Mentor Mindset

Many attempts at influencing adolescent  behavior fail. In this episode, we examine how a mentor mindset may be used to increase  student motivation and academic success. Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an  informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted by

John Kane, an economist... ...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer... ...and features guests doing important research  and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners. Our guest today is David S. Yeager. David is the Raymond Dixon Centennial professor of  psychology at the University of Texas at Austin,

and a co-founder of the Texas Behavioral  Science and Policy Institute. He is best known for his research with Carol Dweck, Angela  Duckworth and Greg Walton on interventions that influence adolescent behaviors. David has served  as a consultant for Google, Microsoft, Disney and the World Bank, and is the recipient of over 15  awards for his work in social, developmental,

and educational psychology. He has published  extensively in scholarly publications, and his research has been featured in The New York Times  Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, CNN, Fox News,  The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many, many other places. David and Carol Dweck and others have also  created a MasterClass on The Power of Mindset. His most recent book is 10 to 25: The Science of  Motivating Young People. Welcome, David.

Thanks for having me. Today's teas are:... David? Are you drinking any tea with us today? Uh…. No, I am not. I read a short story about tea recently, so that's the closest  tea story that I have for you. Alright, we'll count it, we'll count it, we'll  count it. I know you have water with you, which is, as we know, the foundation of tea. It's pre tea. It's pre tea. How about you, John, I am drinking a spring cherry green tea,

continuing the trend of cherry-based teas. Yes, the theme continues. I've reverted back to the blue sapphire tea. And I thought the spring cherry tea was particularly good with a couple feet of snow  that we've had in the last few days here. And it is currently snowing very  hard out my window, John. I don't have windows here, so it's perfectly  nice here until I leave. So we've invited you here today to discuss 10 to 25 which brings  together a large volume of research findings

concerning student motivation in a very  accessible manner. Educators at all levels have been raising growing concerns about student  motivation. That's always been there, but it seems to be a little bit more serious in the last few  years, while many students report that educators seem to be out of touch with their lives and their  experiences, so this book is extremely well timed. How did this book project come about? Yeah, it's a great question. It’s kind

of a convergence of a few different things.  So one was just my observation over years that as a society we are so bad at changing  and influencing adolescents. One program after another seems to not work, and probably the  impetus for that was I was asked to write a paper for the special issue of something called the  future of children, like 2017, it's on social and emotional learning, and it’s an awesome group  of scholars and led by Stephanie Jones, who I

admire very deeply, and I was asked to write the  chapter on adolescents. So what works for social and emotional learning for adolescents? And tell  you what, like I kept looking in the literature, and nothing really worked. And then when you look  at the meta analyses, it seemed like there was this negative trend where the older the kids  in the study, the less effective the program. And the programs that did seem to work weren't  social and emotional learning programs, they were

something else that later somebody labeled social  and emotional learning. It was like Facing History and Ourselves, which is like a history curriculum.  And the side effect of good history education was some better social and emotional outcome. But  it wasn't like they were teaching you square breathing or meditation or something. And I just  wanted to get to the bottom of it and I was like, why is it the case that we've got all these things  that seem to work with younger kids? Because SEL

programs did have pretty good results, third,  fourth, fifth grade, maybe even younger. So like, what's going on, seventh grade to 12th grade?  And what I discovered was that in general, we kind of have the wrong view of young people,  and therefore we keep defaulting to the same kinds of wrong programs, and then we're shocked that  they don't work, but it's because they come out

of a particular mental model. So everything from  DARE to Just Say No to anti-bullying programs, and the list goes on, and I went on sabbatical  at Stanford about 10 years ago to try to get to the bottom of this and figure it out. And this  book involved a lot more than that, but that's what started it. And so it's really been kind  of 10 years of work to expand on that idea. So you just mentioned DARE, and you talk about  this and many other educational interventions in

your introductory chapter. And similarly, college  faculty who give students detailed feedback on their writing often see little feedback being  implemented in follow-up submissions. Can you talk a little bit about why many interventions  that are designed to improve the lives of adolescents are just so unsuccessful? The first kind of passive insight was that there's two things: One is that what the programs  are trying to change, like the basic hypothesis

they're going after wasn't the right thing to be  changing. And the second is that even if they were targeting the right thing, they didn't say it  in the right way. So just take anti-bullying. The most common way to reduce bullying is to  teach kids social skills. It's like, “Well, the reason why you're bullying is you don't  have a way of dealing with social conflict

that is productive, that you have an unproductive  habit.” And the research ended up suggesting that actually, for young kids like third, fourth,  fifth, sixth grade, bullying is associated with poor social skills. It's kids like some of my  kids, where they're ADHD and they just kind of get a rise out of bothering people and saying things  repetitively, or getting a rise out of somebody.

But for middle school and high school, often  bullying is associated with better social skills, because the kind of bullying you're doing is  strategically destroying someone else's reputation while maintaining plausible deniability,  so the adults can't get you in trouble, but then all of your friends see it, so that  way you gain status and you look powerful, and that's actually very sophisticated to do  that. Real world bullying is more sophisticated

than what you see in Mean Girls. And it's not  the case that kids need more social skills, because, in fact, the more social skills they  had, maybe the better they would be at bullying. So what you often saw actually was an increase  in bullying as a result of middle school or high

school anti-bullying programs. So that was one big  issue. And the second big issue is that even if you were working on the right stuff, and the right  stuff, by the way, would be something about trying to maintain your reputation and gain status in a  productive way, rather than by destroying others, would be an alternative, for example. But the  way the programs are often framed is super

lame. I mean, it's like, DARE is like someone  with a neon fanny pack throwing out headbands, like wearing socks and sandals and like, 0%  of kids are like, “Oh yeah, you're right. Next time someone I have a crush on offers me  a cigarette, I'm gonna be like, ‘no, because I dare to resist drugs.’” No one's gonna say that.  And in fact, like, if you think back on DARE,

they teach skills through scenarios, but like,  what are the scenarios? It's like, you do a skit in front of the class, and like, one kid stands  up and they offer the other kid drugs, like, “Hey, man, you want some cocaine?” And then the other  kid's supposed to be like, “No way, dude.” And in every case, the kid offering the drugs looks way  cooler than the nerd who says no, and all you've done is prove in front of everyone that awesome  people offer everyone drugs. And so again, like

drug use, on average, goes up in response to DARE  and similar programs. So the way to summarize this is that you have to be attuned to the adolescent  desire for status and respect, their desire to maintain a good reputation in the eyes of people  whose opinions they care about, and if you don't, then you might just push them away, or you might  even make the bad behavior more enticing. And so that's a launching off point for this book,  where I try to suggest better approaches.

One of the other things you talk about and  you've written about is how to provide feedback effectively to students. And one thing that many  people have been taught for a very long time and still are is to use that compliment sandwich  where you put some critique in between two positive comments. And it turns out that that's  not very effective. One of the things you suggest

is that a wise feedback strategy may be more  effective. Could you talk a little bit about why the compliment sandwich doesn't work and why wise  feedback may be a more effective way of providing

feedback that students will respond to? Yeah, so I'm starting from this premise that young people are like exquisitely sophisticated  in they're thinking about their reputations and how others are perceiving them socially, and  given that, when they're critiqued by a teacher or a coach or a manager or anyone who has power  over them, then they're not just processing it as information to include in their mental model of  perfecting a skill, there's a social implication:

“Who is this person who's implying that I'm not  good enough yet? And why do they feel entitled to very publicly say that I'm inadequate? And  furthermore, do they think I'll ever be not inadequate? Like, is there any possibility  that I could grow and improve?” So they're asking these big, existential questions that  have their roots in concerns about their status

and reputation. What is the adult thinking? Well,  they're thinking, I don't have to give you any feedback at all, like you're lucky that I'm even  spending any time on you, and don't complain, stop whining, and the least I'll do will be to  try to soften the blow by being a little nice, but if you don't like that, then you're entitled,  and you're a wimp. That's kind of a lot of adults’ approach. And so what occurs to them is to be  like, Alright, well, I don't want you to cry,

so I'm gonna do the compliment sandwich. And the  compliment sandwich is something like, “Look, I love your enthusiasm.” It's a nice thing. And  then it's a negative thing, like,”All of your work is terrible and has to change.” And then there's  the nice thing, like, “Thanks for turning it in on time.” And we do our mental math. It's like we're  balancing a stoichiometric equation. And then we

say “Net positive. So you should thank me for this  feedback.” But again, you haven't addressed the core question in the young person's mind about  their status and their worthiness in our eyes. And so the alternative is to directly address the  concern that young people have no value, that they have no potential, they have no future, et cetera,  by using something that Geoff Cohen, a Stanford

professor, one of my mentors, has called wise  feedback. And wise feedback is very simply saying, I'm giving you these comments because I have very  high standards, and I know that you can meet them. So it's first an appeal to a high standard, and  second an offer of support so that way they can

meet it. And it turns out that that comes across  as a very respectful thing to say, and therefore it builds trust, and it puts the young person  in a place in which they're open to criticism, because you've addressed their main fear,  which is that we view them as incompetent. So in 2014 you were the first author on an  experiment involving wise feedback. Can you

talk a little bit about this study? Yeah, so in one experiment that, again, was led initially by Geoff Cohen, my collaborator,  and other great people like Valerie Purdie-Vaughns at Columbia, we partnered with a school in the  East Coast, and we had teachers assign their

seventh grade students an essay to write. So kids  write a standard five-paragraph essay, and then the teachers cover them in comments so they do  whatever the six plus one writing tactics are, and they kind of do their worst, and then the  kids have a chance to revise the essay or not. And the question is, when do kids get their essays  back, covered in red ink and say, “This is great. I'm really happy for all of these ways in which I  can improve. So thanks for pointing out my flaws,

and I'm excited to fix them. So here we go.”  When did they say that? And when do they say, “My teacher is such a jerk that he spent his whole  weekend trashing the essay in the ego of a seventh grader.” And we found that in the default control  group, where we didn't do any wise feedback, only about 40% of kids even turned in their essays.  But we also had teachers append handwritten notes on the essays that said, “I'm giving you these  comments because they have high standards, and I

know that you can meet them.” And then they sealed  the essays in an envelope and handed them back, so that way kids didn't know which got that  note or which got a control group note that didn't convey any new information. And then  a week later, kids had the chance to revise,

and what we found is that 80% of kids revised  their essay in the wise feedback group. And for me as a parent, you know, I have four kids,  and so if twice as many of my kids listened to the things I told them to do, then at least two  of my four kids would have pants on by the time it's time to go to school, and my life would  be better. And I was a middle school teacher, and I remember spending all weekend grading  essays and thinking, “Oh man, they're going to

be so grateful for all this feedback. They're  gonna carry me on their shoulders like Robin Williams at the end of Dead Poets Society and be  a hero.” And instead, they were just like, “Why is this guy such a jerk?” And my life would have  been a lot better if I knew about this research at the time. But I will say it's been interesting  since we published that study. There's a tendency to over claim how important it is. Obviously this  is just one assignment one time. I'm not claiming

this is a magic bullet. The author, Dan Coyle,  in his book The Culture Code, called it magic feedback. And I don't like that. I don't think  it's magic. To be honest, what I think the magic is is the feeling of dignity and respect when  you're in a vulnerable position and someone is looking down on you, and they instead assure you  that you are a person of worth and value, that,

I think is magical. It might happen to the post  it note might not. There's a lot of other ways you can show that, but I think when you do that, then  you start tapping into what's going to motivate adolescents to change. And the more we do that in  schools, I think the better off they would be. Is this something that cuts off once you  pass adolescence? Could this also refer to the feedback from reviewer two on that paper? It's funny, I've grown less patient as a reviewer

over my time as a reviewer. I'm only mean to a  specific kind of author. I lose my patience if you're like, at the University of Chicago, and  you have every resource at your fingertips and you still wrote a lazy paper, then I'm like,  “I don't have time for you.” Anybody else,

I'm wise feedbacking away. But anyway, I guess I  would say that I'm not arguing there's a magical cutoff of 10 years old, all of a sudden you need  wise feedback at 25 you need it, in 25.1 day you don't it's really more that the window of 10 to 25  is like the onset of puberty until the adoption of an adult-like role. And that just tends to be  a period where your status is very precarious and ambiguous and it's uncertain to you if you're  going to be taken seriously, if you're going to be

afforded the rights and privileges that you think  you deserve. Like a good example is this wonderful study I love from 1998 nobody cites by Ruck and  colleagues, and it's on self-determination needs. And it's very simple idea. They ask kids at what  age do you think you should have a certain right or privilege? And then they ask adults, at what  age should kids have it? So an example is being able to write a letter that's critical of the  principal and publish it in the school paper.

So seventh graders are like, “Yeah, I should  totally be able to do that.” And adults are like, “Not till 11th grade.” So you've got this gap. So  you got, like, four years or more, depending on the measure, there's variation in that outcome.  But like, you've got 1, 2, 3, 4 years where a young person is ready for some right and privilege  and society’s saying, “No way.” That's what I call the adolescent predicament, that your status and  respect is in question because of that gap and

mismatch, and I think you could experience that  later in life. This one interesting guy read my book and emailed me. He's a general counsel for  a large like Fortune 100 company, and he's like, “Man, I really have to worry about giving feedback  to my junior associates, like when they write a brief.” So he's thinking of himself as the  mentor. And then it came out that he's actually doing a master's in education because he's about  to retire from being a lawyer, and he's going to

go be a classroom teacher for the sunset of his  career. And I was like, as a 60 year old, but first- year teacher, if there's a principal in the  back of the room sitting there with a clipboard making notes on every single thing you're doing  in the classroom, are you going to feel nervous and worried? He's like, “Oh, absolutely.” So  he's gonna feel back again like a 13-year old

getting his essay criticized. So I really think  that the operational definition of adolescents, at some level, is this adolescent predicament,  this mismatch between the status and respect you think you're ready for, that you desire, and  then what you're afforded by your context. Beginning early in your book, and through  much of it, you talk about the mentor’s dilemma. Could you talk a little bit about  what that is and how we can address that?

Yeah, the mentor's dilemma is, again, something  coined by Geoff Cohen. It's the simple idea that it's very hard to simultaneously criticize  someone and motivate them. And the reason why it's a dilemma is because it feels like you have  two bad choices, like one choice is “I'm going to be really honest and tough and impossible to  please and tell you all your flaws, but sacrifice your motivation and crush your spirit.” Or the  alternative is “I'm going to be nice and friendly

and supportive, but I'm not going to tell you  the truth. I'm going to withhold feedback.” And neither of those really feels satisfying. It  feels like they're not what you're supposed to be doing. And what we've found, and what we've  proposed, is that the solution to the mentor's dilemma is something we call the mentor mindset,  and that's kind of being the walking, talking embodiment of the wise feedback note, where in  all your interactions with young people, you're

neither too harsh nor too much of a pushover. You  are very tough, you have high standards, but your supports are as high as your demands. So that way  young people can meet that demanding standard. Can you give us some examples of how  this mindset might be implemented in a day-to-day student interaction? Yeah, so mentor mindset is something that comes up a lot in let's just say, how you deal  with a student mistake. So in our work, we have

this fellowship program for math teachers. Carol  Dweck and I and several others developed a new program called FUSE, Fellowship Using the Science  of Engagement. And the idea is that the culture teachers create in the classroom can influence  whether students benefit from our instruction. So I get to spend all day giving you illustrative  math or Eureka math, and correcting all your math

misconceptions. But if, fundamentally, the kid  thinks that the reason why they made a mistake is because they're a lazy slacker that the teacher  is looking down on, because the teacher explained it clearly and you didn't do it, and therefore you  weren't paying attention, if that's your default, then you're not going to engage with this  conceptually demanding, cognitively sophisticated curriculum. You'd be like “No way, because if it's  not clear to me right away, then it's a threat.”

So as a teacher, you need to have a culture in  which mistakes are your friend. Otherwise you're stuck doing a curriculum in which students  only ever master things at 100% and they're never confused, they're never lost. Therefore,  in order to create that culture, you have to have good routines for troubleshooting mistakes  with students, because you can't just blame and

shame them or yell at them for making mistakes,  nor can you avoid the mistakes altogether. And so I spent some time observing great mentor mindset  teachers, teachers who had very high standards and were very supportive, and they make students own  their thinking, and they ask tons of open-ended questions, and the students squirm sometimes. And  a normal novice teacher, like I would have done, they feel uncomfortable. They think the student's  head's gonna explode, that they're sitting there

not knowing the answer, but their wait time  is unbelievable for these great teachers. And there's a routine that I call collaborative  troubleshooting, and there's three steps. One is validating what the student has done, so  like finding something right about the student's answer. Next is asking questions to understand: so  where did this come from? What was your reasoning? And that ends up being super important, because  a lot of teachers immediately jump in and presume

they understand the student's mistake. Oh, you  forgot to carry the two. So next time, carry the two. But sometimes we're wrong, and what teenagers  hate is when adults make assumptions about them.

And furthermore, when you make assumptions  and you're not right, you end up telling them solutions that were already obvious to them,  and then that's also insulting, like imagine you were lost and you pulled over to ask someone  for advice on where to go, and then they're like, “Did you think about checking Google Maps?” You're  like, “Yes, I thought about checking Google Maps.”

It’s a very insulting thing to say, like it's  the most obvious thing. So a lot of times when students come to teachers, that's how they react,  is they tell them to do something obvious that the students already tried. So great mentor mindset  teachers don't do that. They ask questions to understand before they tell and then, last, they  kind of ask leading questions to build a bridge to a better understanding, and they wait for the  student to piece it together in their minds.

Novice teachers don't do that because they feel  anxious that the student is stressed, and then they rush in to tell the answer. This goes back  to classic research from Mark Lepper on expert tutors in the mid 90s. Mark Lepper, a Stanford  psychologist who coined the term intrinsic motivation initially. He spent years just watching  great tutors and found that over 90% of what they say is a question. They're not sitting there  telling you what to think. They're like, “Huh?

Where did that answer come from?” or “Is that  right?” And then the student has to have a coach in the head to try to solve the problems. There's  a lot of other examples, but I love that one, both because it's intuitive once you get it. It's  also not obvious when you're a novice teacher, I feel like those same three steps would  be great in the healthcare industry. Any industry. You don't think people  like doctors talking down to them

for making such idiotic health choices? I was thinking that might be a great place for teachers to get some empathy. Like, “Where  have you been talked down to recently?” Or tech, or any of these places. Well, the interesting thing is, we have this fellowship program for teachers, and  their empathy is not hard to get. Just ask them about a time they talk to an instructional  coach. Instructional coaches, ideally, are

these endlessly empathetic listeners. But that's  not often how it works. It's like they race in, they tell you what to do. You're doing everything  wrong, and I'm going to check your test scores next week. And I have compassion for the coaches  too, because a lot of districts, especially poor districts, use instructional coaches like backup  admins, so they're pushing paper three fourths of

the day. They hardly ever get to actually coach.  So without blaming any individuals in the system, most teachers almost immediately have access to  this idea of everyone making an assumption about your limitations and then telling you obvious  things and then making you feel like an idiot. So even though they know that, that's still often  teachers’ default when they talk to kids. As part of this whole mentor mindset, the goal  is to treat students with respect and to let them

know that you think they're capable. But a lot of  students come in with stereotype threat, a lot of students come in with perhaps some imposter  syndrome that they don't feel they're going to be successful to begin with. How can we help  build that growth mindset in students who may have some doubts about their own ability to thrive? Well, I'd just say that stereotype threat often is more of a situational predicament. It's more like  they're aware that other people could judge them,

even if they don't personally believe the  stereotypes. But I think that for students who are used to adults using something I call an  enforcer mindset, which is kind of all standards, no support, or as someone I interview in the book  calls it: “Yell, tell, blame and shame.” If that's what you're expecting, then it's very hard for  students to see the teacher's growth mindset and be like, “Yeah, that's great. I love it,” because  all they see is the standard, and they think,

“Oh, here we go again, another grown up is going  to yell at me for not being good enough.” So I spent a long time interviewing this great teacher  who's kind of like the best growth mindset teacher in Texas. His name is Sergio Estrada. He's at  Riverside High School in El Paso Texas, and Carol Dweck and I interviewed him a lot, like every  Friday for months. And every once in a while,

some kid would wander in his class during his off  period, when we're talking to him. And I would be like, “Hey, who's the opposite of Mr. Estrada?”  And, I tell you what, I've heard some stories. And one kid, Emiliano, told me a story about his  English teacher, and his English teacher assigned some essay where they had to write the pro and  con or side one/side two, and then he could only come up with one of the two. So he went to the  teacher after class to ask for help. He's like,

“I have the assignment. I can only figure out  half the assignment.” And then the teacher said, “Tú no lo entendiste porque no quisiste,” which is  you didn't understand it because you didn't want to. And he was crushed by this, and came back to  me and was like, “Dr, Yeager, it's so unfair.” And I was like, “What do you mean? It's unfair?” He's  like, “Well, I have ADHD, I only understand half

of what anybody tells me,” like, “this is how I  get the other half. I can't imagine wanting the other half anymore than coming after school to  come talk to this teacher to try to get it and yet she's assuming that I was screwing around in  class, that I don't care, I don't care about my education, don't care about learning, and then  I'm trying to, like, ruin her lesson plan by making everybody be behind and asking questions.”  And like, Sergio would never do that, but he also

knows when students come in his class that that's  what they're used to. So he has learned he has to give a speech at the beginning of class explaining  that this is a new culture. Say, for example, this idea of questioning, Sergio, like a great  tutor asks questions way more than he tells. So if a student is doing a problem set and they're like,  “Mr. Estrada, is this right?” He'll say, “Well, I don't know. Do you think it’s right?” So there's  a way of doing that that does not go over well,

it goes over like a lead balloon. There's a way of  doing it where you look like the jerk law school professor cold calling people and forcing them  to explain their thinking, and you're trying to humiliate them. And adults do often ask questions  of kids in public to humiliate them. I mean, as a parent like, I do that sometimes,  even though I don't want to, I'm like, “what were you thinking?” Or like, “Is that  the right way to put your chair away?” Or like,

“Should you be grabbing that cookie?” Like, it's  not an authentic question. It's a question meant to shame and humiliate. So that's what kids  are used to. And so Sergio, before he does his old questioning routine and his collaborative  troubleshooting, he's like, “Alright, guys, I care deeply that you are good at physics after this  class. And in fact, everyone who passes this class eventually deeply understands physics, and I don't  want to deprive you of the chance to know that you

can do it, so I'm not going to tell you answers,  but it's not because I'm being unhelpful. It's because I want you to own the thinking. And every  year, students eventually get it, and every year students don't like it at the beginning. So I just  want you to know that I'm not trying to shame you, not trying to embarrass you. I'm trying to honor  and respect you and make you know that I think you can think, and I want you to build that muscle”  or something like that. And then he'll print it

out and he's got it on the wall. So the next time  students are mad or offended and they're thinking, “Oh, here we go, another enforcer mindset, he’s  going to yell at me.” It's like on the wall, it's crystal clear. And then by the end  of the year, these are students who say, “Mr. Estrada changed my life. He believed in  me.” They're like the first in their family to go to college. They're getting internships at  NASA. I'm not exaggerating, like every summer,

students get internships at NASA, but it takes  that transparency. You can't just show up and do mentor mindset if students have that enforcer  mindset baggage that they've experienced. So I can imagine that some folks might be  thinking adopting a mentor mindset might increase their workload somehow. Is that true? Yeah, it's interesting. It's one of the first

things I worried about writing this book. I  was like, “Oh, am I writing an impossible to accomplish self-help book?” I mean, it would  be like, grabbing a diet book where like, “The best way to lose weight is to never eat anything  that you enjoy.” Well like, “Yeah, I knew that. The hard part is to eat what I enjoy and still  not gain weight.” So I'm not saying the best way to be a teacher is to do it 120 hours a week. And  there are things that Sergio does where he's like,

“I don't recommend anyone do this. It's like a  lot of work.” But I will say two things. One, every great mentor mindset teacher I saw had  procedures and policies that they set up early on in the term, and that often involved getting  peers to look at each other's work and having a good culture of peer feedback. It's kind of a “ask  two before me” situation, and they're not doing that to dismiss kids like gnats. They're doing it  to give them a sense of agency and teach a skill

of collaboration. But that, by the way, saves  them tons of time, because 80, 90% of errors, like some really high percentage of errors, are  things where the minute the kid tries to explain it to their peer, they're like, “Oh my god, I see  it now.” So they actually didn't need the teacher, like, you just need another human being  when they're explaining. So one thing is, you can still do a lot of this stuff and save  time if you just have good procedures for peer

collaboration and feedback, it saves you tons of  time. The second is, there's often a short-term, long-term trade off. It does take a little  more time to set up procedures and create a relationship of respect, but then the whole second  semester, you've got independent, autonomous students that are working hard. You don't even  have to like mess with them. So I remembered we interviewed Sergio during COVID, and it was  like, April of 2020, and everyone's on lockdown

or whatever. And I was like, Sergio, how's it  going? He’s like, “I feel really bad.” Like, “why do you feel bad?” He's like, “I'm bored and  I feel guilty.” Like, “Why are you bored? Why do you feel guilty?” He's like, “because I don't  do anything.” “What do you mean, you don't do anything?” He's like, “I post the problem sets,  then students meet in groups, and they talk about physics all day. Maybe they ask me a question,  but otherwise they just work diligently and then

learn physics.” And he had the highest rates of  passing college level physics that year in his whole district during COVID. And he like was on  Tiktok all day, not because he was goofing off, but because students were so self sufficient, and  I think that's the payoff, is you use a mentor mindset, and then you get people where their work  is like kind of area under the curve, leading to greater growth and learning, because you've  created independent, agentic young people.

So, it sounds like giving students more agency,  perhaps an autonomy-supportive instructional approach and using peers for feedback could  be a really effective way of helping improve motivation and maybe some authentic assessments  where students see that the work they're doing has some intrinsic value beyond just a  series of hoops they have to jump through, that the instructor is kind of imposing on them  to get away from that enforcer mindset and giving

students more control over the learning process,  it sounds like would be really helpful. Yeah. I mean, I think that there are curricular  changes and pedagogical changes that are well known in the literature to be good for  student learning and make them agentic or whatever. And I'm not pretending like I'm  inventing constructivism or anything like that.

It's more this idea that there's an unspoken  conversation between a student and their past that is present anytime a teacher is pushing  them, challenging them, using this maybe more progressive curriculum. And if you're not attuned  to that conversation, and if you're not able to help a student see that this is different, then  they're going to be wearing a set of lenses that ’s going to cause them to interpret what we're  doing in the worst possible light. And that's

not because Gen Z is too wimpy or too woke or too  entitled or whatever it is. It's because they're legitimately responding to prior experiences that  they've had, and they've made sense of those, and they've allowed that sense making to influence  them in the future. That's just how human thinking

works. We form little lay theories of the world  based on our experience. So we kind of need to be agents of change, of giving them a new theory that  when a teacher is pushing you and challenging you, it's because they believe in you, and  they're often going to offer you support, and if they don't, then the support is what you  need to find in order to meet that standard.

Transparency can be really transformative and it  sounds like that's something that you're really advocating for, is being really transparent  about doing things that's respectful. Yeah, like I've been saying, you can't just  presume that they will interpret your actions

in the best possible light. So a good example that  helps, it's kind of an analogy to teaching, is a study led by Kyle Dobson, who's a University of  Virginia professor, and previously was my postdoc, and we did an experiment where we looked at the  context of police officers approaching civilians on the street, and typically, what happens if a  police officer comes up and asks you a bunch of questions, is people feel threatened, and we know  why. It's because there are all kinds of stories

of arrests and police brutality and things like  that. But police officers are baffled by this, because they're like, “Well, my badge says serve  and protect, and why would you not think I'm here to serve and protect? Of course, it’s what I'm  doing.” And so there's this mismatch between the

intentions of the officer usually, and then the  responses of the civilians. And so we did a study where we had people sitting in desks all around  this downtown Austin, and then we had real on-duty police officers, wearing guns and badges, go  approach people and ask them a bunch of questions, and they either launched into the questions in  a control group, and there, people felt super

stressed about it. They had short, kind of  curt replies. Their stress physiology didn't look good when we measured it, implicitly using  a PPG monitor on their wrist, and in general, there was very poor rapport. But when the officer  started the interaction with a simple transparency statement, when they just said, “Hey, I'm walking  around trying to get to know the community, would you mind if I ask you some questions?” When  that happened, then people were really open to

the conversation. They were kind of into it, and  they formed a rapport. And what that suggests is that even in a context where the institutional  authority should, in their minds, be viewed as positive, but in civilians’ minds, there's this  history of distrust. And we can look, we see trust going down every single year on major metrics for  police and other institutions, you can kind of

create a bubble where trust can be restored if  you begin with a transparency statement. Now I did a workshop one time for a bunch of principals  and superintendents on transparency statements, and I gave the example of, “Hey, imagine you're  a school leader, and there's a teacher who's brand new, and you went and set in the back  of their class and you took a bunch of notes, and you were giving them feedback. How could you  use the transparency statement so that way they

didn't view your feedback in the worst possible  light.” And one superintendent was like, “Oh, very easy. I would go up to him and say, ‘hey,  look, just want you to know the reason why I'm observing your class is because I think  you're the worst teacher and you need to be monitored.’” And I was like, “You should not  be transparent about that. Keep that to yourself, like because that is the main worry that was in  their mind already, so do not say that.” So I'm

not saying you should be transparent in that way.  What I'm saying is be transparent in dispelling the most negative possible interpretations  and instead replacing them with better ones. I appreciate the sound of your forehead being  slapped as I told that story. That's a real story. And they were very earnest. They're like, this is  the first person to raise their hand, like, “Oh, this is easy.” I was like, “Really, in a workshop  of 100 school leaders, that's your answer?”

We all know that person. Yeah, they were very confident. In terms of knowing that person… You talked  a little bit about the importance of helping students develop that growth mindset and so  forth, but there was that study by Elizabeth Canning and others that talk about the importance  of faculty having a growth mindset. Both Rebecca

and I at various times in various ways do  work with professional development. How can we help faculty recognize that maybe having an  expectation that students could grow and could become more successful in learning? How can we  spread this, other than encouraging people to read your book and other resources, how can we get  faculty to recognize that students can become more

proficient as they work and develop skills? Yeah. I mean, I think that the beautiful work by Mary Murphy on fixed mindset cultures and  Elizabeth Canning is a collaborator, has suggested that what faculty believe can dramatically  influence the decisions that they make and what makes sense to them from their perspective.  The question of how to change faculty is a little different. So I don't think that you can just give  K-12 teachers or college professors the student

growth mindset intervention, like, “Hey, here's  this stuff about the brain.” And a big reason why, we've learned, and I write about this in our  PNAS article last year, led by my postdoc, Cameron Hecht, growth mindset is really good news  to students. It's like, “Oh, awesome. I don't have

to feel dumb anymore when I make a mistake.”  It's not good news to teachers sometimes, because they're like, “Wait a second, if mistakes  are learning opportunities, then it sounds like I have to re-teach you stuff after you make a  mistake, and then I have to regrade it after you try it again, and that sounds like more work.”  And as I've said, that's not always the case, but that's like people's first interpretation. And so  you can't use that same argument. What we found is

you need to use something called a values-aligned  argument. And this is a framework developed by Chris Bryan and me. Chris is a business school  professor at UT, but he's a social psychologist by training, and values alignment is very simple the  idea that if you want to change someone's beliefs or attitudes or behavior is easier to align  the targeted attitude, behavior, belief, with

what they already care about than it is to try to  convince them to care about something new. And in the case of teaching, for college professors like  we're very rarely held accountable for what we do, and very few people are ever told even how to  backwards plan, let alone teach. And for K-12,

they do obviously care a lot about instruction.  And obviously college professors do care, but like, in my experience, often the best college  professors know about as much about teaching as like, the middle of the road K-12 teacher, because  we're just not given much pedagogical instruction. So for professors, like it's very hard for your  culture of learning and creating growth mindset

culture to get to the front of the list. For K-12,  it's also hard because you're given an endless number of things you're supposed to be changing  and fixing at all times, and you're going to three PDs a year and there’s three new binders you're  going to put on yourself. It's going to make you

feel guilty that you never implemented them.  And so the way we think to cut in line, to get to the front of the line of your motivational  priorities, so that a growth mindset culture, or what I call a mentor mindset, is what you want  to prioritize, is to align it with what people already care about. And what people already care  about often is having the kind of classroom where, when you walk in, students are tracking what  you're doing. They're motivated, they're engaged,

they're curious. They ask you questions about your  content area. They care more about the learning than the grade. You don't have this constantly  threaten them or blame them or console them to do

the minimum. It's really motivating to have that  kind of better motivated classroom culture. And so we say, “Look, if you believe that no one can  grow and learn and that it's all or nothing, that your first grade will be your last grade, then  students will pick up on that as disrespectful, because you're basically telling them that their  efforts are wasted and that there's no point in trying, because if you got an A, well then you're  going to get an A at the end. If you got a C,

you're going to get a C in the end. So what's the  point of doing anything?” That's a disrespectful way to run your class. And if within 10 to 25  young people are sensitive to disrespect, then they're going to be disengaged, if that's how they  feel. But if you want to engage them, they need to feel respected. And the way to respect them is to  make them feel like they can grow and learn even when they struggle. So we frame growth mindset  not as like you should do this, like eating your

broccoli kind of thing. It's more like, maybe  there's some broccoli lovers out there. I don't there's an alternative. I don't want to offend  any broccoli eaters. So brussels sprouts… I like both of those. …specifically brussels sprouts covered in bacon as an appetizer, is mine… But anyway, let's  just pick a food that people kind of have to hold their nose and eat for any objecting broccoli or  Brussels sprout eaters and like, that's not gonna

work. But what will work is saying this is a way  to be the kind of person you always want it to be, and that, I think, is motivating and exciting for  people. And so mentor mindset, framed as a way of respecting young people, and therefore as a way  of engaging them, is, I think, more effective. I think that's a good pro tip to wrap up  on. So I want to be cognizant of our time, so we always wrap up by asking: “what's next?” Our big initiative right now is basically taking

the mentor mindset ideas from the book, and  spreading them to educators. So we have a fellowship called the Fellowship Using the Science  of Engagement or FUSE that Carol Dweck and I and our collaborators, we personally wrote all the  materials and are very excited about them and the results look really good. So in a large randomized  trial that'll be coming out this year later,

we find that teachers, if they change their  mindsets, they change their behavior. Students, then, when they get the mentor mindset classrooms,  they view the classroom as more respectful and more motivating. They feel comfortable raising  their hand and asking questions, making mistakes, and then they learn more. And the effects, well,  I don't know if they'll always be this big, but they look pretty big right now, of .4 standard  deviations, which is pretty large in education.

And then teacher attrition is down by half, and  so is burnout. So the mentor mindset stuff ends up being the only educational intervention that  we know of that, in a rigorous randomized trial, changes teachers, changes students’  perceptions, changes students’ grades, and improve teacher well being, and it does  so for like $23 a kid, so it's like 10 times more effective than individualized tutoring at  scale for like, 1/100 the cost. So that's coming,

and we're thinking about how to expand that,  scale it and make it better. I will say we hired Sergio Estrada as one of the facilitators  for FUSE, and so it's a real treat for them. …some really exciting stuff. It sounds like a wonderful

program, and we encourage everyone to consider  picking up a copy of your book. We're going to be using it as a reading group on our campus,  so we're really looking forward to it, and we will include links to all the studies that  you've referenced in the show notes. Great. So thank you, although I do have to say one other  thing, that putting bacon around brussels sprouts sounds a lot like a  compliment sandwich in some way.

I mainly just listened to the Jim Gaffigan bit  on bacon and so that was fresh in my mind. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please  subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To  continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com.  Music by Michael Gary Brewer.