Supporting Disengaged Teens to Learn Better, Feel Better and Live Better - A Conversation with Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The world has changed dramatically and kids do not feel like they are being prepared. And so that relevance piece, that gap between what they do in school and what they see the world needing from them has become a chasm. And that is combining to create this kind of tremendous apathy and overwhelm, which is like a crazy combination.

Hi everyone, welcome back to this week's episode. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. These two brilliant women have been whipping up a storm this week with the release of their amazing new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, with endorsements from Drew Barrymore, Oprah Winfrey, and the New York Times. I'm not sure I can compete with that, but it was really a huge pleasure to be able to sit down with Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson to talk about the disengagement crisis facing our young people and what we as parents and educators can do about it. Jenny Anderson is an author and award-winning journalist who spent over a decade at the New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz. She contributes to Time, the New York Times, and The Atlantic, among other publications. Rebecca Winthrop is a leading global authority on education. She's the director for the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, where she conducts studies on how to better support children's learning and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. The book was released on January 7th, and you can find links and further information in the show notes. Amazing. Well, lovely to meet you both. Thank you so much for joining. This is really exciting to be able to talk about this book that is just about to hit the shelves and everybody will be able to get their copy. But I'm very privileged to have had an advanced look. And like some other very auspicious people, like Miss Oprah, it's pretty bloody good. And we're giving a big endorsement. Yeah, it's amazing.

That's the best quote I've heard yet. I wish I had that as a blurb on the back.

Exactly.

We'll put it on the website.

There you go.

Tim Logan, pretty bloody good.

But absolutely true. And I'm so excited to, yeah, talk about it with you both. So thank you for joining.

Our pleasure.

Awesome. So maybe just, I'm always curious as to what the personal connection is with why you have written a book. I mean, taking on a book is a major undertaking, as I've heard. It's taken a while and it's maybe gone through a few iterations and yep, you've taken a few pivots along the way, which maybe we'll get into. But no, I, I just, I'd love to, yeah, first of all, invite you to both reflect on what's the personal why as to why you wrote this book.

I'm happy to start. It's Rebecca. So during COVID I noticed that I had completely judged incorrectly how engaged my two boys were. And as a global ed expert, getting it wrong felt really, whoops, what? I've been in the field for 30 years. And I really realized how difficult it is as a parent to see not just what kids learn and the grades they bring home, but how engaged they are in their learning. And I know how important how engaged they are, so how they learn is for their outcomes and ultimately their success in school, that I went and sought my favorite education journalist, Jenny Anderson, and said, "Please, let's write a book." I had struggled a lot because my older son, I thought, was super engaged. He was bringing home top grades. He was in 6th grade when COVID hit, and the minute in the US schools went pass/fail, and you do it online. And the minute it pass/fail and he was at home, he said, oh, he lost all motivation to do any work. And I said, what's going on? Learning's important. You got to keep up. And he said, well, if it's not counted, Mom, it doesn't matter. And that was, you know, stabbed to the heart. But I realized he was not invested in learning. He wasn't engaged in learning. He was invested in the performance at the end, which my other son, I thought, what it was the reverse. He had recently been diagnosed with dyslexia. And so he was struggling mightily in his had stopped trying. He thought it was stupid. And when he didn't have to be alongside his peers and keeping the same pace, he blossomed during COVID He caught up 2 grade levels learning independently on his own, and he was super motivated to learn, not the outcome. And that is what we need our kids to be. So anyways, how to be able to tell as a parent how this works— and, and actually as a teacher, we found it's hard for teachers too.

So no, thank you. That, that's, that's fascinating. Yeah. And Jenny?

Yeah, a very different journey. So I've, I was a finance reporter for a really long time and I really loved it. Covered the markets, covered hedge funds and private equity and Lehman Brothers when it collapsed, which is very exciting. Um, but when I had my kids, I really just, my interest changed. I was very interested in their development and kind of how to support them as learners. And I, so I immediately kind of looked to the media because I was in the media and I love media. And I think they typically can do a wonderful job at covering stuff. And I didn't see a lot about how kids learn and develop. This is sort of 2013, '14, and I thought that was strange. It was a lot about the politics of education, which is also important, but not what I was looking for at all. And so it did feel important, and I switched, and I quit the New York Times and joined an organization that would let me sort of explore some of those topics. And I really thought of myself as a translator between teachers as the experts in learning and parents. Like, what do teachers know about supporting kids' learning, and what can they teach us that parents could use at home in effective ways? And when Rebecca approached me, that she was really looking at doing something so comprehensive, which was deeply intimidating to me, and really well-researched, that would be some of those bits and pieces I had done along the way, really pulling them together and trying to approach this in a systematic way and say to parents, if you wanna coach your kids to be better learners, here's how.

Amazing. I mean, yeah, that, that role, that bridging role, the translator role is just so critical, I think. And I, I really feel like I mean, you've nailed it in terms of the book. I mean, that, that really feels like what the book does, cuz it's, I guess, primarily speaking to a parent audience, but clearly with major implications for teacher leaders, educators, leaders across the system as well. So then digging into the book, I mean, obviously it's part of the title, but it, the framing idea, it feels the problem statement is really about the disengagement crisis. So perhaps just again, to set the context for people. Before we get into some of the responses, what could you paint a bit of a picture about what that is? You say in the book, a shocking number of young people don't see the point of school. And I mean, that clearly resonates with the podcast. It resonates with me and, you know, all of my previous guests, I'm sure. But yeah, what, what is this disengagement crisis?

The data is shocking to use that word. So in third grade, year four in the UK system, about three-quarters of kids love going to school. And by 10th grade, we've got one-quarter of kids saying that they love going to school. And the research is incredible. Incredibly compelling that how kids feel about school has a very serious impact on how they learn and do at school. And so it feels like we should be able to do better. Now, that data is consistent and has been consistent over time. So the question is, what's different now? Kids have been disengaged for a long time, certainly longer than smartphones, you know, certainly longer than COVID. So what has changed? What's changed is what kids need to be prepared for. The world has changed dramatically, and kids need to be better prepared, and they need to feel better prepared. They do not feel like they are being prepared. And so that relevance piece, that gap between what they do in school and what they see the world needing from them has become a chasm. And they are watching that and feeling that, and that is combining to create this kind of tremendous apathy and overwhelm, which is like a crazy combination.

If I can, one question. When you saying that the chasm, it's become a chasm, right? Oh, it's, it's changed in terms of the, the deepening of the disengagement crisis, or has it always been thus that as kids grow, go through adolescence, they begin to disengage from what the teachers are telling them and they, they find other exploring that they wanna be doing themselves.

Sure. There's a natural developmental trajectory, which is to be more questioning, more oppositional, to be more curious about the world outside and to be actually more in search of that information. And so I think we haven't done a particularly good job of adapting schools to sort of meet that moment, that sort of developmental need for like preparing for the real world. That is like the developmental task of adolescence. But you asked this question of becoming. I do think this is where technology does play a role because I think technology means that kids are seeing the outside world a lot more. I mean, they are sort of seeing it through their phones and they are feeling it. And let's be honest, the world has always been complicated. The world has gotten a lot more complicated and they are processing all that information all the time. So generative AI, jobs are going to be gone, inequality, polarization, everybody hates each other, rise of right-wing authoritarianism around the world. Like Even if that was happening, phones now means that kids get that all the time. And so they're thinking, wow, I'm learning the Pythagorean theorem, I wonder how that's going to help me with, you know, the climate crisis, even though it might, by the way. And we don't argue against knowing these things, but that— I don't know, Rebecca, would you?

Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And one stat that I think encapsulates it, Tim, about this gap becoming a chasm is 60 years ago in the US, the number one skill that employers were looking for schools to give to kids was strong literacy and numeracy skills. And that remains true today, but it is nowhere near sufficient. Now employers are looking for collaborative problem-solving skills, interpersonal conflict resolution, empathy, creativity. Can you create novel new ideas? So it was a lot easier 60 years ago to skate through school and be okay. And it is no longer possible to do that. And that is what kids feel and get frustrated about. And they also feel they have little choice. And it's true, they have little choice. And so, if you're stuck in doing something you're forced to do with little choice to make it work better for you, a normal human reaction is to quietly quit, like check out and try to survive.

Absolutely.

Which is sadly what a lot of kids are— have told us they were doing.

Yeah, it's fascinating to me cuz when I was teaching in UK schools, was it maybe somewhere around 2010, 2011 when the Shift Happens video came out? Carl Frisch, I don't know if you've ever seen that. It just feels to me that we've been the last 15 years, we've been kind of saying the same things that the world is changing much more quickly than, than school is, than formal education is. And this, we've kind of been watching this chasm open, right? This slow car crash. So it, it's so interesting to me that it's still the thing that we are talking about as an urgent need for change. But it's just a fascinating thing that it's like the lack of shift and change has been quite phenomenal.

Well, there's a lack of urgency for sure. It's like the crisis that absolutely nobody is talking about. Yeah. 'Cause there seem to be a lot of other crises out there as well. But I would say the, you know, adding to that is the fact that what COVID seems to change tremendously is the social contract broke. You know, everyone thought that COVID was gonna change the fact that kids had technology. That happened. But the bigger thing that happened is a lot of people got to look inside of schools. They didn't like what they saw and they decided it wasn't worth it anymore. And so that to me is a much more dramatic break over this long sort of like, does it matter? Does it matter? Well, not showing up.

Yeah.

Now we've got people's attention, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I'm based in France and the walls and the gates that keep the parents out of school and education, they are pretty solidly closed. Yeah, right. So our inability to engage with parents has been, in that conversation, has been critical, I think, yeah.

Tim, I think to your point of we've been talking about this for years, and I would say actually probably centuries. I mean, go back to John Dewey at the turn of the 1900s. This is absolutely what he was talking about. So I think it's less that these are new issues and more that they're more urgent for our kids now. And we have sort of thrown spaghetti at the wall as an education community about what to do about it because there isn't a wide-scale, across-the-board reaction to say, "We need to give kids more agency." You know, there are definitely schools and leaders and communities who are trying to do that, but there is lots of other places around the world, and oftentimes it's within the same community, different schools, who say, "No, no, no, we need to give them more discipline, more requirements, and more structure." We're not against, you know, you can have structure and agency at the same time and kids need both. But I think as a community we've sort of, we keep trying a bunch of different things.

Yeah.

We have honed in on the fact that kids do need agency and they need to build it and it's more important now than ever in generative AI.

Yeah.

No, it's so much.

That's kind of our core message. Like, come on guys, let's all get together now.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, you mentioned the word agency and I wanted to ask you about agency and engagement because clearly these are two core concepts to your theory of change, right? And just the way you paint pictures of real young people based on the research that you've done and, but real stories of real young people in these kind of different modes, as you, you call them, the four different modes, I think is a really useful frame. So maybe, yeah, maybe could one of you just describe, I was curious, the difference there between engagement and agency? Because, you know, sometimes these words get thrown around, they're not used very precisely always, and you clearly are using them in different ways because they're on two sides of your quadrants, right? Which, yeah, no, it's super powerful. So yeah, please go ahead.

So we found in all our research that kids operate in four modes of engagement. It's passenger mode, achiever mode, resistor mode, explorer mode. They are what they sound like. Passenger mode is kids coasting. They're behaviorally engaged, They're physically there, but they've dropped out of learning. They're not interested, they're not cognitively engaged, and they're very passive. Achiever mode are the kids who are trying to knock it out of the park and get the top grades, like my son was before COVID Yeah. But they're very performance-oriented, and this has some serious risks. We see big mental health problems of kids who are trying to be perfect, not just excellent. And the other piece we see is that kids don't have a lot of time to build resilient learning skills. Fails. And so they, when they fail, they're not used to failing, and they don't have the muscles to pick themselves up and try it again. And then both of those modes— the Achiever mode is deeply engaged in school, everybody loves them, but they are highly successful in a system, in a school where they are basically training themselves how to follow instructions and not actually initiate ideas to make their learning environment more interesting for themselves. So in resistor mode, those are the kids who are quote unquote problem children. They're avoiding, withdrawing, maybe class clown, not doing homework, skipping school. They are actually using their voice often inappropriately to tell us that school isn't working. So when I say using their voice, I mean they're acting out. They're using what power they have. And it is a cry for help is what it is. And we should see it that way. And these kids do have agency in that they are being quite proactive. In their learning environment, but it's pointed away from their learning. And the mode that we want all kids to spend a lot of time in— they don't have to be there 100% of the time, all the time— is Explore Mode, which is agentic engagement. And we find that kids who are agentially engaged, who have the opportunity to be agentially engaged in the classroom— so they're given the space to make a few choices, to make suggestions of how their learning environment could be more interesting, or better for them. They get higher grades, they're happier, and they're developing the resilient learning skills that you need in a world of AI. And that agentic engagement is sort of the holy grail, and we call it explorer mode.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, Jenny, did you want to—

if you want me to, I could explain. You had asked sort of about definitions around agency and engagement. And so if you think of almost a 4x4 grid here, The way we think of agency is the skills and will to set a meaningful goal and marshal the resources to get it. So that is, as Rebecca was saying, the ability to kind of initiate things to sort of shape the learning. I'm interested in this. I want to do this. I'd like to work with a partner. Kind of talking about what you want and need, which requires knowing what you want and need, and then being able, you know, sort of brave enough to articulate it. So that is agency, and engagement is the sort of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and agency around learning. And those all combine to contribute to how kids show up in learning. And so obviously resistors have a lot of agency, not a lot of engagement. Passengers don't have a lot of engagement or a lot of agency. They're just coasting. They're not, you know, they're kind of checked out. In some ways, that's, you know, the place you want to worry about a lot. Explorer mode, a lot of agency, a lot of engagement. And achievers are very interesting, as Rebecca was identifying. Lots of engagement, everybody loves them, but very little agency because they're only satisfying the needs of the system and not asking themselves, what am I interested in? What do I want to do? Why do I want to do that? And that's how they create that performance orientation. So that's kind of our— yeah, the graph.

It's great. No, it's great because the other thing I like about it is that these, these arrows that are pulling away from each other somehow as they go up and along in your Y and your X-axis, I mean, just feels like that's what school does, right? The school tries to lead people off down the engagement axis and often the kids are trying to move into the, the agency access. And it's like both need to come back towards each other to get into the explorer zone, right? Because if you, otherwise you've just constantly creating this tension between what the adults say that they want from the young people and then maybe what the kids say they wanna be doing. And it's critical cuz there is, I mean, there is a sense of a tension between the two things, right? Yeah. I mean, do I get to choose what I engage with? How much do I get to choose, right? Do I get to choose everything or do I just get to choose some of it? Right. You know, in a kind of, uh, what did they call it? That hour that Google did anyway, that like innovation hour or the, the golden hour or whatever.

Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about.

They give you one hour a week to choose your goals, you know, but the rest of the time we decide cuz we're the adults and we know what's good for you. It's, you know, so it's constantly this conversation between like the Y and the X axis of the agency and the engagement pulling away from each other.

I love that you remember that. Golden time. Sorry, that's a UK phrase. Golden time is the free time that kids get together.

There you go.

Yeah, it's usually 15 minutes at the end of a Friday. That's how much time they get to themselves.

Your point, Tim, about the— I think that's very insightful— like the axes are pulling away from each other and they need to come back together is absolutely what we found in the research. So, you know, the farthest away on the agency is when kids really get frustrated and act out, and those kids in resistor mode We found in our research they actually need more autonomy to engage in school than less. And often we give them less autonomy because they're acting out. You're not doing your homework. Oh, you're punished. Oh, go to the dean's office. Oh, take away this. Oh, you can't have recess. Oh, you know. And actually the kids who flipped really quickly is those kids who are bursting with agency. It's pointed away from their learning. So it's not agentic engagement. And if you give them the opportunity to shape something around their learning, they dive in. It's actually easier to get kids often it can be easier, I should say, to get kids in resistor mode to go to explorer mode than passenger mode, who are just really passive.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I spent pretty much my entire teaching career working with disengaged 14 to 18-year-olds usually. And absolutely, I mean, there was an alternative skills-based curriculum for them because basically nobody wanted to deal with them. It's all right, Tim will take care, you know, I'll hang out with them. I came from a background in youth work. So absolutely, it totally resonates what you're saying there because they needed, real autonomy, and you could easily get them into explorer mode if you figured, you know, you figured out that they just completely love fishing and all they wanna do is go fishing. And so how do we connect the things that, the skills-based stuff that we want them to learn? But why only for those young people, you know?

Indeed.

Right?

And I think your question about, you know, is explorer mode giving them the keys to the car with no instruction? No, like there's a lot of evidence about how you can help kids get into explore mode in ways that we scaffold them very much. And so they do need to learn math and they do need to learn science and history. And within those confines, you can give kids a lot of room.

Mm-hmm. No, absolutely. But I'm, I'm conscious that the bias perhaps for you and I, Rebecca, maybe from a schooly perspective is we're hanging out in school right now.

Yeah.

So like, let's take it home to the parents. 'Cause I think that's also a key insight. And you know, you framed the book around is that actually one of the largest effects that we could have for our young people is to engage parents in the conversation about exploring and what does that mean and how to facilitate, support, mentor, coach, et cetera. So yeah, perhaps I'm curious also about your theory of change in regards to, you know, why, why explorer mode, why is it better, in inverted commas, you know? So, and then perhaps we can then go into how can parents begin to support that?

Sure. I can start with the theory of change. I mean, the, in a, in a sort of very pithy way, if COVID taught us you needed to be well to learn well, we would say the inverse is also true. You need to learn well to be well, which means we have to define what learning well looks like, and that is engaged learning. So our theory of change is that we can attend better to components of engaged learning, how kids feel about being in school. Do they belong? Do they feel safe? Do they feel part of a community? Do they feel that what they're learning is connected to the real world? Can we, in your example, tie it to fishing? Can we give them a little bit of choice? Again, not Keys to the Kingdom, not Choose Your Own Adventure. You know, we're not anti-knowledge, but can we give kids 2 or 3 options about how they do their learning? Would you like to work with a partner? Would you like to do this alone? Would you like to do a podcast? You know, give them that choice. Suddenly they do feel like they have the keys to the kingdom, and you have still set the curriculum, set the standards, and set the outcome. So amazing what you can do with a little bit. I think the theory of change is also very much built around two ideas: we need to prepare kids for the future, and we need to attend to the mental health crisis that is sitting right in front of us. And the research is incredibly compelling that when— and Rebecca can talk about this— but we relied a lot on the research of John Marshall Reeve, who's in Australia, as we were talking about earlier, wonderful country. But that when teachers or parents do subtle shifts in how they create the conditions for agency, perspective taking, explanatory rationale, a little bit of scaffolded choice, kids learn better, they achieve more, they're happier, and they have more resilient learning. So we can sort of do it all. And so our theory of change is that with that knowledge, parents and children can get to a better place in a way that is kind of more exciting for them.

Yeah. I mean, just such a key aspect is this, you know, whatever terminology, but wellbeing, flourishing, you know, life outcomes that are just so much broader than academic or educational outcomes. I mean, we're talking about growing humans, right? Functional, well humans who can relate and can be and can, you know, live productively somehow. So it's, yeah, the widening of the scope is critical.

Yeah, I was going to answer your question, Tim, on parents— how can they help and why do we focus on them in the book? And one of the things we found in our research is that parents are equally impactful for boosting student engagement as teachers and peers. I, I was even surprised at how impactful they are. And this is because engagement has a lot to do with mindsets about learning. And those are shaped at home every day, how kids interact in their family from the minute they're born all the way through as they go from teacher to teacher, year to year. Parents and caregivers are there to shape those mindsets. And it's not about getting expensive tutors. It's not even necessarily about, you know, making sure they're in the best extracurriculars for college admissions. Really what it's about is how parents model the thrill of learning at home. And that is 50% more predictive of positive school outcomes than socioeconomic status.

Mm-hmm.

So for us, families and caregivers, and this is something I've worked a lot on in my Brookings work at the Center for Universal Education, are left out of the picture when we talk about improving education so often.

Yeah.

And they have a really important role to play. And if we don't let them in and bring them in in the right way, which is about boosting engagement and not telling teachers how to do their job, they will come in in other ways that aren't as constructive. So, you know, we really hope this really builds strong partnerships between schools and families to really get around kids to boost their love of learning.

And also just, I want to add one thing, also gives parents permission to parent their kids and support them the way they typically instinctually want to do. But the system seems to discourage. And so it's, as Rebecca says, when we're not, when we don't quite know what to do, we're more likely to sort of default to what everybody else is doing, right? So if we can just get a better sense as to what would be effective versus just sort of panicking and feeling like the only way I can help my kid is to do the thing that everybody else is doing.

Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? Because I've got another podcast coming up with Susan Bloom, Professor of Anthropology and her book Schoolishness. And she talks about the pedagogizing of childhood, basically. So it's almost like the schooliness has leeched into home life and our, you know, it's colonized all aspects of our lives. But actually what you are talking about is the opposite, right? And, and I, it's one of my pet peeves is, you know, I think we should talk about formal education really specifically because education is like, has always been forever. As long as humans have been in groups and social situations together, they've been nurturing and raising children to become people as part of, of whatever situation they're in culturally. And that's educational work to me. And it's the, and then we've created this industrialized formal system that is quite historically specific and unique. And then we talk about that as education. That to me, that's just a very particular type of as Susan would say, schoolishness, right? And so I really appreciate what you're doing. It's just how do we open that back up, that conversation back up to say parents are a critical aspect of young people's education.

Yeah.

And not that they have to be doing what the teacher is doing and pedagogizing everything. Right. Actually, it's about how do we nurture young people? Yeah. In generative ways. And yeah, so I love it. You say this book is for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and anyone else caring for children, right? Exactly, exactly.

John Hattie's second, Visible Learning 2, the sequel, and some of his prior work actually around parent involvement finds that the number one thing parents should do is not try to be their children's first teacher, but their child's first learner, which means model learning, model how it's hard, model how you have to, ooh, it didn't work, model how you have to try again, model how exciting it is to learn something new and be able to master it, model following your curiosity. That is what he found is the most important thing parents can do. And it really fits nicely with what you just said about— I always talk about school versus education. To your point that, you know, school is a very specific institution and there's very specific things we want our young people to learn in most countries in the world. But education is a much broader endeavor. And I have a book recommendation for you, The Schooled Society by David Baker. Which talks very much about this.

Oh, great. I love it.

But what it means to be a child of the modern era is to go to school and like that, couple hundred years ago, that was not true.

Right.

We had other means to, you know, what it meant to be a child.

Yeah. I mean, maybe this is a good point to then, because it's, it's also a really practical book in the way that you support parents, particularly in thinking about these things. And to the discussion we were having earlier, the translation piece is critical in putting that in a language that doesn't alienate parents. Gets all schooly and all academic. It, it's really inviting. And I, I feel that when you're reading the book. And so just one point, I heard Rebecca, you say elsewhere that it actually started as a book about school design and then pivoted to become a book for parents really primarily and to, to create that accessible language. So I don't know if you wanted to say anything about that.

I mean, we spent a, a year writing our proposal and actually the proposal was accepted and it was a book on creating the optimal conditions for learning and it was a school design book and we were really excited about about the topic and felt it was really, really important. But kind of two things happened. One was when we talked to our publisher about it and thinking about impact, Rebecca was doing this incredible work on school and family engagement, and we could see in the data that parents have this tremendous impact. I had been writing for parents and recognized that nobody talks to them, nobody cares about them. It's not that nobody cares about them, it's that they're so far at the bottom of the list behind students and teachers, which is really hard. Schools have a lot on their plate, so But parents do get forgotten, and no one is bringing them into the conversation around educational reform. Nobody's bringing them into the conversation, in my mind, about sort of learning and learning support. So we got really excited about flipping it and saying, wait, we've just figured out the optimal conditions of learning. What do those look like at home? And then seeing the research, and the research saying, as Rebecca said, you know, 2 times more predictive than SES in terms of outcomes. So we're like, oh, then that's who we should be writing for. We should be writing for parents. And also there's a gap there. A lot of people— there are some wonderful books, and we relied heavily on the expertise of so many people here about supporting teens emotionally. And that is like the number one ground zero. Until you can do that, you can't do any of the things that we talk about. So there's some really nice overlap there. But then this next step is like so much of adolescence is forming an identity of yourself and so much of your time and that identity formation is happening in schools and around learning. So what can we as parents do to support that in all the best ways, right? To make them happier, to make them more, you know, sort of self-aware, self-regulated, able to thrive and flourish in the world. So that's when we flipped it. And it was nice because we also just felt that there's really good work in school design. A lot of people have done some really good work. We loved Deeper Learning by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine. And we thought it's unlikely that a lot of parents are going to find that book, but what if we helped bring their work to more parents?

Yeah. Well, exactly. And I'm not sure Oprah would've given that a gold star, but genuinely, I mean, it's like, it's a niche area, right? And of course school design is important and it's, it's critical, but some of the deep grammar about just being human is trying to figure out how to deal with these. I mean, you know, I've got 3 almost adolescent young people in my house. Like how the hell do I deal with them? I've, no one's taught me how to do this. No one's taught, you know, my wife how to do it. We're just figuring it out as we go along. And I've had, I mean, I've had other conversations on the podcast, for example, with Chris Baum about middle school and, you know, how again, so much of it is a conversation about parenting as much as it is about educating young people. So it's, it's critical. And I'm, yeah, I'm so glad you made, made the pivot. So maybe let's talk then about the engagement toolkit, cuz you've got those, you know, there's 4 sections which make up the bulk of the book, which is, gets super practical. So perhaps, yeah, I just invite you to whichever bits you wanna pick out from that, but just things that parents can do practically?

Um, the engagement toolkit in the book is a wonderful resource for any caregiver, parent, family member, but teachers can also use it to really try to figure out what you should do when you see your kid or your student getting stuck in either resistor, passenger, or achiever mode. And that is what we worry about most is when kids get stuck. Because usually they move between the modes either over the course of a day or a week, or sometimes they're in one mode in school and one mode outside of school. And so there's different things you can do, and Jenny and I can divide up the, the tips and the tricks for how to make sure kids don't get stuck. So in passenger mode, if you see kid is really coasting and really not that interested, not that motivated, not deeply in any sort of deeper learning or self-regulated learning strategies are they deploying? It's usually for a couple of reasons. One is they could be outside of their zone of proximal development, their sweet spot for learning. So a lot of kids, class is too easy. We found this to be the case in a lot of students, and they are bored to tears and they need challenge. And then there are kids for whom class is too hard. And they start believing that they can't do it and don't try. So for a lot of those kids in particular, they might need some actual support. You know, it could be for many different reasons, but they need probably study skills, the kids who are— for her, it's too hard. And a lot of times we parents nag our kids like, hurry up, get it done, haven't you done your homework yet? And Jenny's favorite study in the book is from Chapter 7. Tell the story about the nagging study. It's her favorite study. She loves it.

I do love this study. Probably my kids are laughing 'cause I'm such a good nagger, and this study shows that I should stop. But this is a team, Rondal and Jennifer Selick, University of Pittsburgh, and Rondal's at Berkeley. They stuck a bunch of teenagers in an fMRI machine and scanned their brains while their mothers, who had been previously recorded, talked to them in 3 ways: in a neutral tone, in a positive tone, and in a critical tone. And the critical tone was, "One thing that bothers me about you," which I think most parents of teens could fill in really easily. And they watched what happened to the kids' brains. And effectively, when parents nag or criticize their kids, the problem-solving part of the brain shuts down. So the kids are literally incapable of actually solving the problem that you're nagging them about because their emotions are sort of flooding them and they really can't engage the parts of the brain that you need to, to move forward. So are they taking our So totally sage advice and putting it into practice, no, they are literally shutting down. So it doesn't work. And what we need to do is actually back off and give these kids some more autonomy as we talked about previously. So we don't need to rehash all that, but it feels very counterintuitive to a lot of parents. And that also doesn't mean that we don't think there should be consequences for bad behavior. You know, we're not saying sort of let them off the hook and let them do whatever they want, but we do need to let them take some control of their learning and start to feel what it feels like to be in charge and not be done to all the time.

Yeah.

And the second piece of that is really help them develop their own interests, expose them to as many things as possible. If they have an interest, lean into that. That's where they're gonna develop their agency. It's not gonna be in school right now. And no matter how much you nag or push or demand that they do that, they will not become a self-driven learner because you've insisted that it is so. They need to feel it and they're gonna have to feel it around something they care about. And so you need to lean into their interests and let that be the canvas on which they're developing some of those important learning skills. And then hopefully it transfers. And there is evidence that there is a spillover effect.

Fascinating. And it, I love the, from nag and control to autonomy and support. And that actually, I mean, that's so in the human interaction between me and my son or that local, but then also I, it really resonates with me at the systems level as well. Like, you know, there's a lot of people talking about moving from paradigms of control to paradigms of care at the global systemic level. And I think it's, it's just a fascinating piece for me that this idea of letting go somehow of, of this overcontrol, the, yeah, this desire to somehow control the outcome. Yeah. It's like we're being told everywhere that that kind of doesn't work and maybe we should shift, but we, we're just, I don't know, I was having this conversation earlier today. We're just, our appetite for control is too, too significant sometimes.

And it's, and it's very human, right? I mean, the, there's, Michael Bungay Steiner, I think is his name. Did I get that right, Rebecca?

Mm-hmm. You did.

Yeah. He has this concept of the advice monster. Like, why are we always so eager to give advice, which can, you know, sort of definitely veers into the control category. And it's, when you think about it, it's like as a parent you wanna be right and smart, right? And that's true of a teacher as well. You also wanna save them both time from having to stumble through to the right answer, but also save them from making a mistake. And you want to be perceived well. And so these are like such good human instincts, but they do not let kids learn on their own. And so it's like we really have to combat our very essential human nature that is deeply derived in love and care for our kids, to let them learn a little bit more, to let them struggle a little bit more, to let them find the answer, right? That is not true when they're 2 and 3. Like, you're pointing out and telling them things. That's a boat. That's a car. This is how this works. You can teach them the world, and then all of a sudden they don't want you to tell them. I don't know how the world works. They want to discover it and we have to create the kid, but we're still like, "Do this, do it this way," you know?

Yeah.

I think the phrase that we refer to a lot is from "The Self-Driven Child," which says parents should never work harder to do kids' homework than the kids work themselves. And I think that's a good rule of thumb. The other piece I would add is when we say give them autonomy, we do not mean don't check in on them. We do not mean walk away and never ask. Really what we're meaning is what Jenny was saying. Let them try on their own. But a lot of time what we have to do is help them develop organizational and study skills. Like, huh, so what's— what I do, because I've tried all these, we've all tried all these tips on our own children, and I have two teenage boys, is, you know, not, is your homework done yet? Which I used to do, and he would never do it. It'd be like, you know, after dinner and before you have to go to bed. I have to do an English essay, you know, drive me crazy. Is— do you have any homework? Yeah, what's your plan? When are you going to do it? How long will it take? Like, why don't you check that, make a little plan?

What are you going to do first?

That stuff is incredibly powerful. And if they don't do it, you know what, he's going to get a bad grade tomorrow. I will not let him fail out of, you know, sophomore year of high school, but like, I will let him stumble the next day.

Yeah. And it's interesting too, because the explorer mode is not just exploring. I mean, you say this explicitly at the beginning, like it's not just exploring wherever you want, whenever you want. Part of the explorer is exploring constraints and the reality of a situation and where I can push, where I can't push, what pushes back on me. And that I think is a key aspect of exploring, like, yes, really generative exploring in the world.

Yes.

That balances the structure and agency piece that you're talking about because you, you never get to freely explore. I mean, that's just naive idealism, right?

Unless you're Shackleton, you know, like, he had his own limits too, right?

I reckon there were some constraints.

Yeah, there was some— that iceberg, actually. Constraint.

Everybody has limits in whatever context. And the piece that really struck us about agentic engagement, the concept agentic engagement, was how deep the research is. Again, this is out of John Marshall Reid and many, many of his colleagues around the world. And it is that kids learn in whatever context they are in. It could be South Korea, which, which has a very different disciplinary approach. It could be Peru, it could be Minnesota in the US, it could be, you know, Ireland. These are all places this research has been done. Really different disciplinary environments, different structures. But when teachers give a little bit of space for kids, Kids, teachers do have to give a little bit of space to have some agency. They can figure out within the different confines of those, of these classrooms around the world, how to quote unquote bend it to their own interests and make it more supportive to them. And literally agentic engagement is defined as kids proactively influencing the flow of instruction to make it more interesting and supportive. For them. And it can be, as Jenni said, "Hey, I know we have to do an essay on the solar system. Can I write it on Mars? I'm really obsessed with Mars." Making suggestions. "Hey, I really want to work with my partner because he and I are super excited about photosynthesis." Whatever, I'm making it up. But like, it doesn't have to be huge things, but even a little space gives that agentic engagement.

Well, I mean, my hope would be a little and then a bit more and then a bit more and, you know, a broadening.

Well, it is a continuum. I mean, you know, we had a discussion recently with someone who was like, is this a school problem? Why are you putting it on parents? And it was like, it is a school problem, but shifting schools is very difficult for many reasons and many people are trying. And until then, parents need to lean in at home. And then we do hope actually the whole last chapter of the book is, hey parents, you can be a changemaker too if you want. Like do this at home with your own kids, but hey, bring the book to your school principal, to your school network, to your community members and say, hey, how can our schools better support kids' engagement? Because that actually one of the other pieces, I'm very animated about this. One of the other pieces is that a lot of really good education innovation and ed reform towards agency, by the way, has been shown in the US over the last decades to be blocked by parents. And it's really, in my mind, not their fault. It's because we haven't told them why it's important. And parents are actually inherently conservative as a constituency in the education reform process. So our other hope is that parents can feel confident to support the really interesting reforms towards giving kids more agency when they see it. And be a partner to their schools.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

Should we cover the— we only covered one of the three modes. I'm wondering if we should quickly get back to those. Sure. Uh, so in resistor mode, when you have kids who are stuck in resistor mode, this is often heartbreaking for parents. They are very judged by other parents. They are very judged often by schools because their kids are acting out and withdrawing and they're not doing the things that it seems like every other kid is doing. So it's really tricky for parents and confrontation often ends up being sort of the go-to place. And we, again, with evidence and research, show that actually what you need to do is really step back and get to the why. What is the thing that is causing the resistance, right? And that literally means getting in the trenches next to them and not sort of confronting them to try to get to the problem, but really helping them feel safe that you're on their side and that you wanna get to the bottom of this with them so that they feel brave enough to take even a half a step back forward, but they can't do that without you. And if they think that you're sort of fighting them on it, so get to the why. And we kind of talk about some of the most common reasons, you know, from bullying to neurodivergence to problems at home. You know, it can be a variety of problems. So that's one. And two is this concept of a future possible self, really helping these kids who have, for whatever reason, started to like wear this identity of resistance. Can you help them imagine a different one? You're in 7th grade and you're really not doing great. What kind of 8th grader do you wanna be? What would be an aspirational 8th grader? Like what, what would a picture of you as a leader, as a great football player, as a, you know, what would that look like? What would it take to get there? What would be some of the obstacles that would get in your way? Who else could we kind of get on our journey to go there? So this idea of a future possible self we found with kids stuck in resistor mode can be very effective. Rebecca, do you wanna do achiever?

Sure. For Achiever Mode, one of the most important things we can do is help them learn to struggle productively. These are kids who don't usually have the muscle to pick themselves back up when they don't do something right. So taking little risks, not on super high consequential things that might make them very stressed out, but little risks. So that's an incredibly important muscle. The second thing we really want kids to do is these, these are kids who are so focused on the goals that others are asking of them, who have said, you know, it's sometimes within the school, it might not even be the parents themselves, but they're picking up like, to be successful, I need top grades, I need to be captain of the soccer team, I need to be in the debate club. Like, they're picking this up from peers or society, and we need to help them slow down a little bit and really check in and develop some self-awareness of, do you— are you doing this because you you love it and are super excited by it, or are you doing this because you think you have to win a race? Because kids are not designed to win races when they're adolescents. They should be exploring and developing an identity and getting to know themselves. And the other piece there is when you slow down and have a little bit of time to self-reflect or literally daydream. We talk about daydreaming and mind wandering in the book. That is where creativity happens. And I am personally extremely worried about the kids who are on the go so much. They're processing input so much every day. They're in, you know, executive control network all the time. And we talk about this brain science of transcendent thinking. You need downtime to reflect and process. And literally this toggling between reflection and execution in the brain is what has been shown to create a lot more self-confidence in kids and a lot more prosocial behavior and stronger identities.

Yeah. Yeah. You don't, you don't get to say that without triggering my Mary Helen love.

Yeah. That's straight up Mary Helen Amorosino.

Yeah.

This is straight up Mary Helen. She's been on the podcast twice and she is, she's a legend.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. No, that's beautiful. And I mean, the other thing I was thinking as you were saying that, it's that also the modeling of that racing and that optimizing and that maximizing is coming from parents as well. Right? Because parents are on the rat race and they're, you know, they're on the hamster wheel of like, this is what modern society is telling you you have to do, right?

Even if they don't tell their kids, they might be.

Exactly. We're modeling it to our kids every day. And that's, that's really difficult. Not, not everybody, but that is a difficult thing to stop doing. You know, it's like telling your kids, don't do as I do, do as I say, right?

I mean, it's also very hard to get in the way of exactly the success the system is looking for. Because the question you have to ask yourself as a parent is, at what cost? And it's sometimes easier not to ask that question and just hope that they can keep going. And, you know, there's— this is tragically true of kids. You know, they can be pushed really, really hard, but, you know, the body will keep score and it will catch up. And so it is our role to be, especially with these kids, to be the brakes, to get them to take their foot off the accelerator, to reinforce to them that they are way more than their performance and create those opportunities for the downtime that Rebecca was talking about.

Yeah. And I mean, zoom out a little bit. Like, what the hell are we doing when that's the situation we're creating where we are pushing our kids that hard that they are getting mentally and physically sick? I mean, it doesn't make, it doesn't make any sense on any level.

It is crazy when you look at it and think about it from a big picture level. And I think the other thing Jenny and I are very, very careful to say is we fully empathize. Every parent is acting rationally in a crazy, crazy system. Because the system is saying this is what, you know, whether it's true or not, by the way, there is this belief that if you get into a really elite college which only accepts 3%, you know, Harvard or whatever, and a lot of others, I'm talking about U.S. institutions, you will be successful. And so therefore, to do that, parents are like, well, I want to help my kid be successful. It is— parents are rational in a terrible system. The other, I would say, Tim, just to is it's not true. Unless you, you as a parent who is listening to this, are living in poverty, getting your kid into Harvard will not measurably change the outcomes of their life. What changes is how engaged they are in any higher education institution that they find themselves. And of course, some are better than others, but in the U.S., there's 4,000 higher education institutions. There is a spot for everyone. And You know, we talk to a lot of college counselors and admissions officers in higher education, and they say that they are looking for kids' personality. There are so many kids who look perfect on paper, who have the perfect grades, who are the captain of everything, who have won everything. They say what they are looking for is they ask kids, you know, that's great, what do you do on your free time? That is what they're looking for, to figure out who these kids are. So it's not true that we're going to help them. By doing this.

Yeah. What's free time? Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And I mean, you mentioned loads of great examples, Big Picture Learning being one of them in the book. And you know, there are lots of places doing this. And I would also say that educators themselves are rational beings and they're just working within, they're making the best possible choices.

Totally. Same.

For the best interests of the young people with them in the system. So it's, the problem's bigger than all of us. And that's, that's what I find fascinating is that there's all these stuff and ecologies of theories of change working towards the same thing, which is shifting these systemic incentives, which are just, you know, which we're all kind of participating in. But anyway, love, I mean, I just love that you're taking on the parent piece. I'm really conscious of time, but thank you so much. There's so much more I would love to ask you about. You talk about tech in the book in really amazing ways, in really balanced ways, particularly a moment where Jonathan Haidt and others are, you know, blaming the social media and blaming the phones, and they have a lot to answer for, and the big tech companies do. But I think you also talk about it being beautiful as well as intensifying disengagement. So I'd recommend people check that out as well, because I think that needs a balanced take, which you, you give it. And yeah, so much more I'd love to ask you about, but maybe next time. But thank you so much for taking the time to chat. Thank you.

Thanks so much, and we're very happy to do a part 2.

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