Producer: Alright, good morning and welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function, I am here again with our host Sucheta Kamath.
Good morning, my friend. Today is your second conversation with Dr. Sam Goldstein. Very much looking forward to it. Learned an awful lot last week.
Are you going to lead us off by talking about this idea of child labor and employing children for money, and then this evolution from how this – 19th century child labor practices then focusing on educating the child with pencils and then chalkboards, to the modern laptop and just improving education using superior technology. It promises to be a fascinating discussion leading us off.
Sucheta Kamath: Well, thank you, Todd. I am too very excited about this second conversation. we all are riddled with thoughts about how do we prepare our young generation for the future, how do we make them competent, and equipped to handle the data revolution that’s happening right in front of us, but I want to kind of take us back to that industrial revolution and we all harbor and kind of generously overlooked the ugly secret of the industrial times where the practices where children were put to work – they had tiny hands and they could fit in small spaces, so we didn't hesitate to employ them, and when I say employed, it doesn’t mean we paid them, or sometimes, we actually did not even treat them as somebody who we're developing and young, and they needed more nurturing. Coming through lots of posts about child labor and one of my favorite websites is Mental Floss and they had a little article on this – I'll attach that on the website as well – I came across quite frightening pictures of children at work in early 19th century. The work conditions were dangerous, unsafe, unsanitary, children were not given any breaks, and they were doing work beyond their capacity or skill. Now, when you hear a child in Bangladesh is making your hats and we are furious and we are marching on Washington Mall, but that was not the case 100 years ago. There was a picture of a boy who lost his leg at age 11 when he worked as a trapper, and he got stuck between two cars, and a funny story, a sad story, but it was determined by the employer, it was the boy’s fault, and so they did not offer him any compensation. There was another picture of a family of harvesters where the child would start picking fruits when she or he would be as young as three. There was also a picture of a child without any footwear or really in a very shabby condition, a kid as young as five who was running barefoot and stomped oysters so they could be cracked open. Lastly, there was a wonderful picture where a little girl is carrying a basket with cranberries and her father yelled at her for stopping for that picture to be taken.
So what I'm trying to say is, we come from that history and now, here we are, we are appalled and we sigh with amusement if there is any mention that children need to do anything but learn, but we are struggling; we are trying to find this balance. How do we educate our children, not only that we don’t subject them to this kind of cruelty but we are struggling to find out, what do we do with them? How do we get them engaged and maintain their love of learning? There was no concept of love of learning, let me tell you, that before, 100 years ago. There was also another evolution that’s happening which is because of the technology. For example, each family had a desktop computer when the classroom just had blackboard or whatever, green boards. When families moved to having laptops, the school bought smartboards. The kids began to have their own individual laptops, the schools were still catching up, and then by the time the kids moved on to iPhones and iPads, the schools were sending kids to computer labs. So now, the schools have begun to let children explore with iPads but the kids are exposed and using technology that’s far advanced that the schools can keep up.
So that brings us to the conversation that we're going to have with Dr. Sam Goldstein who’s joining me again. Here's a little background on him.
He is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Utah, School of Medicine. He's a clinical director of the Neurology Learning and Behavior Center. Dr. Goldstein has authored 50 books as well as three dozen book chapters, and 30 research articles. He's a prolific writer, an incredible speaker, he currently serves as the editor-in-chief of a journal of attention disorders, and sits on editorial boards of six peer review journals. Currently, he has three books and four psychological tests in development. His a man of many talent. He has served as executive producer for a number of films and that includes an award-winning documentary, Tough Times: Resilient Kids. I have personally heard him speak nationally at many important conventions and conferences, and I am delighted to have this conversation of solving this problem which is a lot larger and we need as many thinking hats and thinking experts to get behind this. So I'm excited, Todd.
Producer: I am too, Sucheta. Just listening to you there, I haven’t really thought about this but this evolution of how we educate our children and the tools that we use to do it, where do we go from here and how does that impact the child’s well-being in the study of executive function? I mean, this could be quite fascinating to see where it goes next.
So again, it promises to be another important conversation from Dr. Sam Goldstein. Very much looking forward to it. Let's get to it, here is Sucheta’s second conversation with Dr. Sam Goldstein.
Sucheta: Welcome to the show again, thank you so much for being here, Sam.
Dr. Sam Goldstein: Thanks for having me back.
Sucheta: Yes. And I highly recommend to our listeners to listen to the previous podcast.
So my first question to you is, I want to start with this big idea that you often say that we must design schools to fit the needs of our society today. What is that need and what are the key components of creating this effective learners and successful leaders of tomorrow that get the right education with the lens of executive function?
Dr. Goldstein: I think first, we have to go back and appreciate that our species did quite well before there were any schools. Schools are a fairly recent phenomena and their beginning wasn’t always so noble. It was more to keep kids out of the workforce than really to create an educated society, but if you go back and you ask the question of, well, if you are going to design a school, shouldn't you begin by designing it based on how the human brain develops and how children acquire knowledge and learn to problem-solve, and shouldn't you build it on the qualities of temperament that drive development? Children are not venomous snakes; they're not born knowing everything they need to know, and they're not bear cubs; they need more than a year or two. Our children require nowadays 30 years before they're adults. We have a new area of study, it's called pre-adulthood. It's the riskiest time in life, people from 18 to 27 years of age, and if you start by asking, okay, so tell us about development, you understand that children are born intrinsically motivated, they take pleasure in just the accomplishments of development, and they're instinctually optimistic – they keep trying because they believe they can accomplish, and if you're going to design schools, you're going to design schools that reinforce that, not just for the students who learn quickly and have the right answer, but for all students, even those when they struggle, and not just for the students who can sit in their seats and finish their work, or organize their desks, but for all students, even students who struggle with that. again, we've created an educational model both in its funding and its organization that really is fine for 1930, but doesn’t really fit very well when you begin thinking about 2030, 13 years from now, and the project we had been working on, we call “Inside Out Schools,” Alan [0:08:34] and I, and the question we're asking is, what will schools be like 50 years from now? We call it ‘inside out’ because we want to turn the school inside out in the sense that we see teachers in the future as engagement coaches, whose job it is to find ways to help children engage and do most of the learning on their own, and I don’t mean sitting in front of a computer in a homeschool, but to look at each student and how they acquire their knowledge and to appreciate if they know but don’t do why they're inefficient and to provide experiences that both enhance their development of executive function, meaning improve their ability to work with memory or organize, or plan, or strategize, and also to create what we call ‘prostheses,’ meaning if you're not very good at organization, let me provide you with instruction and some kind of a device that helps you organize. While we haven’t had good transfer, for example in trying to teach kids to pay attention, having them sit in front of a computer and play a game, and then hope they pay attention better in class, we've had very good transfer when we provide children with strategies to enhance their attention on their own in the classroom, and so again, I see executive functioning as comprised of a set of behaviors that bridge the gap between what you know and how effectively you do what you know, and in the end point, last thing I'll say is that when children transition into adulthood, no one asks them their worst subject or their most annoying behavior. The fact of the matter is that no one cares, and when you transition into adulthood, it's your assets and the efficiency with which you can go about applying those assets in problem solving in everyday life that’s really going to predict your future in a positive way.
Sucheta: Tell us a little bit about places where you have implemented this inside out school project and that also sounds like you need teachers with a different mindset to be part of this process of becoming as engagement coaches.
Dr. Goldstein: Right, I wish I could tell you that we've implemented it, we have not yet. We're still talking about it, but you're right, it is a shift from teachers perceiving themselves as the repository of information that they dump onto students versus again, we call them engagement coaches and I see them doing more important things within kind of the context of helping kids become engaged in learning, that is they're giving students opportunities to learn to plan effectively, to learn to organize and sequence information, to learn to pay attention to detail, and to learn to think in a simultaneous way, and I don’t use the word ‘intelligence’ much anymore because for 2,000 years, intelligence equated with how well people solve problems. It didn't matter whether you went to school or not, and in the last 100 years or so, our educational system has redefined intelligence to be strongly based on your reading and math performance, on your achievements. Sure, you have to be a decent problem solver but I have plenty of children we see at our clinic who are exceptional thinkers but just average readers, and they don’t qualify for the gifted program and I would argue that if you look at people out in the world today making important contributions, they're not necessarily the best readers; they're the best thinkers, so that last area, I call ‘simultaneous.’ It means seeing how all the variables fit together at the same time and working with them. So if I asked you what's grey, has four legs, lives in Africa? I gave you this long list and you just pick three things, the probability you'd have the right answer is far less than if you considered all of the facts simultaneously as I provided them to you. That’s simultaneous thinking.
Sucheta: You're suggesting to educators that make learning to learn process more explicit, more strategic and more intentional?
Dr. Goldstein: Correct, and I'm suggesting that the basis that the important variable kids need to come out of school with is not a large repository of information but an efficient set of strategies to go about dealing with life and managing information. The world has changed so quickly. Information is in our fingertips. The whole world is on our fingertips, so how much longer are we going to require children to rotely memorize over and over, year after year, academic facts when in fact, I can find any of those facts in a second. What I need to learn is what to do with that information once I acquire it, and that’s where I think schools are going to need to change, and the problem is, is that technology evolves so much faster – I mean, in some ways, the evolution of technology is kind of like the evolution of viruses. Viruses evolve and multiple so quickly – thousands and thousands of generations by the time we have an antibiotic. It only works for a while, and then there's a new mutation, and technology is kind of like that. Just when we think, oh, look, we have this computer we'll use in the classroom and it's this big thing that sits on a desk, and we have kids go to the computer lab once a day, and then we have iPads, and they don’t need that big cumbersome thing anymore. The device goes with the kids right into the classroom – again, I'm not pushing technology over direct education; I'm just pointing out that the technology has evolved so much faster than educational theory has evolved, and educational theory is scrambling to keep up and from my view, not doing a very good job.
Sucheta: My work with teacher training and teacher education focuses on kind of helping students becoming self-devised strategic thinkers and that self-knowledge is not hardly emphasized in classroom teaching or learning, and that knowing more about teaching the student who he is as a learner and thinker, what are his typical responses, what tools does he have access to? And more importantly, I think that advocacy – how do I ask for help based on my understanding of myself? I mean, I love that a lot of teachers in schools are offering labs where the student is invited or welcomed but the student never shows up. The one that needs the most help never shows up because he doesn’t know either that he needs help or he doesn’t know how to ask for it. So do you see that as well as some of the roadblocks in effective student development?
Dr. Goldstein: Yes, I agree with that, but I'll come back to what I said earlier: by the time you're offering those opportunities to those students, their intrinsic motivation and their instinctual optimism has been so beaten down that they're not interested. Look at young children who are having trouble acquiring reading knowledge and research demonstrates that by late second grade, early third grade, you can put them in what are very effective reading groups and they don’t participate. Even at that point, they're so burned out by the day-in and day-out frustration, and I just had a family in my office this morning. I run a clinic here, university-affiliated clinic is Salt Lake City, the Neurology Learning and Behavior Center. We see about 500 children a year. I train doctor residents in neuropsychology and interns. About half these children have brain injuries. The other half have complex genetic problems. I did a TEDTalk about our clinic called The Power of Resilience. It's a stop of last resort; no one really wants their kid to end up having to come here, but just this morning, in talking to these parents of this seven-year old, he loves books and he likes having a lot of books. He loves the idea of having these books but he tells his mother, “It's just too hard to read them,” and he's seven, and he does have a reading disability but it's so interesting that he likes the concept of having information in this volume – I once had a child tell me that books are like prisons, and when I asked him why, he said, “Well, people put words in them and when you read those words, you free them, you free them from the book.” It was a wonderful –
Sucheta: Aww, that’s wonderful!
Dr. Goldstein: Yeah. Yeah, it was a very bright young teen who told me that. Again, I think that we have to start before they get to school. We have to think about how are we going to nurture their instinctual optimism and their intrinsic motivation, and I'm not saying that everybody has to go to preschool. I'm just pointing out that we can do a better job of triaging kids as they come into school to figure out where they're strong and how we supplement that, and where they're weak and how we support that.
Sucheta: Yeah, it's very disheartening to me, I was reading last night as I was preparing for this, an article in AGC which is our local newspaper, one of the county schools where kindergarten expulsions or suspension, if you look at the rate, more than 100 kids each year are expelled from kindergarten, and if you look at all those behaviors, these are basically difficulty with impulse control and difficulty understanding how to follow classroom protocol, and instead of kind of compassionately taking a look at why they don’t have these abilities, they are punished and punishment never leads to developing skills. If anything, as you said, it'll suck away their entire sense of resilience or a desire for optimistically engaged. What do you think then the ideal classroom look like or what are the strategic instructions that teachers can provide to improve the quality of student engagement or even success in developing these learning to learn skills?
Dr. Goldstein: It takes more brain cells firing to sit still than to move. Human beings are programmed to keep moving. When you have a child who maybe is having some trouble developing those suppressing neurons, to punish them for that or to try and reward that away when they really don’t have the capability yet to do that, this creates, again, more disheartenment on the part of the child. I don't know exactly what this classroom we're looking at will look like. Will it have walls or no walls? Will it be like that research project where kids do their homework at school and their learning on their own at home? Because there was a project – a research project like that. I don't know how it's going to look but I know philosophically, it has to be different and it has to be more in line with what we know about genetics and development. It has to be more in line with what we know about the power of mindsets and belief. It has to be more in line with what we know about how children acquire knowledge, it has to be more in line at, I think, more heavily-focused on that transition on developing executive functioning so that you're more effective in taking what you know and using it out there in the world. So I see a lot more real world kinds of applications. I mean, the fact of the matter is, we've extended education so many years because we just keep piling on top of kids more and more things we think they have to learn, and I'm not saying they shouldn't but there's got to be a breaking point in which we say, well, maybe children need more selection in what they choose to learn about or what they want to learn about. I had a boy in my office not long ago, he asked me when did I go to school, so we had this discussion that I was in elementary school in the late 50s, early 60s and he said, “Well, it's not fair.” I responded, “What’s not fair?” he said, “Well, look at how much more I have to learn since then, it's not fair,” and his view was sort of dislodged volume of information and that the longer the world goes on, the more we force kids to learn all this stuff. We had this interesting discussion about how much of what he's learning does he think he's interested in or will make a difference in his life, or it's just something he ought to know as an educated person.
Sucheta: How optimistic you are about changing executive function skills with training and improving them as you mentioned earlier, that these are pliable skills, and how do you view this whole process of we being successful in helping kids in developing them?
Dr. Goldstein: I'm very optimistic. One, because there's reasons to be optimistic. I can work with a child who has trouble planning or paying attention to detail and through both self-working activities and individual activities, and group activities demonstrate that their ability is enhanced, but even more so, we have plenty of data to show that I can help people compensate. Imagine if we didn't have eyeglasses. Imagine if people who had visual problems and we had no nothing for them, no compensatory activity for them. Look at how a simple thing like eyeglasses.
Sucheta: I think about that all the time, what people did 500 years ago.
Dr. Goldstein: They didn't see. They didn't drive and life was simple, but they didn't see. Again, eyeglasses is a prosthesis but so is a planner, an organizer, so is your cellphone, but there's also cognitive strategies that you can teach people. We've abandoned in terms of children and their development, we've abandoned those things because they take time. It's not as easy as swallowing a pill. If there was a pill, you bet the pharmaceutical industry – and I have no relationship with them because I published this – I'm the editor of a science journal so they send research so I can't have any relationship – but you get if they could figure out how to promote any of their products as enhancing executive functioning, they'd be right on top of it. It's a popular deal; everybody wants to have executive functioning.
Sucheta: Yeah, that quick fix, living in this 21st century in western world, we want quick fix and if we don’t get it, we definitely are disappointed in putting effort.
Well, I really appreciate you sending this message of hope to our listeners about how these are developed, skills that can be trained and developed with great effort, attention, and optimism. I really, really appreciate that message, Sam.
Before I let you go, if anybody wants to get a hold of you, how can they reach you?
Dr. Goldstein: They can reach me on my website, samgoldstein.com or they email info@samgoldstein.com, or they can check out our clinic here in Salt Lake City, The Neurology Learning and Behavior Center. They can watch my TEDTalk which I had thought was going to go viral but a lot of people have watched it, but it didn't make me a star.
Sucheta: It is viral. You have like, 90,000 views. That’s a superstar in my eyes.
Dr. Goldstein: I know. So too to those kids with the fidgets.
Sucheta: Well, thank you so much and I look forward to this information being available to our listeners and once again, so grateful for your time.
Dr. Goldstein: You're welcome, take care.
Producer: Alright, Sucheta, as I suspected, yet another great conversation with Dr. Sam Goldstein, great stuff. Any initial thoughts that you want to run down for us?
Sucheta: Absolutely. The first takeaway for me that educating children through schooling is a modern phenomenon. I kind of led our podcast with that but not until last 100, 150 years, we began to send them to school, and in spite of that, the kids, for generations, have been fine and growing up has never been interrupted because of not being schooled formally, and so this reminds me of the work by the Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer who has written a wonderful book, I will also attach that link here, but who writes about a massive shift in post-industrial modern society where children stopped being the object of utility, where as you know, I mentioned they were part of American labor force, and moved into a status of value or she calls it the ‘object of sentiment.’ Zelizer’s on-point observation of how children who were once bringing in money became economically useless and emotionally priceless. With that, we have begun to ponder what to do with these children who were sitting home; they were not working who needed to be kept occupied and coached, and trained, I guess, and so that’s where the education debate came on board and the entire country began to sort out through these processes and here we are, we are still trying to figure it out.
Producer: Well, thinking about the modern educator, I mean, they have a lot of challenges and they're facing many, many dilemmas but to truly help executive function emerge, they really need to do something very specific or it won’t work, right?
Sucheta: Partly, I think nobody ever had the term ‘executive function,’ it's a very modern term. We just called it ‘street smarts’ or you will do well if you know what you are supposed to do, and it's our observation that sometimes, our children are not doing that, maybe there is a serious problem in learning, so that connection is recent but the phenomenon is not.
There are two most important concerns educators are facing, if you ask me. One is, how do we teach students to manage information and second is, how do we teach students to manage learning? Each and every child, no matter how he learns, we need to answer those two questions. So let's start with the first concern. Well-prepared and thoughtful teachers are bringing forth new modern and evolved ideas as well as up-to-date content, but the content may not be new or can be unlocked, so to speak, by the teacher for the student, but kids are growing up in this information age who can access that unlocked or locked information through various sources on their own, so I wonder if teachers need to serve more like an art curator and help connect ideas to relevance. The way I see is that the bigger responsibility that has landed on teachers’ lap is to know and figure out how they make students self-sufficient so the students themselves can curate the information, particularly while they are standing in the midst of ongoing onslaught of information and do that for themselves. Just as data scientist engineers and developers, or entrepreneurs in the digital space are trying to figure how to sort, analyze big data to determine trends, the 21st century students need to get out of their education is this particular set of skills: the skills to manage the big data of learning and competently sort, analyze information and look for patterns and figure out ways to apply that learning to personally relevant direction. That is what is going to let our children thrive in digital innovation, the way I see it.
Now, I'll quickly talk about the second concern which is how do we teach students to manage learning when each and every child may or may not be learning the same identical way? So the educators need to develop discernment to distinguish between teaching and helping. That’s another area that’s lacking if you ask me. A struggling student may get verbal guidance rather than experience in self-directed problem solving and there's a temptation to be reactive rather than proactive, only attacking the problems as they occur at a very superficial level.
Producer: So make it very clear for us, what should educators focus on while they're helping prepare students for tomorrow?
Sucheta: Well, as Dr. Goldstein talked about, strategic teaching can be effective in helping develop tomorrow’s leaders. They can take charge of their learning. There are several benefits to creating strategy-centered learners and research shows that very clearly. For example, students develop a sense of power over their learning environment and begin to trust their own judgment regarding learning. Students become more responsible. Students know there is more than one way of doing things, and they begin to explore those multiple ways. They also acknowledge their mistakes readily and show willingness to rectify them. Students develop tools to evaluate their own products and their behaviors. So what's a product? A paper you write. What's a product? A test you take. So we need students to go back and look at the feedback the teacher gives, and that readiness may come from this strategic thinking. Work completion and accuracy improves when we begin to support them strategically and students begin to learn how to personalize their approach to studying process, they become successful risk-takers. So that’s what is going to make students succeed and withstand the pressures of the future, if you ask me.
Producer: Thank you for sharing that. Any final thoughts, Sucheta?
Sucheta: Yes, as we close this interview, this is such a powerful conversation. this is one of my favorite conversations and I just love Dr. Goldstein’s work and if executive function is the bridge that connects what you know to how you do what you know, then there's certainly a gap in education, and based on these conversations, I hope listeners can begin to notice that we need to kind of go in this direction of investigative thought process. Number one, our classrooms promoting every day problem solving. Number two, does the instruction include how to do that and not because what they are learning but because how they learn to learn is integral part of their executive function development, and the third is, are students being coached, not just because they are required, but eventually, they will be managing themselves. So we need to apply our collective wisdom and sharpen executive function acumen of our own to shift our approach in education.
Producer: Much to think about here. Great stuff.
Alright, well, that’s it for today’s episode. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening today and we look very much forward to seeing you again next week on Full PreFrontal.