What the Science Shows a Mentorship Mindset Can Do for Student Motivation

Foreign. Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane. How are you?

I am. Well, this is a first for us. We are doing a special summer episode, and for good reason.

Well, we are trying to break out, I would argue, of the old structures of, like, a summer break where kids go home and, you know, don't go to school. We're trying to break out of that model that, like we've always done in this podcast and to have an important conversation about a book that is upcoming and will be out by the time this podcast is released. So, Diane, why don't you introduce the book and our special guest?

Yeah. I'm really excited to welcome Dr. David Yeager to the podcast today. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and has a long, long list of accomplishments and works with a number of other learning scientists. So I encourage you all to go look at that impressive bio. Let me just share personally, that we met about a decade ago, and I have always been such a huge fan because David's work is so applicable to schools and to young people and to mentoring and to teachers and to parenting. And he is, in my view, one of the rare researchers who not only has a background in those areas, but is deeply committed to making sure his research is actually meaningful and embedded in practice. And so over the years, we've had tons of incredible dialogues and conversations about very practical things in schools. And he had a huge influence on our summit learning model when I was at Summit. And so I am so excited for his upcoming book called 10 to 25. And it's all about mentoring, which is a huge part of what I have worked on and focused on in my career. And so thrilled that you're here with us today to have this conversation. David, welcome.

Yeah, thanks a lot. It's great to be here. And, Diane. Yeah. I think it was 12 years ago we met. Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you were my favorite person. We met at this crazy meeting where we were briefing thought leaders in education reform. And the last question of that interview was, if you could do one thing, what would it be? And whatever I said a week later, you're like, okay, so we did that thing you said, now can you help us? And I was like, I love Diane Davner. She's just gonna make it happen. So I've just always been your admirer, and it's great to be on this.

Podcast, not just talk with Diane. It is action.

So, yeah, be careful what you say. She'll do it. Yeah.

Well, thank you. We are. We are thrilled to have you. And I Wanted to jump in. And this is, this is going to be kind of silly, but I think it's meaningful. Um, so, so your new book, um, it, it kind of introduces what I would call a mad lib activity. It's like a fill in the blank activity, um, and the fill in the blank sentences. And I know you've asked a bunch of people to complete this, so I'm curious, you know, the different responses you've, you've gotten. But it starts with this idea. The sentence of given that young people are blank, the best way to motivate them is blank. And so I'd love to know your response to that. But also, what do you normally hear from people when you ask them to fill in those, those, those sentence starters?

Yeah, I would say that. Let me just start with the most common things I hear. So the most common thing I hear is given that young people are kind of short sighted, lazy, hard to motivate, not listening to grownups, something like that, something kind of denigrating. Given that the best way to motivate them is to. And then you tend to see one of two things. One is like, explain to them why all their choices now are not quite right and why they're not aligned with their long term best interest. Or motivate them with either threats or rewards. So if you do this, something bad's gonna happen to you. Or if you do this, I'll give you this nice thing. So either bribes or threats. That's the most common answer I see. Um, the second most common answer I see is given that young people are stressed out, overwhelmed.

Addicted to their phone. Right, addicted to their phones.

Like recovering from COVID lonely, in the middle of a mental health epidemic, et cetera. The best way to motivate them is to remove their demands, chop up what they're doing into tiny steps, help them feel a sense of success, let them feel confident, don't overwhelm them, basically make it easy on them to grow up. And both of those, those of those kind of internal logics make sense, but neither of them are great. And I would say the big punchline from my book is when I started studying people who do an awesome job at motivating young people, even in the most difficult of circumstances, they complete the sentence with given. The young people are given, capable of doing incredible and incredible things that make contributions to the world. The best way to motivate them is to inspire them to sometimes to get out of their way, to run interference so that way things don't derail their ambitions and hopes, but really support their potential to come alive. And the reason I like this exercise that you. I'm glad you started with this is because it reveals how our beliefs about young people are. Are intimately tied to our practices and how we deal with them. And that sounds obvious when I say it, but it's not obvious to most people. They just think, okay, the best way to motivate people is the following. And they don't question the fact that that's a choice and it comes from a belief system and it's something that can be changed.

It's really interesting. I'm feeling jealousy at the moment because Diane's had the chance to read the book in advance, and I will read it once it's out. But I'm curious, you know, what motivated you then to write this book? 10 to 25, what was your intention? What's your hope for the book?

Well, for me personally, the book comes from 15, 20 years of frustration, feeling like the advice I'd been given as a teacher and later that I saw in the research literature just wasn't cutting. It wasn't good enough. And I remember being a mediocre middle school teacher and caring so deeply for my kids and wanting to do everything, everything for them and feeling like I never got that kind of inspiring, enthusiastic love of learning where kids were embracing the hardest stuff and coming after class because they were curious about the topic. And then when I started doing research, I also felt like the answers I saw in the field were very, I don't know, just not useful. It was. It was like, very abstract and bland and not applicable. So we've conducted a lot of research over the last 15 years, and part of the book is, all right, well, let's put that all in one place. And I'm often asked about this part of my work. Some people think of me as the community college student success person. Other people think of me as the purpose in life person. Other people as the youth mental health, and others as the growth mindset. I kind of wanted all the work to be in one place, but the other thing was just an acknowledgement that there's a lot I didn't know and I needed to go out in the world and find great leaders who are awesome at motivating young people. And so the book is, to me, a combination of science. We've done over 15 years and original reporting on what I've learned from the wisdom of practice. I guess you could say, very cool.

I'm curious. Then Diane teased this that a lot of this book, it's not just about motivation and how to spark students, but a part of that is this mentoring mindset, I think you call it. I've certainly bought hook, line and sinker on the importance of mentoring, but the mentoring mindset is a phrase that is unfamiliar to me. So what is the mentoring mindset?

Yeah, the mentor mindset is an approach or a philosophy you take with a young person where you maintain very high standards. So you're tough, you expect a lot, but you're supportive enough so that a young person can meet those standards. So it's not just saying, hey, I have super high standards, you can meet them or not, which often ends up with Maybe the top 5% doing well and everybody else struggling. And it's not saying I care about you, but I'm not going to ask a lot of you. Right. Which maybe kids feel supported, but they don't grow and improve. So the basic material mindset is high standards, high support. The basic philosophy is a simple idea. Where does that come from? It comes from this investigation of the most successful people I could find in K12 education, higher ed, academic research, MBA coaching, parenting, management at retail, at grocery stores, management and technology firms. And I really wanted to look at anyone who was in charge of or relates to someone age 10 to 25 in any of these domains. What do the most successful people have in common? And the answer was this mentoring or mentor mindset. And, and so the book, I describe it and I also describe what's the opposite of that, what, what happens if you don't have that.

And Michael, you'll love because it is a two by two because you always have.

So you're saying I feel, I'm gonna feel at home is what you're saying.

You're gonna feel very at home because. So I love the mentoring mindset because it, it embodies sort of the belief system that I've had for my care, aspired to this idea of high expectations, high support. Let's just put names on the other ones that you were sort of describing, David. There's this enforcer mindset which is like you were describing high expectations but no support, really. And this protector mindset, which is high support but no expectations really. And one of the things I loved in our conversation is you're. You come, you, you never start from a deficit mindset place. You're always an asset. Best approach where you're like, look, even those other two places have one of, of the two parts of the equation. So they're halfway there. So we just need to get the other kind of half in there, if you will. Yeah. Say more about.

Yeah, I think.

There are two ways in which it's properly.

Yeah. And that was great. Later on the test, I'll give you a high score as a professor. I'm just walking around grading everyone. Just kidding. The there are two ways in which we tried to be asset based. One is that suppose you're in one of these off diagonal cases, the enforcer mindset, all standards, low support, protector, all support, no standards. Like that's coming from a good place. And I started talking about that. And then the second is, as you're saying, reframing those two off diagonal cases as you got half of it right. So just add the other half.

Right.

So why do I say they're coming from a good place? The first point. Well, I think for a long time people have felt torn. If I'm a manager, a boss, a teacher, a professor, I have a dichotomous choice between being the tough, authoritarian, dictator kind of hard nosed person who demands excellence. And the negative consequence of that, of course, is kids are in, young people are crying and feeling debilitated and crushed and most people don't succeed. But that is viewed as a necessary side effect of me upholding high standards. And you can see how you could put your head on your pillow at night and feel good about that. Right. It's like I'm the gatekeeper to excellence and high performance and I'm doing what I have to do. Though it's sometimes unpleasant to uphold the standard for culture or society or performance. And on the other side where you're very low standards but high support, what I call the protector mindset, there too, you can feel good about how you're caring, you love young people, you're putting their feelings and needs first. You're being maybe empathic, you're very attuned. Right. And those are all good things to feel. The problem is that you're also a pushover and young people don't get anywhere. But it might feel like that's the necessary consequence of protecting young people from the distress of this dog eat dog world that they can't possibly succeed in.

Right.

So both I think come from a, in the best of cases, they come from a concern for young people. Both the enforcer and the protector, they're just a little misguided. And I think the reason they're misguided is because they're embedded in this worldview we have about young people generally being incompetent. And if you think they're Incompetent, and I have to be tough. Well, that's enforcer. It's like, I need to maintain the standards, and I'm the last, you know, defense against the world descending into chaos. Right. And that's why I have to maintain rigorous standards on the protector side. They're incompetent, they're weak, but that's why I have to make up for what they lack by protecting them.

Right, yeah.

So the mentor is like, all right, well, let's just take both of what's good from those. You've got the high standards, great. Add the support. You've got the support, great. Add the standards. So you can. You have two reasons now to feel good about yourself at the end of the day, not just one.

Yeah, I. I love that approach. And the book is filled with the science that's behind it. And one of the things I appreciate about you is it's not only all the science that and research you've done, but you are highly collaborative, and you sort of have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the other research in the space that everyone else has done and are very generous in bringing those ideas in to the book. We are not going to spend a lot of time on the science here today because we want to really, given our audience, go to the practices that you put forward. But I will say for people who want to do a deep dive there, I. I've listened to the Huberman Lab podcast that you did, you know, three hours, and it's an extraordinary deep dive in that space. So I highly recommend that for people who want to go really deep there along with the book. But if you want to listen. And so for here, I want to shift us over to these mindset practices, and they're particularly profound here in conversation, because, honestly, when I looked at the titles of these chapters and when I started digging in, these are things that Michael and I talk about all the time on the podcast, because these are cornerstones of, in our view, what redesigned schools and learning experiences need to be building on, incorporating how they need to, you know, function, essentially. And so, you know, we are deeply aligned in kind of our agenda for what learning can and should look like. And so I just want to, you know, let me just say off the top, so, because our listeners will recognize these, you know, we'll. We'll start with transparency, which is a really interesting intro. And I think you say these go from, like, easiest to implement to probably most challenging, so we'll talk about that. But transparency, questioning this, reframing of stress and then purpose and belonging. And again, our listeners have heard us talk about purpose and belonging sort of ad nauseam, but we can keep talking. So let's start with transparency, because you have this very, very, I would say, easy lift that people can do called a transparency statement. So tell us about that. Like, what does that look like? And how does that get you sort of off on the right foot, quite frankly, in your relationship with young people?

Yeah. So the transparency statement that I write about is very simply explaining your motives whenever you are about to uphold some high standards and. Or provide some support so that young people don't interpret it in the worst possible light. Okay. And. And that can be very short. So in the case of. Let's take Uri Treisman, the world's greatest freshman calculus professor I write about in chapter 11, he'll give students large intro courses in calculus, five problems where they have to find the limit of a function using Lhopital's rule. And the thing is, most kids, when they take AP calculus, memorize Lhopital's rule and then they just apply it to find limits of functions. But the problem is that Lhopitals are not an analytic solution. It's like a workaround. And so it doesn't work. It breaks a lot. So he'll give students five problems, four of them Lhopitals rule won't work for, and one it will. Which normal teacher doesn't do that? Like, normal teachers like that you're a lunatic. Because they're going to cry, basically. So before he does that, he's like, all right, I just want you to know the reason why I'm doing this is because you guys are preparing to be mathematicians and to think mathematically. And I want you to have careers long beyond this class. I don't want you to apply math tricks. I want you to be able to take apart the math tricks, figure out how they work, and putting them back together again. Okay? So he says that before they spend 25 minutes struggling, if you don't, they would be in tears thinking, I'm dumb at math. I'm going to fail calculus. I'm never going to be a doctor or an engineer.

Right?

That's where students freshman's mind is going to go. So it's like, you got to say something. But in a world in which he says nothing and there's crying and tears and frustration or whatever, like, that's not a great world because the most marginalized students are going to quit the. The first, because they're also dealing with other stereotypes about whether they're smart enough, etc. But in the world in which he has a transparency statement, it's otherwise the exact same lesson and the students have the exact same great professor, but it means something totally different in that context. So that's the main, that's why it's the easiest, is like, you can already be awesome at mentor mindset stuff. High expectations, high support, and you could be coming across the wrong way to your young, your young people. And sometimes all you have to do is remind them of why you're giving them something that's a little unpleasant. And now I think that the societal narrative currently about young people is, well, I shouldn't have to explain myself because if they weren't such woke wimpy idiots, then they would know that I'm here for them. Right? So there's a version in which people, adults and leaders think I shouldn't have to explain myself. But my answer to that is, look, for most young people starting at the beginning of gonadarchy and puberty, until they're, you know, in their 20s, that day you're talking to them is the day on which they have the most testosterone they've ever had in their entire lives. That day. And the next day when you do something else, that also will be the day on which they have the most testosterone they've ever had in their entire lives, both boys and girls. And that does all kinds of things to the brain. That makes them over interpret things that might be plausibly offensive. And that's why their head goes to this crazy place of I'll never succeed or you hate me, or this is bias, et cetera. So you just kind of have to explain yourself two or three more times than you think you need to. Not because they're too sensitive, but because the job of a young person is to figure out if they're being taken seriously and respected. And so just don't make them guess. Just be transparent.

Yeah, One of the things that comes up in the book is this idea of, you know, at that developmental stage, they want status and they want respect. And there's good biological reason, reasons for that. And when we are running counter to that, we're creating all sorts of distance between, my word, distance between us relationally, which makes so, so much sense to me. And I can just say from my career, I can't tell you how many of the like, rigorous teachers that I knew purposefully would not have been transparent up front because they were actually trying to sort of scare kids or, or you Know, create what is essentially a threatening environment because they thought that's what they were supposed to do with high standards. And the science is pretty clear of what they were. Actually, the effect they were having was not the effect that I think they ultimately wanted.

Right. I mean, I think there's a. There's this mythology of the demanding leader that is like, impossible to please. And it's a little bit ambiguous if you've won them over. And in that mythology, you're supposed to leave people you're leading a little bit in the dark for a while, and then only at the end reveal that you cared about them all along. But they're supposed to be afraid for nine months. So that way you get optimal performance. And like, I 100% remember feeling that way as a teacher. Like, oh, if I tell them too quickly that I care about them, then they're going to take advantage of me. Me. But that's like, not what the mentor mindset leaders do. They're super hard, and students are often crying in the first few months of their classes in the college and K12 settings. But they're also super duper transparent, so that by October, November, students can now trust that when they, like, ask a question. Mr. Estrada, Sergio Estrada, is one of the teachers I write about. Mr. Estrada, is this problem right? And be like, I don't know, is it right? Initially, students hate that, but he says, look, I would never deprive you of the opportunity to know that you can understand physics. I care about you too much to lower standards. So that's why I'm asking you the question back. So given that, do you think it's right? And he's got to say that for a couple months, but eventually students know that and then they start thinking on their own and they own their own learning, and it saves him tons of time. Later in the semester, they become independent thinkers. They go on to the next course in college and can do well. And he's given them that gift of being independent, thoughtful, curious, intellectual leaders, even though it was a little rocky at first because students aren't used to it. But you're not going to get there if you wait till May and they hate you all year.

Right.

Like, that's idiotic.

That's. Yeah, you've led us into the questioning technique. So, you know, some of those teachers were talking about their, their class would also look like the, the professor not giving them any help or any support. That's not what you're talking about. And Sergio and others that you profile, don't they they, they specifically have this strategy around asking, not telling. And so tell us the, the dimensions and characters, characteristics of that approach that, you know, is, is quite different from other.

Yeah, I was really struck by the, like, parenting coach that I followed who is almost always coaching parents to ask questions not to tell their kids what to do, and the similarities between great parenting and great teaching, great tutoring, and good management. So the great manager I followed, Steph Okamoto, who's at Microsoft at the time, would do her performance reviews and ask questions like, all right, well, how do you think that went? So on, get their opinions. But then she would say, all right, for you to be a top 15% performer in your next performance evaluation, what's a task you could do that's above and beyond that would really impress everybody, and that would be something you would want to do and you want to learn. And then they would generate two or three ideas and then she'd be like, huh, all right, well, what are you worried about getting in the way of those things? And so an example in the book is Steph's doing a performance review and the time she was on the software testing unit for Microsoft. So they would write the manuals that would help the developers know what Windows is doing, for instance. And so someone on her team's like, well, instead of just testing it and writing the manual, I could go talk to the engineers and fix all the goofy things with the software now, rather than have 20 pages in the manual about how the goofy thing is like a workaround, you know? And she's like, okay, well, what would be hard about that? I was like, well, the engineers don't want to talk to a tester because I'm low status. And the manager is going to be like, stop wasting my engineers time. So then Steph would be like, all right, well, would you mind if I contacted the manager and said, get off her case and let her go talk to your engineers? Like, no, that's okay with me. So they formed this whole plan where her direct report could go over, perform, and do something testers weren't normally required to do. But Steph's out. She's not doing it for the direct report, but she's running interference to give her the freedom to be in the room to talk to the engineers. And then the next six months later, her direct report is over. Performing as a top five, 10% performer gets a raise, promotional velocity, et cetera. But Seth didn't do it for her, you know, so that's, that's what I mean by Questioning is like, there's a version of questioning that's not good. Like, if your kid comes home drunk and you're like, what were you thinking? That's not an authentic question. Like, because what you really mean is you were not thinking and you're an idiot and you're in trouble and I could not be mad at you. Like, that's what you mean.

Right.

And there are versions of questions that are just about facts.

Right.

What I'm really talking about is what I call in the book, authentic questioning with uptake. So where it's a legitimate question that the person could have a true answer that in principle the asker doesn't know the answer to. And second, where the question builds on some thinking the person has done.

Yeah.

And I found mentors did that a lot and did it really well, whether it was the best NBA's best basketball coach or Sergio Estrada in physics class or Uri Treisman in calculus or Steph at Microsoft.

Yeah, really, I think, really useful. It's really resonating with me on multiple level levels because as I build this new product to help people, people figure out what they want to do in the future. This. This was the cornerstone of our approach is we would ask authentic questions of them and help them discover and explore versus the traditional approaches. Like kind of tell you we have this black box questionnaire or test, and then we tell you, oh, guess what? You should be a firefighter or a mortician or, you know, whatever. And young people are like, what are you talking about? I, not me. So very resonant. The next piece is a total reframing of stress. So especially coming out of COVID you know, Michael and I started the podcast during the middle of COVID and everyone, I think, you know, probably at the time, but really, like, swung one direction about, like, not. People are so incredibly stressed. We have to completely fundamentally change our expectations and our behaviors in response to that stress. And I still think there's a belief that kids are so young people. Kids are so stressed that this is where I think the. The protector mindset comes in a lot. Yeah, tell. Like, the science, though, is tells us something very different. We should think differently about stress and then act differently accordingly. Tell us about it.

Yeah, this was an important chapter in the book because there's a world in which managers are out there saying, or teachers or professors, I'm a mentor mindset. Therefore I have mega hard expectations for you, and you need to suck it up and just deal with how stressful it is. And that's not what you see the best mentor mindset leaders doing, they definitely maintain standards, they definitely imply you should stick with it. But they don't tell you to suppress your stress or feelings of frustration, et cetera. Instead, they have ways of reframing the negative emotions that tend to come from pushing yourself to your frontiers and reframing them as one a sign you've chosen to do something important and meaningful, right? That like if it, if it was easy, then anyone would do it kind of thing. But the fact that it's hard means that you are doing something impressive. And the fact that you're stressed often means you care about it, that it matters to you and that's cool to do something that matters to you. And then second, that those worries actually can be fuel to help you do better. So you see that a lot. I mean that if you look at great one on one tutors or even like a good golf coach or you know, tennis coach, they're really a asking you to go take on a challenge. So if in athletics, choose harder opponents and if it's tutoring, choose the harder problems and try them if you can't master them. And then second, that physiological arousal of like heart racing, pump sweating, butterflies in your stomach, that's your body mobilizing like oxygenated blood to your muscles, in your brain cells and that's helping you to be stronger and your brain to think faster and so on. And most people don't think that way. They think the fact that I have butterflies on my stomach and my heart's racing mean my body's about to shut down, that my body's betraying my goals and it's going to get in the way. And so we talk a lot about the science of reframing away from what's called a suppression approach, where you just say, so classic suppression would be, well, as a parent, be like, stop crying, like stop being sad, right? You just tell your kids to stop feeling the way they're feeling. But as a teacher, what you often see is you've prepared, you shouldn't feel stress like you're fine, right? You can do this, you should feel confident. And you see this a lot. Kids say it to each other like, oh, you shouldn't be stressed out. But it's like, no, actually you should be stressed if it matters to you. And it's legitimately hard. And so reassuring you that you shouldn't be stressed is a suppression approach. And it turns out if you suppress feelings, they just come back stronger and they, they get in the way. So the protector Mindset leads you to that suppression approach. You're like, I feel so bad that you feel distress that I want you to get rid of it. And I want to get rid of it either by removing the demand or telling you to push the feelings down, you know, like push them away, don't feel stressed, etc. I tell the story in the book about a student of mine who emailed and said, look, my mom just died, most important person to me in the world. I can't possibly do the assignments for the next couple weeks. I hope this won't make me fail, but I just am telling you I can't do it. And I could tell from the tone that most of my colleagues at UT would either imply that she was lying about it and that she had to prove it, or would say, just take an incomplete in the class either to save you the distress or because the teachers are worried about it being unfair to the other students in the class. And like, that wasn't my approach. I had been thinking a lot about this stress approach and I said my approach was, look, let's separate the intellectual difficulty of what you're doing from the logistical difficulty. The intellectual difficulty is you have to do an awesome final project that's very impressive, that hopefully you can talk about in your job interviews, can be on your resume and that you're proud of. And I'm like, I don't want to take that away from you. That's why you took my class was to learn new stuff and do things that are impressive. And frankly, your mom cared for you and rooted for you throughout college because you were doing cool, impressive stuff. So one way to honor your mom's memory is to do a great final project in my class. But do I really care that you do the daily busy work that I assigned? Well, like, no. I mean, that's only there to help you get prepared to do the final project. So what I did is I reduced the demands for the logistical stuff, like the busy work. And I was like, just communicate with your group and whenever you're ready, come back and then do your final project with them. And so she took two and a half, three weeks off and just kind of stayed in touch with her group. And then they did a fully kick ass final project. Like they created this whole like AI based support to help teachers do empathic discipline rather than like very harsh discipline. Three years ago they did this before GPT was released. Wow. And then she talked about it in her interview, got this job for a major financial services group and now is Traveling the world on this rotational program. Fast track for managers. You know, she's. She immigrated from Africa. Like, is su. You know, very interesting young woman of color who, you know, is constantly trying to help improve society and culture. And I caught up with her a year later. I was like, did I do the right thing? Like, should I have just given you an incomplete? And she's like, no. Half my professors told me to take an incomplete, but then I couldn't have graduated on time, and then I wouldn't be in this financial services mentoring program. So that's just a kind of example where if you have the belief that young people are capable of impressive stuff with the right support, then you start thinking about sometimes you maintain the intellectual demand or the demand for the work that's truly impressive, but the way you support them is reduce some of the logistical demands. I think a lot of people mistake those two. They think being a hard ass on deadlines is what it means to be demanding. But I think it's having people own thinking and contributions that's the demand, and deadlines are, like, a means to get there.

I love this chapter. The whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking back, because you alluded to this in the beginning, David. But the first two times we met each other were arguably under very stressful circumstances that I would not trade, though. I mean, we were in the first case, like, presenting our work to Bill Gates directly, and in the second case at the White House. And, you know, if someone had taken those opportunities away from us, I think we would be very regretted. And it was stressful. Those are so stressful.

But it's stressful in a way where you have to bring your A game.

Yeah.

And. And I think the challenge is. Is to see it as a positive opportunity to perform at your peak, rather than a threatening opportunity to fail publicly. And when you do the ladder, you're still sweating. You're still, like, your heart's racing, and you're worried about doing poorly, but you also are like, all right, let's go. It's like, right? It's like, if I'm a good surfer on a huge wave, that's how you want to feel.

Yeah. So it's really awesome. David, with our. Our last few minutes here, we're gonna give you the tall tasks of talking purpose and belonging, which are just very significant. And. And I should say the end of your book pulls all of this into, like, whole models and approaches. But tell us. Tell us the. The key concept here of purpose and belonging in your work.

Yeah, I Mean, I think that the, as you know, 10, 15 years ago, those were not concepts people talked about in education reform, right? It was like curriculum and interests were probably the two biggest things. And the idea of a meaningful purpose, you know, that wasn't around. I think Bill Damon's work brought purpose on a lot of people's radars. And I did a lot of the early randomized experiments, but even now I think it's not as well known. Belonging to for a long time was thought of as this soft self esteem boost, like everyone needs a hug from all the world's friends. And it like wasn't taken seriously. And I think the common thread across the two is that they're super duper powerful, especially for young people who are trying to make it through the world. Having a sense of status and respect purpose because you want to contribute something of value to the world around you. And so having a meaningful purpose where it's like something beyond myself is depending on me, that's super motivating for a young people. And a lot of education gets that wrong because they just make an argument about making money in the future or using this lesson plan and a job in the future, or it's kind of a delay of gratification, long term self interested argument. And I don't think that's ever really going to work to drive deeper learning. But the idea that right now somebody's depending on you having mastered something and done a good job, I think that's really meaningful. And in an enforcer mindset, you wouldn't think of that because you'd be like, well, they're going to choose the laziest possible way to do things no matter what. So the only way we can entice them to do tedious work is through rewards or now or delayed rewards later. Belonging is similar in that now that it's starting to get on the radar, people, more people are talking about it, but it's still misconstrued. I think a lot of people think belonging is, I'm going to give you a you belong sticker for to slap on your laptop and all of a sudden achievement gaps are going to disappear. And as I say in the book, you can't declare belonging by fiat. It has to be experienced. And one of the big things that has to happen is you have to help young people tell us themselves a story of how difficulties could be overcome through actions that they could take. And then over time they actually felt a sense of belonging in a community. And I think that purpose and belonging go hand in hand, because one way you know you're valued by a community is when you've contributed something that they perceive as important to that community back in our evolutionary history. So I think there's a lot more in the book and there's stories about how do you leverage those two to get a deeper, more lasting, meaningful motivations rather than more frivolous things, like, I don't know, turning education into a slot machine. Like, I don't think that's gonna do it. And I think that what's more important is like, appealing to deeper purpose, a sense of connection, a sense of mattering, so on.

That's awesome. There is so much more in the book. I can't recommend it highly enough. I hope everyone will read it and, and ping us with questions, thoughts, and what comes up for you. And, you know, maybe at some point we can circle back and do even more on, on the other pieces when we hear from our readers what they think.

Michael I was going to say the same. I was going to say the same thing. Just huge. Thanks first David. But check out the book 10 to 25. I got a lot just from this conversation that has whet my appetite and I know many others will as well. And let's circle back once we have some more fodder because I can tell we're scratching the surface and you've hit these hot button topics that, as you said, David, we sort of know there's something there, but I think the full depth of how it's understood is not there yet in the education field. So I appreciate you writing this and joining us.

Yeah, absolutely.

For all those listening. Yeah, I was going to say for all those listening. We'll be back next time on Class Disrupted. Thank you again.

Sa.