Stanford psychologist who coined the term intrinsic
motivation initially. He spent years just watching great tutors and found that over 90% of what they
say is a question. They're not sitting there telling you what to think. They're like, “Huh?
Where did that answer come from?” or “Is that right?” And then the student has to have a coach
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in the head to try to solve the problems. There's a lot of other examples, but I love that one,
both because it's intuitive once you get it. It's also not obvious when you're a novice teacher,
I feel like those same three steps would be great in the healthcare industry.
Any industry. You don't think people like doctors talking down to them
for making such idiotic health choices?I was thinking that might be a great place
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for teachers to get some empathy. Like, “Where have you been talked down to recently?” Or tech,
or any of these places.Well, the interesting thing is,
we have this fellowship program for teachers, and their empathy is not hard to get. Just ask them
about a time they talk to an instructional coach. Instructional coaches, ideally, are
these endlessly empathetic listeners. But that's not often how it works. It's like they race in,
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they tell you what to do. You're doing everything wrong, and I'm going to check your test scores
next week. And I have compassion for the coaches too, because a lot of districts, especially poor
districts, use instructional coaches like backup admins, so they're pushing paper three fourths of
the day. They hardly ever get to actually coach. So without blaming any individuals in the system,
most teachers almost immediately have access to this idea of everyone making an assumption about
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your limitations and then telling you obvious things and then making you feel like an idiot. So
even though they know that, that's still often teachers’ default when they talk to kids.
As part of this whole mentor mindset, the goal is to treat students with respect and to let them
know that you think they're capable. But a lot of students come in with stereotype threat, a lot of
students come in with perhaps some imposter syndrome that they don't feel they're going
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to be successful to begin with. How can we help build that growth mindset in students who may have
some doubts about their own ability to thrive?Well, I'd just say that stereotype threat often is
more of a situational predicament. It's more like they're aware that other people could judge them,
even if they don't personally believe the stereotypes. But I think that for students
who are used to adults using something I call an enforcer mindset, which is kind of all standards,
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no support, or as someone I interview in the book calls it: “Yell, tell, blame and shame.” If that's
what you're expecting, then it's very hard for students to see the teacher's growth mindset and
be like, “Yeah, that's great. I love it,” because all they see is the standard, and they think,
“Oh, here we go again, another grown up is going to yell at me for not being good enough.” So I
spent a long time interviewing this great teacher who's kind of like the best growth mindset teacher
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in Texas. His name is Sergio Estrada. He's at Riverside High School in El Paso Texas, and Carol
Dweck and I interviewed him a lot, like every Friday for months. And every once in a while,
some kid would wander in his class during his off period, when we're talking to him. And I would be
like, “Hey, who's the opposite of Mr. Estrada?” And, I tell you what, I've heard some stories.
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And one kid, Emiliano, told me a story about his English teacher, and his English teacher assigned
some essay where they had to write the pro and con or side one/side two, and then he could only
come up with one of the two. So he went to the teacher after class to ask for help. He's like,
“I have the assignment. I can only figure out half the assignment.” And then the teacher said,
“Tú no lo entendiste porque no quisiste,” which is you didn't understand it because you didn't want
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to. And he was crushed by this, and came back to me and was like, “Dr, Yeager, it's so unfair.” And
I was like, “What do you mean? It's unfair?” He's like, “Well, I have ADHD, I only understand half
of what anybody tells me,” like, “this is how I get the other half. I can't imagine wanting the
other half anymore than coming after school to come talk to this teacher to try to get it and
yet she's assuming that I was screwing around in class, that I don't care, I don't care about my
(25:20):
education, don't care about learning, and then I'm trying to, like, ruin her lesson plan by
making everybody be behind and asking questions.” And like, Sergio would never do that, but he also
knows when students come in his class that that's what they're used to. So he has learned he has to
give a speech at the beginning of class explaining that this is a new culture. Say, for example,
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this idea of questioning, Sergio, like a great tutor asks questions way more than he tells. So if
a student is doing a problem set and they're like, “Mr. Estrada, is this right?” He'll say, “Well,
I don't know. Do you think it’s right?” So there's a way of doing that that does not go over well,
it goes over like a lead balloon. There's a way of doing it where you look like the jerk law school
professor cold calling people and forcing them to explain their thinking, and you're trying to
(26:04):
humiliate them. And adults do often ask questions of kids in public to humiliate them. I mean,
as a parent like, I do that sometimes, even though I don't want to, I'm like,
“what were you thinking?” Or like, “Is that the right way to put your chair away?” Or like,
“Should you be grabbing that cookie?” Like, it's not an authentic question. It's a question meant
to shame and humiliate. So that's what kids are used to. And so Sergio, before he does
his old questioning routine and his collaborative troubleshooting, he's like, “Alright, guys, I care
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deeply that you are good at physics after this class. And in fact, everyone who passes this class
eventually deeply understands physics, and I don't want to deprive you of the chance to know that you
can do it, so I'm not going to tell you answers, but it's not because I'm being unhelpful. It's
because I want you to own the thinking. And every year, students eventually get it, and every year
students don't like it at the beginning. So I just want you to know that I'm not trying to shame you,
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not trying to embarrass you. I'm trying to honor and respect you and make you know that I think you
can think, and I want you to build that muscle” or something like that. And then he'll print it
out and he's got it on the wall. So the next time students are mad or offended and they're thinking,
“Oh, here we go, another enforcer mindset, he’s going to yell at me.” It's like on the wall,
it's crystal clear. And then by the end of the year, these are students who say,
(27:11):
“Mr. Estrada changed my life. He believed in me.” They're like the first in their family to
go to college. They're getting internships at NASA. I'm not exaggerating, like every summer,
students get internships at NASA, but it takes that transparency. You can't just show up and do
mentor mindset if students have that enforcer mindset baggage that they've experienced.
So I can imagine that some folks might be thinking adopting a mentor mindset might
(27:36):
increase their workload somehow. Is that true? Yeah, it's interesting. It's one of the first
things I worried about writing this book. I was like, “Oh, am I writing an impossible to
accomplish self-help book?” I mean, it would be like, grabbing a diet book where like, “The
best way to lose weight is to never eat anything that you enjoy.” Well like, “Yeah, I knew that.
The hard part is to eat what I enjoy and still not gain weight.” So I'm not saying the best way
(27:58):
to be a teacher is to do it 120 hours a week. And there are things that Sergio does where he's like,
“I don't recommend anyone do this. It's like a lot of work.” But I will say two things. One,
every great mentor mindset teacher I saw had procedures and policies that they set up early
on in the term, and that often involved getting peers to look at each other's work and having a
(28:18):
good culture of peer feedback. It's kind of a “ask two before me” situation, and they're not doing
that to dismiss kids like gnats. They're doing it to give them a sense of agency and teach a skill
of collaboration. But that, by the way, saves them tons of time, because 80, 90% of errors,
like some really high percentage of errors, are things where the minute the kid tries to explain
(28:41):
it to their peer, they're like, “Oh my god, I see it now.” So they actually didn't need the teacher,
like, you just need another human being when they're explaining. So one thing is,
you can still do a lot of this stuff and save time if you just have good procedures for peer
collaboration and feedback, it saves you tons of time. The second is, there's often a short-term,
long-term trade off. It does take a little more time to set up procedures and create a
(29:02):
relationship of respect, but then the whole second semester, you've got independent, autonomous
students that are working hard. You don't even have to like mess with them. So I remembered
we interviewed Sergio during COVID, and it was like, April of 2020, and everyone's on lockdown
or whatever. And I was like, Sergio, how's it going? He’s like, “I feel really bad.” Like,
(29:24):
“why do you feel bad?” He's like, “I'm bored and I feel guilty.” Like, “Why are you bored? Why do
you feel guilty?” He's like, “because I don't do anything.” “What do you mean, you don't do
anything?” He's like, “I post the problem sets, then students meet in groups, and they talk about
physics all day. Maybe they ask me a question, but otherwise they just work diligently and then
learn physics.” And he had the highest rates of passing college level physics that year in his
(29:46):
whole district during COVID. And he like was on Tiktok all day, not because he was goofing off,
but because students were so self sufficient, and I think that's the payoff, is you use a mentor
mindset, and then you get people where their work is like kind of area under the curve, leading
to greater growth and learning, because you've created independent, agentic young people.
(30:06):
So, it sounds like giving students more agency, perhaps an autonomy-supportive instructional
approach and using peers for feedback could be a really effective way of helping improve
motivation and maybe some authentic assessments where students see that the work they're doing
has some intrinsic value beyond just a series of hoops they have to jump through,
(30:28):
that the instructor is kind of imposing on them to get away from that enforcer mindset and giving
students more control over the learning process, it sounds like would be really helpful.
Yeah. I mean, I think that there are curricular changes and pedagogical changes that are well
known in the literature to be good for student learning and make them agentic
or whatever. And I'm not pretending like I'm inventing constructivism or anything like that.
(30:51):
It's more this idea that there's an unspoken conversation between a student and their past
that is present anytime a teacher is pushing them, challenging them, using this maybe more
progressive curriculum. And if you're not attuned to that conversation, and if you're not able to
help a student see that this is different, then they're going to be wearing a set of lenses that
(31:14):
’s going to cause them to interpret what we're doing in the worst possible light. And that's
not because Gen Z is too wimpy or too woke or too entitled or whatever it is. It's because they're
legitimately responding to prior experiences that they've had, and they've made sense of those,
and they've allowed that sense making to influence them in the future. That's just how human thinking
works. We form little lay theories of the world based on our experience. So we kind of need to be
(31:36):
agents of change, of giving them a new theory that when a teacher is pushing you and challenging you,
it's because they believe in you, and they're often going to offer you support,
and if they don't, then the support is what you need to find in order to meet that standard.
Transparency can be really transformative and it sounds like that's something that you're really
advocating for, is being really transparent about doing things that's respectful.
(32:00):
Yeah, like I've been saying, you can't just presume that they will interpret your actions
in the best possible light. So a good example that helps, it's kind of an analogy to teaching, is a
study led by Kyle Dobson, who's a University of Virginia professor, and previously was my postdoc,
and we did an experiment where we looked at the context of police officers approaching civilians
on the street, and typically, what happens if a police officer comes up and asks you a bunch of
(32:24):
questions, is people feel threatened, and we know why. It's because there are all kinds of stories
of arrests and police brutality and things like that. But police officers are baffled by this,
because they're like, “Well, my badge says serve and protect, and why would you not think I'm here
to serve and protect? Of course, it’s what I'm doing.” And so there's this mismatch between the
intentions of the officer usually, and then the responses of the civilians. And so we did a study
(32:48):
where we had people sitting in desks all around this downtown Austin, and then we had real on-duty
police officers, wearing guns and badges, go approach people and ask them a bunch of questions,
and they either launched into the questions in a control group, and there, people felt super
stressed about it. They had short, kind of curt replies. Their stress physiology didn't
(33:09):
look good when we measured it, implicitly using a PPG monitor on their wrist, and in general,
there was very poor rapport. But when the officer started the interaction with a simple transparency
statement, when they just said, “Hey, I'm walking around trying to get to know the community,
would you mind if I ask you some questions?” When that happened, then people were really open to
(33:29):
the conversation. They were kind of into it, and they formed a rapport. And what that suggests is
that even in a context where the institutional authority should, in their minds, be viewed as
positive, but in civilians’ minds, there's this history of distrust. And we can look, we see trust
going down every single year on major metrics for police and other institutions, you can kind of
(33:50):
create a bubble where trust can be restored if you begin with a transparency statement. Now I
did a workshop one time for a bunch of principals and superintendents on transparency statements,
and I gave the example of, “Hey, imagine you're a school leader, and there's a teacher who's
brand new, and you went and set in the back of their class and you took a bunch of notes,
and you were giving them feedback. How could you use the transparency statement so that way they
(34:11):
didn't view your feedback in the worst possible light.” And one superintendent was like, “Oh,
very easy. I would go up to him and say, ‘hey, look, just want you to know the reason why I'm
observing your class is because I think you're the worst teacher and you need to
be monitored.’” And I was like, “You should not be transparent about that. Keep that to yourself,
like because that is the main worry that was in their mind already, so do not say that.” So I'm
(34:35):
not saying you should be transparent in that way. What I'm saying is be transparent in dispelling
the most negative possible interpretations and instead replacing them with better ones.
I appreciate the sound of your forehead being slapped as I told that story. That's a real story.
And they were very earnest. They're like, this is the first person to raise their hand, like, “Oh,
(34:55):
this is easy.” I was like, “Really, in a workshop of 100 school leaders, that's your answer?”
We all know that person. Yeah, they were very confident.
In terms of knowing that person… You talked a little bit about the importance of helping
students develop that growth mindset and so forth, but there was that study by Elizabeth
Canning and others that talk about the importance of faculty having a growth mindset. Both Rebecca
(35:16):
and I at various times in various ways do work with professional development. How can
we help faculty recognize that maybe having an expectation that students could grow and could
become more successful in learning? How can we spread this, other than encouraging people to
read your book and other resources, how can we get faculty to recognize that students can become more
(35:40):
proficient as they work and develop skills? Yeah. I mean, I think that the beautiful work
by Mary Murphy on fixed mindset cultures and Elizabeth Canning is a collaborator, has suggested
that what faculty believe can dramatically influence the decisions that they make and
what makes sense to them from their perspective. The question of how to change faculty is a little
(36:03):
different. So I don't think that you can just give K-12 teachers or college professors the student
growth mindset intervention, like, “Hey, here's this stuff about the brain.” And a big reason why,
we've learned, and I write about this in our PNAS article last year, led by my postdoc,
Cameron Hecht, growth mindset is really good news to students. It's like, “Oh, awesome. I don't have
(36:23):
to feel dumb anymore when I make a mistake.” It's not good news to teachers sometimes,
because they're like, “Wait a second, if mistakes are learning opportunities, then it sounds like I
have to re-teach you stuff after you make a mistake, and then I have to regrade it after
you try it again, and that sounds like more work.” And as I've said, that's not always the case, but
that's like people's first interpretation. And so you can't use that same argument. What we found is
(36:46):
you need to use something called a values-aligned argument. And this is a framework developed by
Chris Bryan and me. Chris is a business school professor at UT, but he's a social psychologist by
training, and values alignment is very simple the idea that if you want to change someone's beliefs
or attitudes or behavior is easier to align the targeted attitude, behavior, belief, with
(37:06):
what they already care about than it is to try to convince them to care about something new. And in
the case of teaching, for college professors like we're very rarely held accountable for what we do,
and very few people are ever told even how to backwards plan, let alone teach. And for K-12,
they do obviously care a lot about instruction. And obviously college professors do care,
(37:27):
but like, in my experience, often the best college professors know about as much about teaching as
like, the middle of the road K-12 teacher, because we're just not given much pedagogical instruction.
So for professors, like it's very hard for your culture of learning and creating growth mindset
culture to get to the front of the list. For K-12, it's also hard because you're given an endless
(37:47):
number of things you're supposed to be changing and fixing at all times, and you're going to three
PDs a year and there’s three new binders you're going to put on yourself. It's going to make you
feel guilty that you never implemented them. And so the way we think to cut in line, to get
to the front of the line of your motivational priorities, so that a growth mindset culture,
or what I call a mentor mindset, is what you want to prioritize, is to align it with what people
(38:09):
already care about. And what people already care about often is having the kind of classroom where,
when you walk in, students are tracking what you're doing. They're motivated, they're engaged,
they're curious. They ask you questions about your content area. They care more about the learning
than the grade. You don't have this constantly threaten them or blame them or console them to do
the minimum. It's really motivating to have that kind of better motivated classroom culture. And
(38:34):
so we say, “Look, if you believe that no one can grow and learn and that it's all or nothing, that
your first grade will be your last grade, then students will pick up on that as disrespectful,
because you're basically telling them that their efforts are wasted and that there's no point in
trying, because if you got an A, well then you're going to get an A at the end. If you got a C,
you're going to get a C in the end. So what's the point of doing anything?” That's a disrespectful
(38:55):
way to run your class. And if within 10 to 25 young people are sensitive to disrespect, then
they're going to be disengaged, if that's how they feel. But if you want to engage them, they need to
feel respected. And the way to respect them is to make them feel like they can grow and learn even
when they struggle. So we frame growth mindset not as like you should do this, like eating your
broccoli kind of thing. It's more like, maybe there's some broccoli lovers out there. I don't
(39:18):
there's an alternative. I don't want to offend any broccoli eaters. So brussels sprouts…
I like both of those. …specifically brussels sprouts covered in
bacon as an appetizer, is mine… But anyway, let's just pick a food that people kind of have to hold
their nose and eat for any objecting broccoli or Brussels sprout eaters and like, that's not gonna
work. But what will work is saying this is a way to be the kind of person you always want it to be,
(39:41):
and that, I think, is motivating and exciting for people. And so mentor mindset, framed as a way of
respecting young people, and therefore as a way of engaging them, is, I think, more effective.
I think that's a good pro tip to wrap up on. So I want to be cognizant of our time,
so we always wrap up by asking (39:55):
“what's next?” Our big initiative right now is basically taking
the mentor mindset ideas from the book, and spreading them to educators. So we have a
fellowship called the Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement or FUSE that Carol Dweck and I and
our collaborators, we personally wrote all the materials and are very excited about them and the
(40:17):
results look really good. So in a large randomized trial that'll be coming out this year later,
we find that teachers, if they change their mindsets, they change their behavior. Students,
then, when they get the mentor mindset classrooms, they view the classroom as more respectful and
more motivating. They feel comfortable raising their hand and asking questions, making mistakes,
(40:38):
and then they learn more. And the effects, well, I don't know if they'll always be this big,
but they look pretty big right now, of .4 standard deviations, which is pretty large in education.
And then teacher attrition is down by half, and so is burnout. So the mentor mindset stuff ends
up being the only educational intervention that we know of that, in a rigorous randomized trial,
(41:00):
changes teachers, changes students’ perceptions, changes students’ grades,
and improve teacher well being, and it does so for like $23 a kid, so it's like 10 times
more effective than individualized tutoring at scale for like, 1/100 the cost. So that's coming,
and we're thinking about how to expand that, scale it and make it better. I will say we
hired Sergio Estrada as one of the facilitators for FUSE, and so it's a real treat for them.
(41:24):
…some really exciting stuff.It sounds like a wonderful
program, and we encourage everyone to consider picking up a copy of your book. We're going to
be using it as a reading group on our campus, so we're really looking forward to it, and we
will include links to all the studies that you've referenced in the show notes.
Great. So thank you,
although I do have to say one other thing, that putting bacon around
(41:46):
brussels sprouts sounds a lot like a compliment sandwich in some way.
I mainly just listened to the Jim Gaffigan bit on bacon and so that was fresh in my mind.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes
(42:07):
or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on
our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
Many attempts at influencing adolescent behavior fail. In this episode, we examine
how a mentor mindset may be used to increase student motivation and academic success.
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective
(00:24):
practices in teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted by
John Kane, an economist... ...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer...
...and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more
inclusive and supportive of all learners.Our guest today is David S. Yeager. David
(00:51):
is the Raymond Dixon Centennial professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin,
and a co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is best
known for his research with Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth and Greg Walton on interventions that
influence adolescent behaviors. David has served as a consultant for Google, Microsoft, Disney and
(01:13):
the World Bank, and is the recipient of over 15 awards for his work in social, developmental,
and educational psychology. He has published extensively in scholarly publications, and his
research has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal, Scientific American, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many, many other
(01:35):
places. David and Carol Dweck and others have also created a MasterClass on The Power of Mindset. His
most recent book is 10 to 25 (01:43):
The Science of Motivating Young People. Welcome, David.
Thanks for having me.Today's teas are:... David?
Are you drinking any tea with us today?Uh…. No, I am not. I read a short story about tea
recently, so that's the closest tea story that I have for you.
Alright, we'll count it, we'll count it, we'll count it. I know you have water with you,
(02:07):
which is, as we know, the foundation of tea. It's pre tea.
It's pre tea. How about you, John,I am drinking a spring cherry green tea,
continuing the trend of cherry-based teas. Yes, the theme continues. I've reverted
back to the blue sapphire tea.And I thought the spring cherry tea was
particularly good with a couple feet of snow that we've had in the last few days here.
(02:31):
And it is currently snowing very hard out my window, John.
I don't have windows here, so it's perfectly nice here until I leave. So we've invited you
here today to discuss 10 to 25 which brings together a large volume of research findings
concerning student motivation in a very accessible manner. Educators at all levels
have been raising growing concerns about student motivation. That's always been there, but it seems
(02:56):
to be a little bit more serious in the last few years, while many students report that educators
seem to be out of touch with their lives and their experiences, so this book is extremely well timed.
How did this book project come about? Yeah, it's a great question. It’s kind
of a convergence of a few different things. So one was just my observation over years
that as a society we are so bad at changing and influencing adolescents. One program
(03:21):
after another seems to not work, and probably the impetus for that was I was asked to write a paper
for the special issue of something called the future of children, like 2017, it's on social
and emotional learning, and it’s an awesome group of scholars and led by Stephanie Jones, who I
admire very deeply, and I was asked to write the chapter on adolescents. So what works for social
(03:44):
and emotional learning for adolescents? And tell you what, like I kept looking in the literature,
and nothing really worked. And then when you look at the meta analyses, it seemed like there was
this negative trend where the older the kids in the study, the less effective the program.
And the programs that did seem to work weren't social and emotional learning programs, they were
(04:06):
something else that later somebody labeled social and emotional learning. It was like Facing History
and Ourselves, which is like a history curriculum. And the side effect of good history education was
some better social and emotional outcome. But it wasn't like they were teaching you square
breathing or meditation or something. And I just wanted to get to the bottom of it and I was like,
why is it the case that we've got all these things that seem to work with younger kids? Because SEL
(04:28):
programs did have pretty good results, third, fourth, fifth grade, maybe even younger. So like,
what's going on, seventh grade to 12th grade? And what I discovered was that in general,
we kind of have the wrong view of young people, and therefore we keep defaulting to the same kinds
of wrong programs, and then we're shocked that they don't work, but it's because they come out
of a particular mental model. So everything from DARE to Just Say No to anti-bullying programs,
(04:54):
and the list goes on, and I went on sabbatical at Stanford about 10 years ago to try to get to
the bottom of this and figure it out. And this book involved a lot more than that, but that's
what started it. And so it's really been kind of 10 years of work to expand on that idea.
So you just mentioned DARE, and you talk about this and many other educational interventions in
(05:16):
your introductory chapter. And similarly, college faculty who give students detailed feedback on
their writing often see little feedback being implemented in follow-up submissions. Can you
talk a little bit about why many interventions that are designed to improve the lives of
adolescents are just so unsuccessful? The first kind of passive insight was that
there's two things (05:36):
One is that what the programs are trying to change, like the basic hypothesis
they're going after wasn't the right thing to be changing. And the second is that even if they were
targeting the right thing, they didn't say it in the right way. So just take anti-bullying.
The most common way to reduce bullying is to teach kids social skills. It's like, “Well,
(05:56):
the reason why you're bullying is you don't have a way of dealing with social conflict
that is productive, that you have an unproductive habit.” And the research ended up suggesting that
actually, for young kids like third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade, bullying is associated
with poor social skills. It's kids like some of my kids, where they're ADHD and they just kind of get
(06:18):
a rise out of bothering people and saying things repetitively, or getting a rise out of somebody.
But for middle school and high school, often bullying is associated with better social skills,
because the kind of bullying you're doing is strategically destroying someone else's reputation
while maintaining plausible deniability, so the adults can't get you in trouble,
but then all of your friends see it, so that way you gain status and you look powerful,
(06:42):
and that's actually very sophisticated to do that. Real world bullying is more sophisticated
than what you see in Mean Girls. And it's not the case that kids need more social skills,
because, in fact, the more social skills they had, maybe the better they would be at bullying.
So what you often saw actually was an increase in bullying as a result of middle school or high
school anti-bullying programs. So that was one big issue. And the second big issue is that even if
(07:05):
you were working on the right stuff, and the right stuff, by the way, would be something about trying
to maintain your reputation and gain status in a productive way, rather than by destroying others,
would be an alternative, for example. But the way the programs are often framed is super
lame. I mean, it's like, DARE is like someone with a neon fanny pack throwing out headbands,
like wearing socks and sandals and like, 0% of kids are like, “Oh yeah, you're right.
(07:29):
Next time someone I have a crush on offers me a cigarette, I'm gonna be like, ‘no, because I
dare to resist drugs.’” No one's gonna say that. And in fact, like, if you think back on DARE,
they teach skills through scenarios, but like, what are the scenarios? It's like, you do a skit
in front of the class, and like, one kid stands up and they offer the other kid drugs, like, “Hey,
(07:50):
man, you want some cocaine?” And then the other kid's supposed to be like, “No way, dude.” And in
every case, the kid offering the drugs looks way cooler than the nerd who says no, and all you've
done is prove in front of everyone that awesome people offer everyone drugs. And so again, like
drug use, on average, goes up in response to DARE and similar programs. So the way to summarize this
(08:13):
is that you have to be attuned to the adolescent desire for status and respect, their desire to
maintain a good reputation in the eyes of people whose opinions they care about, and if you don't,
then you might just push them away, or you might even make the bad behavior more enticing. And so
that's a launching off point for this book, where I try to suggest better approaches.
(08:35):
One of the other things you talk about and you've written about is how to provide feedback
effectively to students. And one thing that many people have been taught for a very long time and
still are is to use that compliment sandwich where you put some critique in between two
positive comments. And it turns out that that's not very effective. One of the things you suggest
(08:56):
is that a wise feedback strategy may be more effective. Could you talk a little bit about why
the compliment sandwich doesn't work and why wise feedback may be a more effective way of providing
feedback that students will respond to? Yeah, so I'm starting from this premise that
young people are like exquisitely sophisticated in they're thinking about their reputations and
(09:18):
how others are perceiving them socially, and given that, when they're critiqued by a teacher
or a coach or a manager or anyone who has power over them, then they're not just processing it
as information to include in their mental model of perfecting a skill, there's a social implication:
“Who is this person who's implying that I'm not good enough yet? And why do they feel entitled
(09:43):
to very publicly say that I'm inadequate? And furthermore, do they think I'll ever be not
inadequate? Like, is there any possibility that I could grow and improve?” So they're
asking these big, existential questions that have their roots in concerns about their status
and reputation. What is the adult thinking? Well, they're thinking, I don't have to give you any
(10:04):
feedback at all, like you're lucky that I'm even spending any time on you, and don't complain,
stop whining, and the least I'll do will be to try to soften the blow by being a little nice,
but if you don't like that, then you're entitled, and you're a wimp. That's kind of a lot of adults’
approach. And so what occurs to them is to be like, Alright, well, I don't want you to cry,
(10:29):
so I'm gonna do the compliment sandwich. And the compliment sandwich is something like, “Look,
I love your enthusiasm.” It's a nice thing. And then it's a negative thing, like,”All of your work
is terrible and has to change.” And then there's the nice thing, like, “Thanks for turning it in on
time.” And we do our mental math. It's like we're balancing a stoichiometric equation. And then we
(10:49):
say “Net positive. So you should thank me for this feedback.” But again, you haven't addressed the
core question in the young person's mind about their status and their worthiness in our eyes.
And so the alternative is to directly address the concern that young people have no value, that they
have no potential, they have no future, et cetera, by using something that Geoff Cohen, a Stanford
(11:11):
professor, one of my mentors, has called wise feedback. And wise feedback is very simply saying,
I'm giving you these comments because I have very high standards, and I know that you can meet them.
So it's first an appeal to a high standard, and second an offer of support so that way they can
meet it. And it turns out that that comes across as a very respectful thing to say, and therefore
it builds trust, and it puts the young person in a place in which they're open to criticism,
(11:37):
because you've addressed their main fear, which is that we view them as incompetent.
So in 2014 you were the first author on an experiment involving wise feedback. Can you
talk a little bit about this study? Yeah, so in one experiment that, again,
was led initially by Geoff Cohen, my collaborator, and other great people like Valerie Purdie-Vaughns
at Columbia, we partnered with a school in the East Coast, and we had teachers assign their
(12:02):
seventh grade students an essay to write. So kids write a standard five-paragraph essay, and then
the teachers cover them in comments so they do whatever the six plus one writing tactics are,
and they kind of do their worst, and then the kids have a chance to revise the essay or not.
And the question is, when do kids get their essays back, covered in red ink and say, “This is great.
(12:25):
I'm really happy for all of these ways in which I can improve. So thanks for pointing out my flaws,
and I'm excited to fix them. So here we go.” When did they say that? And when do they say,
“My teacher is such a jerk that he spent his whole weekend trashing the essay in the ego of a seventh
grader.” And we found that in the default control group, where we didn't do any wise feedback, only
(12:47):
about 40% of kids even turned in their essays. But we also had teachers append handwritten notes
on the essays that said, “I'm giving you these comments because they have high standards, and I
know that you can meet them.” And then they sealed the essays in an envelope and handed them back,
so that way kids didn't know which got that note or which got a control group note that
didn't convey any new information. And then a week later, kids had the chance to revise,
(13:09):
and what we found is that 80% of kids revised their essay in the wise feedback group. And
for me as a parent, you know, I have four kids, and so if twice as many of my kids listened to
the things I told them to do, then at least two of my four kids would have pants on by the time
it's time to go to school, and my life would be better. And I was a middle school teacher,
and I remember spending all weekend grading essays and thinking, “Oh man, they're going to
(13:31):
be so grateful for all this feedback. They're gonna carry me on their shoulders like Robin
Williams at the end of Dead Poets Society and be a hero.” And instead, they were just like, “Why
is this guy such a jerk?” And my life would have been a lot better if I knew about this research
at the time. But I will say it's been interesting since we published that study. There's a tendency
to over claim how important it is. Obviously this is just one assignment one time. I'm not claiming
(13:55):
this is a magic bullet. The author, Dan Coyle, in his book The Culture Code, called it magic
feedback. And I don't like that. I don't think it's magic. To be honest, what I think the magic
is is the feeling of dignity and respect when you're in a vulnerable position and someone is
looking down on you, and they instead assure you that you are a person of worth and value, that,
(14:16):
I think is magical. It might happen to the post it note might not. There's a lot of other ways you
can show that, but I think when you do that, then you start tapping into what's going to motivate
adolescents to change. And the more we do that in schools, I think the better off they would be.
Is this something that cuts off once you pass adolescence? Could this also refer to
the feedback from reviewer two on that paper? It's funny, I've grown less patient as a reviewer
(14:40):
over my time as a reviewer. I'm only mean to a specific kind of author. I lose my patience if
you're like, at the University of Chicago, and you have every resource at your fingertips and
you still wrote a lazy paper, then I'm like, “I don't have time for you.” Anybody else,
I'm wise feedbacking away. But anyway, I guess I would say that I'm not arguing there's a magical
cutoff of 10 years old, all of a sudden you need wise feedback at 25 you need it, in 25.1 day you
(15:06):
don't it's really more that the window of 10 to 25 is like the onset of puberty until the adoption of
an adult-like role. And that just tends to be a period where your status is very precarious
and ambiguous and it's uncertain to you if you're going to be taken seriously, if you're going to be
afforded the rights and privileges that you think you deserve. Like a good example is this wonderful
(15:27):
study I love from 1998 nobody cites by Ruck and colleagues, and it's on self-determination needs.
And it's very simple idea. They ask kids at what age do you think you should have a certain right
or privilege? And then they ask adults, at what age should kids have it? So an example is being
able to write a letter that's critical of the principal and publish it in the school paper.
(15:47):
So seventh graders are like, “Yeah, I should totally be able to do that.” And adults are like,
“Not till 11th grade.” So you've got this gap. So you got, like, four years or more, depending on
the measure, there's variation in that outcome. But like, you've got 1, 2, 3, 4 years where a
young person is ready for some right and privilege and society’s saying, “No way.” That's what I call
the adolescent predicament, that your status and respect is in question because of that gap and
(16:13):
mismatch, and I think you could experience that later in life. This one interesting guy read my
book and emailed me. He's a general counsel for a large like Fortune 100 company, and he's like,
“Man, I really have to worry about giving feedback to my junior associates, like when they write
a brief.” So he's thinking of himself as the mentor. And then it came out that he's actually
(16:34):
doing a master's in education because he's about to retire from being a lawyer, and he's going to
go be a classroom teacher for the sunset of his career. And I was like, as a 60 year old, but
first- year teacher, if there's a principal in the back of the room sitting there with a clipboard
making notes on every single thing you're doing in the classroom, are you going to feel nervous
and worried? He's like, “Oh, absolutely.” So he's gonna feel back again like a 13-year old
(16:56):
getting his essay criticized. So I really think that the operational definition of adolescents,
at some level, is this adolescent predicament, this mismatch between the status and respect you
think you're ready for, that you desire, and then what you're afforded by your context.
Beginning early in your book, and through much of it, you talk about the mentor’s
dilemma. Could you talk a little bit about what that is and how we can address that?
(17:19):
Yeah, the mentor's dilemma is, again, something coined by Geoff Cohen. It's the simple idea that
it's very hard to simultaneously criticize someone and motivate them. And the reason why
it's a dilemma is because it feels like you have two bad choices, like one choice is “I'm going
to be really honest and tough and impossible to please and tell you all your flaws, but sacrifice
(17:40):
your motivation and crush your spirit.” Or the alternative is “I'm going to be nice and friendly
and supportive, but I'm not going to tell you the truth. I'm going to withhold feedback.”
And neither of those really feels satisfying. It feels like they're not what you're supposed to
be doing. And what we've found, and what we've proposed, is that the solution to the mentor's
(18:00):
dilemma is something we call the mentor mindset, and that's kind of being the walking, talking
embodiment of the wise feedback note, where in all your interactions with young people, you're
neither too harsh nor too much of a pushover. You are very tough, you have high standards, but your
supports are as high as your demands. So that way young people can meet that demanding standard.
(18:23):
Can you give us some examples of how this mindset might be implemented
in a day-to-day student interaction? Yeah, so mentor mindset is something that
comes up a lot in let's just say, how you deal with a student mistake. So in our work, we have
this fellowship program for math teachers. Carol Dweck and I and several others developed a new
(18:43):
program called FUSE, Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement. And the idea is that the culture
teachers create in the classroom can influence whether students benefit from our instruction.
So I get to spend all day giving you illustrative math or Eureka math, and correcting all your math
misconceptions. But if, fundamentally, the kid thinks that the reason why they made a mistake
(19:04):
is because they're a lazy slacker that the teacher is looking down on, because the teacher explained
it clearly and you didn't do it, and therefore you weren't paying attention, if that's your default,
then you're not going to engage with this conceptually demanding, cognitively sophisticated
curriculum. You'd be like “No way, because if it's not clear to me right away, then it's a threat.”
So as a teacher, you need to have a culture in which mistakes are your friend. Otherwise you're
(19:26):
stuck doing a curriculum in which students only ever master things at 100% and they're
never confused, they're never lost. Therefore, in order to create that culture, you have to
have good routines for troubleshooting mistakes with students, because you can't just blame and
shame them or yell at them for making mistakes, nor can you avoid the mistakes altogether. And so
I spent some time observing great mentor mindset teachers, teachers who had very high standards and
(19:48):
were very supportive, and they make students own their thinking, and they ask tons of open-ended
questions, and the students squirm sometimes. And a normal novice teacher, like I would have done,
they feel uncomfortable. They think the student's head's gonna explode, that they're sitting there
not knowing the answer, but their wait time is unbelievable for these great teachers. And
(20:10):
there's a routine that I call collaborative troubleshooting, and there's three steps.
One is validating what the student has done, so like finding something right about the student's
answer. Next is asking questions to understand (20:19):
so where did this come from? What was your reasoning?
And that ends up being super important, because a lot of teachers immediately jump in and presume
they understand the student's mistake. Oh, you forgot to carry the two. So next time, carry the
two. But sometimes we're wrong, and what teenagers hate is when adults make assumptions about them.
(20:40):
And furthermore, when you make assumptions and you're not right, you end up telling them
solutions that were already obvious to them, and then that's also insulting, like imagine
you were lost and you pulled over to ask someone for advice on where to go, and then they're like,
“Did you think about checking Google Maps?” You're like, “Yes, I thought about checking Google Maps.”
It’s a very insulting thing to say, like it's the most obvious thing. So a lot of times when
(21:03):
students come to teachers, that's how they react, is they tell them to do something obvious that the
students already tried. So great mentor mindset teachers don't do that. They ask questions to
understand before they tell and then, last, they kind of ask leading questions to build a bridge to
a better understanding, and they wait for the student to piece it together in their minds.
Novice teachers don't do that because they feel anxious that the student is stressed, and then
(21:25):
they rush in to tell the answer. This goes back to classic research from Mark Lepper on expert
tutors in the mid 90s. Mark Lepper, a Stanford psychologist who coined the term intrinsic
motivation initially. He spent years just watching great tutors and found that over 90% of what they
say is a question. They're not sitting there telling you what to think. They're like, “Huh?
Where did that answer come from?” or “Is that right?” And then the student has to have a coach
(21:49):
in the head to try to solve the problems. There's a lot of other examples, but I love that one,
both because it's intuitive once you get it. It's also not obvious when you're a novice teacher,
I feel like those same three steps would be great in the healthcare industry.
Any industry. You don't think people like doctors talking down to them
for making such idiotic health choices?I was thinking that might be a great place
(22:09):
for teachers to get some empathy. Like, “Where have you been talked down to recently?” Or tech,
or any of these places.Well, the interesting thing is,
we have this fellowship program for teachers, and their empathy is not hard to get. Just ask them
about a time they talk to an instructional coach. Instructional coaches, ideally, are
these endlessly empathetic listeners. But that's not often how it works. It's like they race in,
(22:32):
they tell you what to do. You're doing everything wrong, and I'm going to check your test scores
next week. And I have compassion for the coaches too, because a lot of districts, especially poor
districts, use instructional coaches like backup admins, so they're pushing paper three fourths of
the day. They hardly ever get to actually coach. So without blaming any individuals in the system,
most teachers almost immediately have access to this idea of everyone making an assumption about
(22:55):
your limitations and then telling you obvious things and then making you feel like an idiot. So
even though they know that, that's still often teachers’ default when they talk to kids.
As part of this whole mentor mindset, the goal is to treat students with respect and to let them
know that you think they're capable. But a lot of students come in with stereotype threat, a lot of
students come in with perhaps some imposter syndrome that they don't feel they're going
(23:18):
to be successful to begin with. How can we help build that growth mindset in students who may have
some doubts about their own ability to thrive?Well, I'd just say that stereotype threat often is
more of a situational predicament. It's more like they're aware that other people could judge them,
even if they don't personally believe the stereotypes. But I think that for students
who are used to adults using something I call an enforcer mindset, which is kind of all standards,
(23:45):
no support, or as someone I interview in the book calls it: “Yell, tell, blame and shame.” If that's
what you're expecting, then it's very hard for students to see the teacher's growth mindset and
be like, “Yeah, that's great. I love it,” because all they see is the standard, and they think,
“Oh, here we go again, another grown up is going to yell at me for not being good enough.” So I
spent a long time interviewing this great teacher who's kind of like the best growth mindset teacher
(24:09):
in Texas. His name is Sergio Estrada. He's at Riverside High School in El Paso Texas, and Carol
Dweck and I interviewed him a lot, like every Friday for months. And every once in a while,
some kid would wander in his class during his off period, when we're talking to him. And I would be
like, “Hey, who's the opposite of Mr. Estrada?” And, I tell you what, I've heard some stories.
(24:31):
And one kid, Emiliano, told me a story about his English teacher, and his English teacher assigned
some essay where they had to write the pro and con or side one/side two, and then he could only
come up with one of the two. So he went to the teacher after class to ask for help. He's like,
“I have the assignment. I can only figure out half the assignment.” And then the teacher said,
“Tú no lo entendiste porque no quisiste,” which is you didn't understand it because you didn't want
(24:55):
to. And he was crushed by this, and came back to me and was like, “Dr, Yeager, it's so unfair.” And
I was like, “What do you mean? It's unfair?” He's like, “Well, I have ADHD, I only understand half
of what anybody tells me,” like, “this is how I get the other half. I can't imagine wanting the
other half anymore than coming after school to come talk to this teacher to try to get it and
yet she's assuming that I was screwing around in class, that I don't care, I don't care about my
(25:20):
education, don't care about learning, and then I'm trying to, like, ruin her lesson plan by
making everybody be behind and asking questions.” And like, Sergio would never do that, but he also
knows when students come in his class that that's what they're used to. So he has learned he has to
give a speech at the beginning of class explaining that this is a new culture. Say, for example,
(25:41):
this idea of questioning, Sergio, like a great tutor asks questions way more than he tells. So if
a student is doing a problem set and they're like, “Mr. Estrada, is this right?” He'll say, “Well,
I don't know. Do you think it’s right?” So there's a way of doing that that does not go over well,
it goes over like a lead balloon. There's a way of doing it where you look like the jerk law school
professor cold calling people and forcing them to explain their thinking, and you're trying to
(26:04):
humiliate them. And adults do often ask questions of kids in public to humiliate them. I mean,
as a parent like, I do that sometimes, even though I don't want to, I'm like,
“what were you thinking?” Or like, “Is that the right way to put your chair away?” Or like,
“Should you be grabbing that cookie?” Like, it's not an authentic question. It's a question meant
to shame and humiliate. So that's what kids are used to. And so Sergio, before he does
his old questioning routine and his collaborative troubleshooting, he's like, “Alright, guys, I care
(26:28):
deeply that you are good at physics after this class. And in fact, everyone who passes this class
eventually deeply understands physics, and I don't want to deprive you of the chance to know that you
can do it, so I'm not going to tell you answers, but it's not because I'm being unhelpful. It's
because I want you to own the thinking. And every year, students eventually get it, and every year
students don't like it at the beginning. So I just want you to know that I'm not trying to shame you,
(26:51):
not trying to embarrass you. I'm trying to honor and respect you and make you know that I think you
can think, and I want you to build that muscle” or something like that. And then he'll print it
out and he's got it on the wall. So the next time students are mad or offended and they're thinking,
“Oh, here we go, another enforcer mindset, he’s going to yell at me.” It's like on the wall,
it's crystal clear. And then by the end of the year, these are students who say,
(27:11):
“Mr. Estrada changed my life. He believed in me.” They're like the first in their family to
go to college. They're getting internships at NASA. I'm not exaggerating, like every summer,
students get internships at NASA, but it takes that transparency. You can't just show up and do
mentor mindset if students have that enforcer mindset baggage that they've experienced.
So I can imagine that some folks might be thinking adopting a mentor mindset might
(27:36):
increase their workload somehow. Is that true? Yeah, it's interesting. It's one of the first
things I worried about writing this book. I was like, “Oh, am I writing an impossible to
accomplish self-help book?” I mean, it would be like, grabbing a diet book where like, “The
best way to lose weight is to never eat anything that you enjoy.” Well like, “Yeah, I knew that.
The hard part is to eat what I enjoy and still not gain weight.” So I'm not saying the best way
(27:58):
to be a teacher is to do it 120 hours a week. And there are things that Sergio does where he's like,
“I don't recommend anyone do this. It's like a lot of work.” But I will say two things. One,
every great mentor mindset teacher I saw had procedures and policies that they set up early
on in the term, and that often involved getting peers to look at each other's work and having a
(28:18):
good culture of peer feedback. It's kind of a “ask two before me” situation, and they're not doing
that to dismiss kids like gnats. They're doing it to give them a sense of agency and teach a skill
of collaboration. But that, by the way, saves them tons of time, because 80, 90% of errors,
like some really high percentage of errors, are things where the minute the kid tries to explain
(28:41):
it to their peer, they're like, “Oh my god, I see it now.” So they actually didn't need the teacher,
like, you just need another human being when they're explaining. So one thing is,
you can still do a lot of this stuff and save time if you just have good procedures for peer
collaboration and feedback, it saves you tons of time. The second is, there's often a short-term,
long-term trade off. It does take a little more time to set up procedures and create a
(29:02):
relationship of respect, but then the whole second semester, you've got independent, autonomous
students that are working hard. You don't even have to like mess with them. So I remembered
we interviewed Sergio during COVID, and it was like, April of 2020, and everyone's on lockdown
or whatever. And I was like, Sergio, how's it going? He’s like, “I feel really bad.” Like,
(29:24):
“why do you feel bad?” He's like, “I'm bored and I feel guilty.” Like, “Why are you bored? Why do
you feel guilty?” He's like, “because I don't do anything.” “What do you mean, you don't do
anything?” He's like, “I post the problem sets, then students meet in groups, and they talk about
physics all day. Maybe they ask me a question, but otherwise they just work diligently and then
learn physics.” And he had the highest rates of passing college level physics that year in his
(29:46):
whole district during COVID. And he like was on Tiktok all day, not because he was goofing off,
but because students were so self sufficient, and I think that's the payoff, is you use a mentor
mindset, and then you get people where their work is like kind of area under the curve, leading
to greater growth and learning, because you've created independent, agentic young people.
(30:06):
So, it sounds like giving students more agency, perhaps an autonomy-supportive instructional
approach and using peers for feedback could be a really effective way of helping improve
motivation and maybe some authentic assessments where students see that the work they're doing
has some intrinsic value beyond just a series of hoops they have to jump through,
(30:28):
that the instructor is kind of imposing on them to get away from that enforcer mindset and giving
students more control over the learning process, it sounds like would be really helpful.
Yeah. I mean, I think that there are curricular changes and pedagogical changes that are well
known in the literature to be good for student learning and make them agentic
or whatever. And I'm not pretending like I'm inventing constructivism or anything like that.
(30:51):
It's more this idea that there's an unspoken conversation between a student and their past
that is present anytime a teacher is pushing them, challenging them, using this maybe more
progressive curriculum. And if you're not attuned to that conversation, and if you're not able to
help a student see that this is different, then they're going to be wearing a set of lenses that
(31:14):
’s going to cause them to interpret what we're doing in the worst possible light. And that's
not because Gen Z is too wimpy or too woke or too entitled or whatever it is. It's because they're
legitimately responding to prior experiences that they've had, and they've made sense of those,
and they've allowed that sense making to influence them in the future. That's just how human thinking
works. We form little lay theories of the world based on our experience. So we kind of need to be
(31:36):
agents of change, of giving them a new theory that when a teacher is pushing you and challenging you,
it's because they believe in you, and they're often going to offer you support,
and if they don't, then the support is what you need to find in order to meet that standard.
Transparency can be really transformative and it sounds like that's something that you're really
advocating for, is being really transparent about doing things that's respectful.
(32:00):
Yeah, like I've been saying, you can't just presume that they will interpret your actions
in the best possible light. So a good example that helps, it's kind of an analogy to teaching, is a
study led by Kyle Dobson, who's a University of Virginia professor, and previously was my postdoc,
and we did an experiment where we looked at the context of police officers approaching civilians
on the street, and typically, what happens if a police officer comes up and asks you a bunch of
(32:24):
questions, is people feel threatened, and we know why. It's because there are all kinds of stories
of arrests and police brutality and things like that. But police officers are baffled by this,
because they're like, “Well, my badge says serve and protect, and why would you not think I'm here
to serve and protect? Of course, it’s what I'm doing.” And so there's this mismatch between the
intentions of the officer usually, and then the responses of the civilians. And so we did a study
(32:48):
where we had people sitting in desks all around this downtown Austin, and then we had real on-duty
police officers, wearing guns and badges, go approach people and ask them a bunch of questions,
and they either launched into the questions in a control group, and there, people felt super
stressed about it. They had short, kind of curt replies. Their stress physiology didn't
(33:09):
look good when we measured it, implicitly using a PPG monitor on their wrist, and in general,
there was very poor rapport. But when the officer started the interaction with a simple transparency
statement, when they just said, “Hey, I'm walking around trying to get to know the community,
would you mind if I ask you some questions?” When that happened, then people were really open to
(33:29):
the conversation. They were kind of into it, and they formed a rapport. And what that suggests is
that even in a context where the institutional authority should, in their minds, be viewed as
positive, but in civilians’ minds, there's this history of distrust. And we can look, we see trust
going down every single year on major metrics for police and other institutions, you can kind of
(33:50):
create a bubble where trust can be restored if you begin with a transparency statement. Now I
did a workshop one time for a bunch of principals and superintendents on transparency statements,
and I gave the example of, “Hey, imagine you're a school leader, and there's a teacher who's
brand new, and you went and set in the back of their class and you took a bunch of notes,
and you were giving them feedback. How could you use the transparency statement so that way they
(34:11):
didn't view your feedback in the worst possible light.” And one superintendent was like, “Oh,
very easy. I would go up to him and say, ‘hey, look, just want you to know the reason why I'm
observing your class is because I think you're the worst teacher and you need to
be monitored.’” And I was like, “You should not be transparent about that. Keep that to yourself,
like because that is the main worry that was in their mind already, so do not say that.” So I'm
(34:35):
not saying you should be transparent in that way. What I'm saying is be transparent in dispelling
the most negative possible interpretations and instead replacing them with better ones.
I appreciate the sound of your forehead being slapped as I told that story. That's a real story.
And they were very earnest. They're like, this is the first person to raise their hand, like, “Oh,
(34:55):
this is easy.” I was like, “Really, in a workshop of 100 school leaders, that's your answer?”
We all know that person. Yeah, they were very confident.
In terms of knowing that person… You talked a little bit about the importance of helping
students develop that growth mindset and so forth, but there was that study by Elizabeth
Canning and others that talk about the importance of faculty having a growth mindset. Both Rebecca
(35:16):
and I at various times in various ways do work with professional development. How can
we help faculty recognize that maybe having an expectation that students could grow and could
become more successful in learning? How can we spread this, other than encouraging people to
read your book and other resources, how can we get faculty to recognize that students can become more
(35:40):
proficient as they work and develop skills? Yeah. I mean, I think that the beautiful work
by Mary Murphy on fixed mindset cultures and Elizabeth Canning is a collaborator, has suggested
that what faculty believe can dramatically influence the decisions that they make and
what makes sense to them from their perspective. The question of how to change faculty is a little
(36:03):
different. So I don't think that you can just give K-12 teachers or college professors the student
growth mindset intervention, like, “Hey, here's this stuff about the brain.” And a big reason why,
we've learned, and I write about this in our PNAS article last year, led by my postdoc,
Cameron Hecht, growth mindset is really good news to students. It's like, “Oh, awesome. I don't have
(36:23):
to feel dumb anymore when I make a mistake.” It's not good news to teachers sometimes,
because they're like, “Wait a second, if mistakes are learning opportunities, then it sounds like I
have to re-teach you stuff after you make a mistake, and then I have to regrade it after
you try it again, and that sounds like more work.” And as I've said, that's not always the case, but
that's like people's first interpretation. And so you can't use that same argument. What we found is
(36:46):
you need to use something called a values-aligned argument. And this is a framework developed by
Chris Bryan and me. Chris is a business school professor at UT, but he's a social psychologist by
training, and values alignment is very simple the idea that if you want to change someone's beliefs
or attitudes or behavior is easier to align the targeted attitude, behavior, belief, with
(37:06):
what they already care about than it is to try to convince them to care about something new. And in
the case of teaching, for college professors like we're very rarely held accountable for what we do,
and very few people are ever told even how to backwards plan, let alone teach. And for K-12,
they do obviously care a lot about instruction. And obviously college professors do care,
(37:27):
but like, in my experience, often the best college professors know about as much about teaching as
like, the middle of the road K-12 teacher, because we're just not given much pedagogical instruction.
So for professors, like it's very hard for your culture of learning and creating growth mindset
culture to get to the front of the list. For K-12, it's also hard because you're given an endless
(37:47):
number of things you're supposed to be changing and fixing at all times, and you're going to three
PDs a year and there’s three new binders you're going to put on yourself. It's going to make you
feel guilty that you never implemented them. And so the way we think to cut in line, to get
to the front of the line of your motivational priorities, so that a growth mindset culture,
or what I call a mentor mindset, is what you want to prioritize, is to align it with what people
(38:09):
already care about. And what people already care about often is having the kind of classroom where,
when you walk in, students are tracking what you're doing. They're motivated, they're engaged,
they're curious. They ask you questions about your content area. They care more about the learning
than the grade. You don't have this constantly threaten them or blame them or console them to do
the minimum. It's really motivating to have that kind of better motivated classroom culture. And
(38:34):
so we say, “Look, if you believe that no one can grow and learn and that it's all or nothing, that
your first grade will be your last grade, then students will pick up on that as disrespectful,
because you're basically telling them that their efforts are wasted and that there's no point in
trying, because if you got an A, well then you're going to get an A at the end. If you got a C,
you're going to get a C in the end. So what's the point of doing anything?” That's a disrespectful
(38:55):
way to run your class. And if within 10 to 25 young people are sensitive to disrespect, then
they're going to be disengaged, if that's how they feel. But if you want to engage them, they need to
feel respected. And the way to respect them is to make them feel like they can grow and learn even
when they struggle. So we frame growth mindset not as like you should do this, like eating your
broccoli kind of thing. It's more like, maybe there's some broccoli lovers out there. I don't
(39:18):
there's an alternative. I don't want to offend any broccoli eaters. So brussels sprouts…
I like both of those. …specifically brussels sprouts covered in
bacon as an appetizer, is mine… But anyway, let's just pick a food that people kind of have to hold
their nose and eat for any objecting broccoli or Brussels sprout eaters and like, that's not gonna
work. But what will work is saying this is a way to be the kind of person you always want it to be,
(39:41):
and that, I think, is motivating and exciting for people. And so mentor mindset, framed as a way of
respecting young people, and therefore as a way of engaging them, is, I think, more effective.
I think that's a good pro tip to wrap up on. So I want to be cognizant of our time,
so we always wrap up by asking (39:55):
“what's next?” Our big initiative right now is basically taking
the mentor mindset ideas from the book, and spreading them to educators. So we have a
fellowship called the Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement or FUSE that Carol Dweck and I and
our collaborators, we personally wrote all the materials and are very excited about them and the
(40:17):
results look really good. So in a large randomized trial that'll be coming out this year later,
we find that teachers, if they change their mindsets, they change their behavior. Students,
then, when they get the mentor mindset classrooms, they view the classroom as more respectful and
more motivating. They feel comfortable raising their hand and asking questions, making mistakes,
(40:38):
and then they learn more. And the effects, well, I don't know if they'll always be this big,
but they look pretty big right now, of .4 standard deviations, which is pretty large in education.
And then teacher attrition is down by half, and so is burnout. So the mentor mindset stuff ends
up being the only educational intervention that we know of that, in a rigorous randomized trial,
(41:00):
changes teachers, changes students’ perceptions, changes students’ grades,
and improve teacher well being, and it does so for like $23 a kid, so it's like 10 times
more effective than individualized tutoring at scale for like, 1/100 the cost. So that's coming,
and we're thinking about how to expand that, scale it and make it better. I will say we
hired Sergio Estrada as one of the facilitators for FUSE, and so it's a real treat for them.
(41:24):
…some really exciting stuff.It sounds like a wonderful
program, and we encourage everyone to consider picking up a copy of your book. We're going to
be using it as a reading group on our campus, so we're really looking forward to it, and we
will include links to all the studies that you've referenced in the show notes.
Great. So thank you,
although I do have to say one other thing, that putting bacon around
(41:46):
brussels sprouts sounds a lot like a compliment sandwich in some way.
I mainly just listened to the Jim Gaffigan bit on bacon and so that was fresh in my mind.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes
(42:07):
or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on
our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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