Producer: All right, welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. As always, I am here with our host Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, my friend. Good to be with you as always. I’m very much looking forward to your conversation today. Kick things for us, please.
Sucheta Kamath: Well, good morning to you as well, Todd, and it’s such a delight to be here. You know, I am obsessed with Henry Winkler. He is one of my favorite actors – I guess not a comedian, but more like an actor, and recently, I’ve been watching and HBO show called Larry and he’s just phenomenal Fresh Air and a couple of other places, and he came to our International Dyslexia Association of Georgia, organized an event where he was the chief guest of honor and he came and spoke about growing up with dyslexia and learning disability, and he talks about his parents who were Eastern European, I think, and referred to him as a “dumb dog” in German when he was growing up. He never received any support, he was quite often criticized for struggles that he had in learning, and he was often blamed for not thinking, and as I was listening to this, it just reminded me that the way we are dressed, thinking in general in the context of education and that is why I’m so excited to speak to our guest today, but we often talk about thinking as if it’s an effortless process, just as breathing is, and somehow, it should be present without instructions. We often even tell students that, “Why don’t you just think?” but in fact, what we know from neuroscience education, cognition, cognitive psychology, I guess, is that thinking can be referred to as chair with various names, including executive function or mindful reflection, cognitive processes, intelligence, even, attention, reasoning, and finally, metacognition.
So, I want to kind of explore that today and also see how can we really prepare the next generation of young minds and provide them with all tools for thinking? So, that’s why this wonderful speaker, so today, we have Kathleen Kryza in the studio, I guess, and she is a lifelong learner, an experienced educator and outstanding presenter. I personally have had a chance to hear her, so I can vouch for that. She is passionate, informed, and committed to bringing the best educational practices to educators and parents, so that they can help all children to succeed. She is a co-author of a wonderful book Transformative Teaching: Changing Classrooms Culturally, Emotionally, and Academically which I think we have had – our listeners might remember MaryAnn Brittingham who was our guest. She is the co-author with MaryAnn, but Kathleen is also featured in the video Differentiating Instruction in the Intermediate Grades, Bureau of Education and Research. In 2008, she has also done extensive training over the years with giants in the field on topics such as differentiated instruction, brain-based learning, cooperative learning, co-teaching, coaching, and content literacy, and a very special connection which I recently discovered, that she is the better half of one of my favorite researchers, Jack Naglieri, so it is a great pleasure and have Kathleen yesterday.
Welcome to the podcast, Kathleen.
Kathleen Kryza: Thank you, Sucheta. I am totally excited to be here to share with you things that I’m, as you said, very, very passionate about, so thank you for inviting me.
Sucheta: So, let’s jump into it. So, how would you describe your own executive function and as an educator who works with children, have you benefited from your insights into improving skills and managing self?
Kathleen: That answered a question to answer, but I would say that growing up, I was not taught anything about how my brain works and how thinking occurs, and I was a good student, so learning came easily to me, but with it got hard, I had no idea really how to manage studying and being prepared for my future. I was a first-generation American, so I was not really taught how to go to college, and there’s a lot of skills involved in becoming a college student that involve executive function, and so it was a really challenging and difficult experience for me compared to I think what I saw with my fellow students around me. So, I think I got into education, I started in my second year learning about the concept of metacognition and teaching students to think about their own thinking, and that was – I actually get goosebumps while I say it’s because that was a huge change not only for me personally but in everything, everything that I did as an educator from that point forward, and the Was 30 years ago when I began that journey. So, I know without a doubt in teaching this way, teaching in a metacognitive way and helping kids understand how their brains learn, I wish I had that growing up, I wish I had been able to give more of the brain research that we have out there to the students I worked with back then, but I do know that when I changed and shifted to teaching them about – to me, executive function and metacognition are two of the same, they are woven together. It has made a difference for kids, it has made a difference to my life to be aware of how my brain learns and the neuroplasticity that even though I age, I can still make changes in neural connections in my own brain. It is a lifelong process. So, big impact on me personally and professionally.
Sucheta: Yup! You know what? I think what is reverberating with me as that fundamentally, you had a great sense of openness within, and to me, that is a sign of a strong executive function – being receptive, being open, and another thing that you said that struck a chord with me, being a good student, particularly, I think you assume that thinking is going to continue to be effortless just the way it has been earlier. So, not just because you are a good student does not mean you will know what to do when things get hard. So, that brings me to my first question about helping all the listeners, whether they are parents, educators, teachers, psychologists, but what do you think gets in the way of student developing their executive function?
Kathleen: Adults, whether they are parents or teachers, we have a tendency – I have such a good place in our hearts to do too much of the thinking and the planning for students and children, and what we do when we take away their thinking and they are planning, or actually, we become their prefrontal cortex. So, we become their prefrontal cortex is where executive function unfolds and when we come to their prefrontal cortex, they are not developing their own prefrontal cortex, so when I work with parents and teachers, I really want them to realize that was the take away, kids struggled. I think that is another big issue, is we tried to take away their struggle and their failure, and when we protect them too much, they don’t learn from their mistakes, and we know in the neuroscience that mistake making, risk-taking, and mistake making, and then being able to figure out what you did wrong or what you should do differently next time actually grows stronger neural connections. I love the book Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, and he does a wonderful job of making the neuroscience about risk-taking user-friendly for us as parents and teachers, and in there, he talks about how when he makes mistakes and we worked through them, the myelin that wraps around those neural connections is actually stronger, so as adults, when you take away their struggle, what we’re doing is we’re sending the message that they are not capable. So, we want to let them fall off their bikes and fail that test, and not rescue them every time something goes wrong because then, we are their prefrontal cortex and we have taken away take risks, make mistakes.
Sucheta: Yeah. I think I love this book called Blessings of Skinned Knee. I don’t know if you have ever read it. It is a phenomenal book written by a psychologist in Los Angeles area as she serves these affluent families and their children, and one of the things that she talks a very passionately about is the same exact same, that our motivation is to protect and to seal, and provide comfort to our children, but we’re doing more harm than we know, and you are right, I think – I have not heard an educator talk so emphatically that what comes in the way of developing executive function is adults, so I love that framework.
So, let us that a little more. What kind of role do children’s own ability of developing executive function and which is on a trajectory of slow and gradual incline come in the way of keeping up with on their executive function. So, for example, a fourth-grader is going to be more proficient than a seventh grader, but the instructional process may be such that the fourth-grader is not expected to have a certain level of proficiency but he may not have it, and that can cost him or that can become a barrier in general success or even interpersonal relationship. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Kathleen: I think what you are asking me is about the developmental – am I understanding that you are asking me about the development of executive function through the ages?
Sucheta: Exactly, so what I am asking is that there is one element which is the expectations and a lot of doing for children can come in the way, as you mentioned, and the second component which is, there is actual delay certain children’s brains because of developmental challenges that can cause problems with their executive function, and yet, we’re expecting them to have certain executive function proficiency, so how do we understand that in the classroom setting with different children are developing at a different pace with their executive function?
Kathleen: You know, students, like plants, all develop in different ways and at different times, and the idea that every child should be reading at the same time or comprehending text or figuring out math problems is just – we know that’s not true. We know with that of the neuroscience that all brains develop differently and at different times, and some brains come with struggles, with learning struggles that are different than the other kids. As a special education teacher – actually, when I started teaching, I was a general education teacher. I taught English and I had 125 kids, and I did not have any knowledge about how to work with kids that struggle, but I have done, and so I went back and got my special education training because I wanted to understand the brains of kids who learn differently, and so the more as educators we understand that kids can learn differently, whether it is cognitive development for learning disabilities, or ADHD, the more we can support them in the classroom and not expect them to learn the same way that every student learning. So, we need to understand that their executive function, they develop more slowly, so they may need more repetition, more generally, what they need is more modeling and scaffolding of the kind of skills that we want them to use in the classroom. It may be that they develop those skills a year later. I have always said, I provide my special and students with the tools that I know good tools for becoming stronger in their thinking and executive function, but I might not be there to see when it pops.
Sucheta: I like that, like [0:12:41] the soil, and you may not be there for the beautiful garden.
Kathleen: Right, right, but I’ve had students that came back to speak to me and I have some students that find me on Facebook now to say the greatest gift you gave us was to be a community of learners and a community of thinkers, and I think that is the gift we give all kids, and then we don’t assume that they are going to get in the same way at the same time, and when we create that kind of a – whether it’s a home environment where you have one child that has a challenge or a school environment where we have them all, that we create that space where we say it doesn’t matter when you get it, and matters that we are all learning to develop our thinking, and we all can.
Sucheta: I say your approach and that you are describing it, I think it is a compassionate one, one that has a deep sense of neuroscience, but also some allowance made for that individual differences. I find off then, teachers don’t come from this school of thought and to be quite annoyed with their children or students and often feel that the student intentionally being difficult or is intentionally not – or is being defiant, so your kind of inviting them to change their mindset a little bit.
Kathleen: Absolutely inviting them to change their mindset.
Sucheta: Talk a little bit about that. What does that look like in terms of education where teachers themselves changing their mindset as well as then as a result, maybe teaching students to change their mindset.
Kathleen: In the workshops that I do and in the transformative teaching book, that is what I lead with, and that is the most important change. We almost called our book, Making Those Kids Our Kids, because in the work that MaryAnn and I do across the field, and then Alicia, our co-author, do across the field, we hear that a lot: why do I have to have those kids in my classroom? I didn’t used to have to have those kids in my classroom. I say to those teachers, those kids are our kids. You don’t get to pick who shows up in your classroom, and they all have beautiful brain, and they all have things to offer us, and the more we can see that, the more I believe, and from my experience as a teacher, that the kids that taught me to be a good teacher with the kids that came with the greatest challenges. If I had had all the teacher –
Sucheta: I love that.
Kathleen: If I had all the teacher pleasers, I would’ve thought I was a great teacher, but I know now that those kids have a lot to offer and those kids make a difference in how we understand the brain and what we can do to help our kids learn.
Take changing teachers’ mindsets first begins with their desire. I think they need to have a learn as better mindsets can be getting in the way, so we talk a lot about that in the work that our mindsets impact kids’ mindsets, and if we believe they cannot learn or they cannot grow, or they cannot change, then that is going to impact how kids – I mean, kids feel how we feel about them, and see how we feel about them, and if we are saying to themselves, “Well, you came from that background or you have this learning challenge, or you are in this cultural environment,” we are projecting that out, and so we know that our mindsets make a difference, and we have to make the choice to really look at kids in a different way, and to say to ourselves, when they are challenging, well, I’ve never had a kid like that. I cannot wait to see what they are going to teach me this year about how to become a better teacher, and we have to –
Sucheta: Sounds like it is like bringing the growth mindset into your own life before you bring it to your child’s life.
Kathleen: Yes, it has to be of developing our group mindsets along with our students, and that is a process, and it is something we have to catch ourselves at because we are having a difficult or challenging day as an educator for a school psychologist, or a parent, we can get into our fixed mindset mode, and we have to catch ourselves. I think we first because we are the adults need to be modeling how you get back into the growth mindset, would you have stepped into a fixed mindset and do that with students, so the teachers I work with all over the world work on mindsets with their students, not just at their students, and I think it is okay to say, “Hey, we’re learning to do this together. We’re in this together, developing our neural connections together. I make mistakes too and that is okay.”
Sucheta: You know, I talk to teachers and parents as well to share their mistakes, and one of the things that you mentioned really is an exercise that are encouraged, I feel, which is telling the child that, “I failed because of my assumptions. I’ve failed myself,” and one thing that I have encouraged the teachers to say is last year, like getting in front of students and saying at the beginning of the year, “Let me tell you who was my most difficult student last year,” and when you talk about that, if the teachers get the practice of talking about what made that student difficult for me, not what was about that student that made him difficult, I think can be an example of that mindset shift or demonstration, or modeling you are talking about. Is that fair? Is that a good example?
Kathleen: Yeah, I never thought of that, but the shift to it is me, whether you say it at the beginning of the year for all year, I have apologized to my students when I have handled things wrong with that and come back and said to a whole class, not just an individual student that this was about the, it was about you. I made a mistake. I did not handle this well, let me have a redo, and that is such a powerful thing for them to realize that we take ownership of ourselves and our own growth, and our own mistakes. We are setting a powerful message and we are helping them understand that we are human and that we are growing as well, and that it is okay to have those discussions.
Sucheta: I love that. So, let us talk about mindfulness practices. You have often talked about that in your work and your presentations. How do you think these my practices support students’ socio-emotional well-being in the classroom, and why are they so essential?
Kathleen: I think the research that we are finding on mindfulness practices is life-changing, again, for parents and teachers, and psychologists, and of course children. Something I wish I had been taught growing up, we are seeing so many anxious children. I would say one of the number one things – and the two things that I hear the most when I asked parents, teachers that I work with around the world, what are your two biggest challenges? Number one relates to our first question, parents rescuing their children and not pulling them to the natural consequences that they should face, so that goes back to question number one, but also anxious kids, and I start talking about kindergarten and first grade, and beyond, and I think there is a lot of reasons why we are seeing so many anxious children. A lot of it, I believe, is a screen time. If we look at the research, we are seeing that kids under two are spending three hours a day in front of screens versus less than half an hour in 1997, and that is scary. I think it increases the anxiety because the messages are coming at them fast and furious, and they don’t have that quiet time and that downtime. They witness way too much violence on television, things that parents would never allow them to see in their actual home if they allow them to see on television, and the teenagers are seeing the violent video games, and they are not getting outside enough. I’d like to talk about that more in a bit, but that not running is not playing creates a lot of anxiety as well, as the treasurer in schools, the higher pressure and parents, especially as parents in high-performing communities to be perfect, to always be the best, the always get into the best colleges, to you are the smartest kid ever and you have to be smart all the time, all of that promotes anxiety and our children, and I think it is a national problem. The solution or one of the solutions to that before you get to medications, methods and really extreme, to me, is the mindfulness practices, and what we are seeing is that mindfulness practice is done on a consistent basis with children and is increasing their learning and it is the crazing their anxiety, and of course, when their anxiety is less, they are more able to learn because anxiety for those of us who experienced it, and this is something I am passionate about because I am a high anxiety person, is that it helps to think and learn more effectively, and when we look at Sharon Salzberg’s work, she is an expert in the field. You know Sharon?
Sucheta: Yeah, I know her work and I love it. I have attended her workshops, and I do have a mindfulness practice myself. I love it.
Kathleen: Yeah, she is powerful and she did the weeks of mindfulness practices with four through sixth graders, and when she looked at the research again, she saw the decrease in anxiety and improved attention. The way important for our ADD/ADHD kids. Last emotional reactivity which is many types of our students, and more acceptance of themselves which is so healing and health, and so we know – and that’s just some of the research. Goldie Hawn’s project for minds up has a lot of research in the work that they have been doing on mindfulness in the classrooms. So again, that is a practice. What I love about practicing mindfulness with students or your own children that when you practice it with them, you get to do it yourself, so it is another skill. I think the most powerful skills for building executive function and calming the brain are good for adults as well if they are students, and equally as important. So, we want to look at simple doable ways to build mindfulness practices into our lives to heal ourselves as well as our classrooms and to heal our students and help them to find ways to calm, and we’re really seeing benefits of fat in both the inner-city schools. They are doing work on that in Baltimore schools and seeing a reduction in suspensions, but I think it is equally important for the students of the very high-powered, high-pressured schools that I work in.
Sucheta: You know, I think what I am hearing you speak about is this idea that the most important thing I think is not getting undressed in everyday education is teaching children to come from a place where there is greater acceptance of self. I think this notion of a perfect learner to me is a myth because by definition, learning means you don’t now, so then I often find that the children are put in a place where they come with this mindset that I should’ve already know, and then I don’t understand how would you know something that you are about to learn, and you are learning because you did not know. So, if you have that self-acceptance that not everything that you don’t know because you are having difficulty, but it is because of the nature of the job of being a student can be extremely healthy and feeling as you mentioned, so I love that, what you are saying.
Tell me a little bit about how do you think – what are the doable ways that teachers and parents can promote children being in charge of their learning, learning lives, or in their social emotional lives? I think it is a fascinating topic.
Kathleen: Well, I would love to give you what I call the winning formula for success in school and in life, and socially emotionally, and then I’d also like to give you some really pragmatic practices that you can do with your children in the classroom. The formula that I teach and all the work that I do is that mindsets was skill sets equal results, and I think – let me explain that. I think it is really essential that we teach children that we understand how brains develop and how they learn to think and how they learn to learn, and that –
Sucheta: Tell us more.
Kathleen: So, I’ll tell you more. So, let us look at the mindset part. From Carol Dweck’s, another researcher’s work, and we know that if we don’t have growth mindsets, if we are saying negative things to ourselves, your thoughts actually sculpt your brain. So, the more that you program your brain for adults and teachers, the more you are bombarding yourselves with those negative thoughts, that is how they are going to work together, and what I teach my teachers and students is that neurons that fire together, wired together, so if what you are wiring in the brain are negative thoughts, that’s going to be your life view, would you create that negativity bias, but if you practice positive thoughts, if you practice gratitude on a regular basis, if you say, I know that this is a risk-taking, state making process, this thinking and learning thing, but I can do it. I will get to the skill set part in a moment, but if we can continue to practice, again, the daily lifetime practice, you can reprogram those pessimistic selves into positive selves, and the wiring changes, so over time, it does become easier, it does become more effective, and I get so excited in the schools I work in. I’m working at a school in Barry, Vermont with preschool through middle school teachers where we are teaching them to teach kids about this, and one of the things we get so excited about this imagine starting in preschool, in kindergarten that you were learning to develop a positive mindset, and to build and to understand what a mindset is, fixed versus growth, and build those neural connections all the way through. Wouldn’t you have loved to have something like that in your ongoing education besides learning math and besides learning the facts?
Sucheta: I would love to – I grew up in India and there is of course the good, the bad, and ugly of any educational system anywhere in the world, and so one thing that I got which I was very, very grateful for was incredible knowledge to do deep thinking and writing, and it was systematically taught and supervised, but there was also the downside of humiliation was not at all spared. I grew up in schools where your scores were displayed on the doorway into the classroom, so everybody – with your name, so thankfully, I was always the topper, but that doesn’t mean that I too was insecure about falling from grace if God forbid, if I came second, but I cannot even imagine those who were struggling at some difficulties, and their needs being displayed in the bottom with red if they were failing, how much disastrous that method was, even though I can see it can benefit in some ways to develop awareness, but not such a harsh reality awareness without any support.
Kathleen: Oh, that’s a cruel and unusual policy, and I think even for the students at the top, I worked with gifted children for many years, and of course, my husband is a lot of work with gifted children, and when they are expected to be smart and be at the top of the list all the time, that is a phenomenal pressure, phenomenal pressure for their mindset, and in the case often have the most fixed mindsets, because everyone is telling them, “You’re so smart, you’re so smart, you are so smart,” they feel like they have to do that all the time, and I have a best friend who is a high school counselor, and she said, you can’t believe how many gifted kids come down to me and say, “If one more person tells me you’re so smart, I’m going to kill myself,” and they are not joking. They are hurting because the pressure to be number one is – and then when you fail, you’re not some are one, and for those students that are struggling because of whatever learning problems or social emotional problems – I’ve met kids that have traumatic things going on in their homes – you cannot learn under those conditions. Helping them – both ends of that spectrum to know that they can reprogram their brains and that every thought in their great releases a chemical and if they can shift their thoughts that it’s about how you think, not about your grades in your points, and your scores – all of that creates a fixed mindsets thinking and our schools. It is a big problem in our schools, and I will have to say, and I say this with great love, parents, you are the worst offenders. Parents are so obsessed with grades and points, and scores that they lost sight of the fact that we should want children to be lifelong learners and levers of learning, and that in that process, mistake making and not being perfect is critical and it is essential. I’m working with a teacher now, she is a special ed teacher in Barry, Vermont, I was just there a few weeks ago, and she did the most amazing thing. She is so working with kids and they are second graders, the group I was with, she did it with all of her students, but these are kids who cannot read, and they are super struggling with reading. It’s painful. There’s only three of them that she worked with, so close intervention, and they don’t believe in themselves, they don’t believe that they can learn to read. Already, by second grade, their self-perception, their self-compassion is so low. It is so difficult, and as I have been teaching her and she’s been super growth mindset herself about trying these things, if she only sees them for half an hour, she’s like, “I felt like I didn’t have time to talk about mindsets with them and about how other brains change and learn, but I know I would never not do that because it is been the door opener for these kids that are starting to be willing to learn the skill sets,” which is the second part of that equation that I want to get to. She had them, while I was there, draw pictures of the critical critters that were in them that said all these mean and nasty things, and the kids’ names, their critical critters, oh, I think one was like, Loser Lisa – these are second-graders – and they had a vision of that monster within them that says all these nasty things. So, we talked about that. I was there, we talked about how you can change that. You don’t have to be that way because that is a nasty critter that you can ask to leave your brain, and then the next day, I was not there, but she did the growth mindset superheroes. So, they drew and another picture. So, those visuals are powerful. Another picture of what that superhero could come in and help you to develop your mindsets and your skill sets. I mean, that is powerful.
Sucheta: That so powerful, and I can even imagine this being a lifestyle, not just in teaching but even raising children, but even as a workplace, can you imagine the critical critters at workplace, and then growth mindset superheroes at workplace? So, I see this being really infiltrating our lives, all aspects of our lives. Beautiful example, Kathleen.
So, as we come to the end of this discussion, I wanted to not leave you without talking about metacognition, you and I share great interest in this topic. You and I have great commitment to helping children develop these proficiencies of self-monitoring, self-assessment, and self-talk. Do you mind talking a little bit about that?
Kathleen: Metacognition is the second part of the equation, mindsets plus skill sets equal result. So, you can have growth mindset, but they have not developed metacognitive skill sets, you’re still going to be stuck as a learner. So, what we know about the brain, again, today is that it can develop neural connections by practicing, practicing, practicing self-reflective strategies about their social emotional, as well as there will, and that when we teach metacognitive waves with our students and our children, that they do better in school, they do better in life, so instead of telling them things to do and telling them how to do things, we want to get in the habit of asking the which is a change for us. It’s easy to tell them how to tie their shoes, and now we buy them Velcro shoes or weak tie their shoes for them. We know that we want them to be self-sufficient. We need to show them how, and then let them practice, and that if they make a mistake in school, if they do not pass the test for kids along the grade levels of – we have them self-analyze, self-reflect. I have my kids do exit cards: what did I do to study that? Did it work or not work? What would I do differently next time? And that is teaching them to think about their own thinking and recognize that they can develop the skill set of more effective strategies to help them along the way. For my special education students, that was the key, a door opener to realize that thinking and learning did not happen magically. It happened by developing these skill sets, and for my struggling learners, I need to do a lot more modeling and scaffolding. Their brains don’t always come to those strategies magically. So, we want to do a lot of practices with them and really teach them about their brains. I teach them about their prefrontal cortex and how that is the place where they plan and where they come up with effective strategies, and that they can build a toolkit of strategies over time, and using those strategies effectively can help them be effective in life with their friends, with their academics. So, I just how to tell a fun story. I’ve been teaching my granddaughter about that and she came downstairs, she is spending the night with us and she came downstairs – she’s seven and she said, “You know, when I was getting dressed today, I realized that I didn’t have the capris I wanted to wear because I’m going in the water, but I used my prefrontal cortex. I came up with a plan to hike up my hands, so that I would be able to go in the water.” I see that with the teachers that are being very intentional and a very transparent about teaching kids that plans are built in the prefrontal cortex and that when you think about your own thinking and you get stuck, you don’t quit; you come up with a plan, but I ask for help: what should I do differently? Can I look in the book? Can I ask a friend? Phone a friend? So that they have a plan. I teach them, and I’m hitting my hand on my forehead. I teach them, duh, I need a plan, and they need to think smart. They need to stop and think, they need to make a plan, they need to take action, they need to review to see if that plan is working, and then either try again if it’s not working or ta-da, I got it! and that intentional teaching of metacognitive skills endlessly – practice, practice, practice helps kids to shape their brains and help them love learning as well.
Sucheta: Love it! Love it. You are such a wonderful, educator, Kathleen, I love your ideas, I love the way you present them and make them palatable.
As we come to an end, I want to ask you, what are we as a society doing right? So, what are you very optimistic about the way we are teaching these skills and how well is this formula working, which is mindset plus skill set lead to results, and what are your worries about the world because these skills take time and because some may know about it, some may not know about it? So, do you have any closing thoughts about that?
Kathleen: Well, I’ll start with the worries, and end on a happy note.
Sucheta: I’m glad you changed the order, that’s what I meant, yes.
Kathleen: My worries are that, and parents are not getting this information is enough, I say, which they were being bombarded with, and I’m so glad for your podcast, and the fabulous people that are bringing you the neuroscience to us. Teachers need to understand that it starts with them and them shaping their mindsets and their skill sets, and I worry when there is an unwillingness to that, when I do the work that I do with educators around the world, I worry that kids get the wrong messages from us about learning and even things that they see on television that make everybody look perfect on television in the media, make it seem like everybody is perfect and that things come easily, so if we talk about screen time, I would get them off screen time and out playing and making mistakes, and stumbling and fumbling, and bumbling, and working things out together instead of us fixing things for them when they have a social emotional challenges. My hope, and I do think the formula mindsets plus skill sets equal results is the formula for hope because we know with the neuroscience that when we shape our mindsets and when we developed metacognitive skill sets, when you look at the research from Dweck, when you look at the research from my husband Jack Naglieri and from so many others in the field of neuroscience today, that when you do those things, you do see results, you see academic performance increase, you see social emotional challenges decrease, and I think that the more we do that, the more we can change the world positive ways, and the children that are raised that way will go out and create a better world for us. That’s my passion, that is why I’m not doing what I do.
Sucheta: And, I love you for it. Thank you for what you do, and truly, I love this idea about the formula is not only effective but it’s a formula for both, and I am so glad that a few educators are as emphatic and clear as you have been that the change begins with the teachers, and I know, unfortunately, the teachers, there’s a lot riding on them, but they feel they need to produce good results in their teaching, but instead, if they focus on being that educator who brings this mindset, the automatic impact of that would be that their students will learn no matter how the learning is challenging or not, and I think your message comes out very loud and clear.
So, I cannot thank you enough for being a guest today and being so generous and thoughtful, and truly leaving a legacy of your work through books which I will share in the links in my podcast. It was a total joy to have you on the podcast, Kathleen, thank you.
Kathleen: It was a total joy to be invited, and thank you for all that you are doing to spread the word because your work is very, very important, and I am grateful for what you are doing. Thank you.
Producer: All right, that’s all the time we have for today. If you know of someone who just might benefit from listening to today’s episode, we would be most grateful if you would kindly forward it to them. So, on behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, today’s guest Kathleen Kryza, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thanks for listening today and we look forward to seeing you again right here next week on Full PreFrontal.