Colin Seale || Closing the Critical Thinking Gap

It's great to have Colin Seal on the podcast. Colin was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, to a single mother and an incarcerated father. He has always had a passion for educational equity. Tracked early into Gift and Talented programs, Colin was afforded opportunities his neighborhood peers were not.

He founded think Wall, an award winning organization to help educators leverage inquiry based instructional strategies to close the critical thinking gap and ensure they teach and reach all students, regardless of race, zip code, or what side of the poverty line they were born into. When he's not serving as the world's most fervent critical thinking advocate, Colin broadly serves as the world's Greatest entertainer to his two little kiddos and a loving husband to his wife, Carrie Colin.

Thanks so much for being on the podcast today. So excited to be here, Scott. I'm excited to chat with you. And that was an awesome bio by the way. Yeah, and I like to kind of point this out as a caveat, just to start it all out with. When you think about going up in Brooklyn, New York and having a dad that was in trouble with the law, and having really not a lot of opportunities afford it, I think one thing that people miss out on is the extreme amount of joy that was a part of

my childhood. When I was in first grade. For incident, Scott, I lived in a one bedom apartment with nine people. And that sounds crazy, that sounds like, oh my god, how'd you deal with that? But as a six year old, that's party time. That's always having adults to talk to, always having people that want to play with you and

learn from. It was playing scrabble with my no holes barred uncles who didn't really care and like will push me and push me and push me to step on a vocabulary game up and it ended up being a huge part of what made me who I am today.

So I always kind of say that because I know for the educators out there that are thinking about students that are going through all these troubles, I often ask them to do some reframing and think about what are the ways that what they are doing are actually setting them up for amazing levels of success in the future. So I always like to put that caveat out there whenever people kind of hear my background and hear about my story. Thanks Colin, I really appreciate you putting that out.

You know, in the field of positive psychology where I work, we're really interested in kind of figuring out the various psychological factors and reframing and mindset and various things that can help bring those who are even you know, the most disadvantaged kind of feel like there's hope, you know, there's a reason to keep working hard. And you know, one of the criticists of the field is that we shouldn't care about any of that. We should care about

just the structural inequalities. And so I do want to discuss with you, like, you know, how can you know that's kind of false dichotomy, isn't it? First of all? Like, can't we care about both? And you know, how do you sort of view the situation? So it's so funny you say this, because this sounds a lot like the conversations between my wife and I, where you can say race is a social construct and just call it that, or you can actually do some things to help to

address some of those inequities that are there. I honestly look at any type of challenge we see in our world, Scott, whether it's a challenge in healthcare or in education, or you know, economic justice issues, and I'm like, okay, Like I have always, by nature been a so what are we going to do about it? Kind of person? And by being what are we going to do about a kind of person? It often lends us into the world of leaning on a pragmatic you know, I'll give you

an example. There's a lot of conversations right now about the future of work and about how what students are experienced in school isn't necessarily preparing them for this uncertain

future of work. And when you go to some of these conferences, Scott, you might see people talking about we need to transform education, we need to reimagine and redesign this or this that the other thing, And I'm like, okay, but at the end of the day, like we're talking about a really large system that is incredibly stubborn when it comes to making that sort of transformational change. So

the revolution is going to have to be practical. It's going to have to be things that people can apply on a Tuesday morning when they just came back from a fire drill and now they've got to figure out how do they get more critical thinking into their classroom in a more kind of sustainable sort of way given the personnel that we have, given the systems that we have set up, and you know, to speak to kind of a bigger question around like how do you sort

of break down this psychotomy, I'm like, we've got to do a little bit of both. We've got to make sure that we always have that focus on practical solutions that are going to move a society forward while also acknowledging something back and realizing like, yeah, like we need to analyze these big picture systems and start to tinker away at ways to reform those. But we have to have some sort of trade off between short term gains and long term structural changes that need to happen. I

love that. So tell me about think Wall, Tell me about this company that you founded. It looks really neat. Yeah. So it's interesting because I made the interesting life decision to be a middle school and high school math teacher during a day at a high poverty school in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I decided to go to law school at night. And well, that wasn't the best life decision in a lot of ways, like my social life and just being

newly married. In other ways, it was so incredibly transformational for me, Scott, because I've always been a under achiever my whole entire life. I was that kind of kid where I'm like, ah, I'm passing, no big deal. I would be that kid who, like I would actually help people with homework assignments that I didn't even do myself. Like that was me. That's who I was, even in graduate school. So when I got to law school, everything changed. Not because I became this super avid learner with all

this new enthusiasm. It was that for once it wasn't about just knowing stuff, because it turns out in law school you didn't really learn the law. You learn how to think like a lawyer, and this process of seeing things at different perspectives and asking questions to gain information and making claims and backing up with evidence. It was entirely in line with my frame of viewing the world now, being the anti actually had value now. Thinking differently about things.

Questioning the professor was part and part so of what made you a success. And to be honest with you, there was nothing extraneous, at least from my viewpoint. I felt like I wasn't doing assignments for the sake of

doing assignments. Everything was always about the final exam. I would say about ninety percent of my classes, one hundred percent of the grades, or your final exam, which is how you responded to this scenario, which was a typically a crazy, out of this world scenario that measured you and how well you thought on your toes, how well you were able to answer this question, what would the

world look like if so? As a kid that like did theater, I used to be like, uh did Broadway and African dance and hip hop dancing like it spoke to this spirit of creativity inside of me in a way that school never did. Like I would walk away from doing a three hour final exam and be like, damn, that's it, Like I really wanted to do more. And at the same time, my kids had the highest test scores they ever did in the district, in an area that was one of the toughest parts of Las Vegas.

We were able well to essentially get the same kind of test cards would see at the most affluent areas. And what was so powerful there, Scott, was that I realized you don't have to wait until law school to get kids exposure to this kind of thinking. It doesn't even need to be a Civics or Humanities or English class. In my math class, I would put problems up on a board where instead of like solving an equation and instead of saying, Okay, what did jose do wrong on

this problem? Corrected? I would say, here are two problems that are both done wrong, which one is more right? And kids would start going for it. It will turn into this super rigorous debate where talk about the metacognition. Right, you're making predictions out of like the best case interpretation and the worst case interpretation of what mistakes might have been made, and like between the writing that's happening, the

dialogue that's happening and that conflict in drama. It just transformed the energy in kids where it didn't feel like a math class. There's no I hate math when you're having that kind of robust discussion, And I tell you it was just really a transformational time for me to

see what that connection was. So when I realized that, that became a formation behind my work with Think Law, our practice law for three years, and when I launched Think Law, it was around this idea that maybe there's a reason at twenty five past presidents and thirty five founding fathers of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela have all been attorneys. This is the exact kind of critical thinking our kids need, so let's start them with it now.

So right now, Think Law. It helps educators each critical thinking use in legal cases and upper grades. In lower grades, we use fairy tales and nursey rhymes because there's just a lot of shady characters and children's stories, and we do a lot of training on Socratic style questioning to help all educators make that shift right from asking what and how to to more of that why and what

if That will cause that saving spark that I experienced. Wow, that is so cool, and you're really like bringing the spirit of like, you know, we don't need to I really like that spirit of we don't need to wait till the person's rich and successful, you know, by society standards to learn the key skills they're going to help them thrive right now. I really really like that. You know, I really appreciate being so vulnerable and kind of talking

so openly about your early struggles. I you know, also had my own struggles, you know, with being in special education and things of that nature. You know, how much do you think like we could use to have more discussions open on as discussions where we talk about our common struggles versus like, let's like talk about you know, maybe like we had similar struggles and maybe we can like understand where each other's coming from and maybe try

to pull each other up and support each other. But you seem like the type of person that is really into open, honest conversations, So I'd love to get your thoughts on this. So I'm sure you've seen that thing on social media that's kind of gone viral of like you know, our inability or the advice that we've gotten to like not talk about really or politics is the reason that we keep on getting everything wrong when it

comes to religion in politics. I honestly think that one of the challenging things about growing up how I grew up Scott is like, you know, I was completely, basically one hundred percent segregated in my community up until eighth grade. Went to a specialized high school, the Bronxich School of Science in New York City, whereas my first time like living like a racial minority and understanding what that felt like.

And I often joke, you know, there's all these kind of talk around how when you are a black student who really cares about academics you get accused of acting white. That could not possibly have been a thing where I grew up because nobody knew what acting white meant. We didn't know any white people. It wasn't the thing that

you could even accuse somebody of doing. But by the time I got to college, I realized, like, you know, what's really missing from my college experience at Syracuse University, poor white people. It just wasn't a thing, like, you know, we got there a lot of my friends and people that came from my neighborhood and my communities. You know, we got different scholarships and different programs, We had student athletes, and for a predominantly white institution like Syracuse, that's where

you're probably getting the bulk of your student population. We also had some affluent African American students as well, but the vast majority of you know, white students at some of these really elite institutions across the country are not coming from more meager upbringings where we can actually see like we've got these things in common. We've got a lot of these shared struggles. And it really wasn't until I got to law school. It wasn't really until I

got a lot older. Well, I started to like meet colleagues and be like, oh, like, huh, so I'm not the only one that had an incarcerated parent. Interesting also, I'm not the only one that like went to school on frame reduced lunch and like and honestly getting into the education space. I remember being at the National Title one conference, which is the collection of all these different schools across the country that have forty percent of more kids that on framer lunch and Scott it blew my mind.

It blew my mind because when I think Title one high poverty. I think growing up in Brooklyn, New York. I think Chicago, I think LA. I had no idea that the vast majority of Title Ian districts numerically, because the quantity of those districts are rural white districts. It just completely blew my mind that like, Okay, this factory town in Montana, this small city, or this small town in Kansas on the Dakotas where they've lost a lot of industry, they're struggling with the opioid epidemic to a

level and an extent that is unimaginable. They're facing the same sort of struggle. And when I start talking about things like access, access to engaging instruction, access to the kind of transformational critical thinking, and that's going to transform our kids perceptions of who they are and who they can be. The reality is when you live in a city, at least you are in a space where by osmosis, you can be exposed to these certain things. There's different programs,

a lot of people target these places. There are programs, educational programs and companies that literally don't even work with small districts as a rule because there's not enough like BANG for their buck, there's not enough return on their investments supposedly, So it does really start to step back a little bit and realize, like, huh, there are a lot of people that are not getting a fair shake.

And I suspect Scott that it's not an accident that we are kind of trained to sow in our divisions, because I think that if we actually realized how much we had in common and unite it, that would be a very dangerous force for the status quota. Handle. Wow, wow, Okay, you said so many juicy things, and as a podcast host, it's like, oh, which one to our pick to follow up on? Okay? Wait, so okay, first of all, can you the very last thing you said, like, so who's

the seat quote in your mind? Give me a concrete like who will blow whose mind? If we recognize that?

So when I said that, and I think about like the status quo, particularly when it comes to education, I think that the one thing that was true when we were young that is still true today that if we don't change, will still be true and the next generation is that zip codes determine your destiny by and large, right like stories like mine, where you know I get this excellent education, and I go off and become student body president Syracuse and become this award winning entrepreneur with

a law degree and all this stuff. That's the exception to the rule, and that rule that says that who you're born to and where you're born, how much money they make. The term is what your outcome is going to be in life. That's the injustice, Like that is

the status quo. And a lot of times when I think about transformation, I think about, like, how do we move from that space to a point where we can actually say in truth, like in earnest, that every single child has a fair shot at being exceptional, Like every kid is actually a realistic thing that we're like, all right, Like we can set all of you all up to fulfill your potential and set the world on fire. Like we can actually figure out a way to do this.

Maybe I'm a cockode optimist, but I believe that that ought to be the goal. It's a shame that that's become like an insult. I know it has it has been to dream bigger, but I don't know, I don't know. I think that one of the biggest challenges, and this is going back to like teaching kids to be dumb enough, right, And it's one of those things that was a tough thing for me to struggle with until I was part of this organizing training and I remember there was a

problem that we were posed. God, this is an interesting one. Okay. So you're trying to advocate on behalf of like a community that needs seventy five full day kindergarten programs. Okay. So we're looking at it, We're looking at the budget, and we're like, all right, so what do we do? And we like set up this whole big compromise, Me and like five others, super smart like education leader people.

All right, here's what we're gonna do it. We're gonna ask for like fifteen in the first year pilot it show the data whatever, and then by year whatever, your four year five will have what the seventy five. And the lead person at the training is looking back at us, you're like, okay, cool, cool, all right, So you said the need was what, well, seventy five? Like all right, well, why didn't you ask for seventy five schools if that's what was needed? Like, well, you're never gonna get seventy

five schools. Who says you're never gonna get seventy five schools fun at full day kindergarten. Well, it's not realistic. Who says us? Not realistic? And it's one of those things where you're like, oh, I guess I just kind of talked myself out right. I kind of did this logical reasoning to do this thing, and I'm like, well, why do we negotiate against ourselves or something that we've

determined was important. We determined that it was essential, but somehow as a starting point off the block, we decided to not even start with what the core need was right. And I think about that in terms of like really smart people that like settle for like a good job. Now, look, I get economics, I get like breaking through cycles of poverty, Like I'm never gonna thumb my nose at somebody securing a job that's paying them great money and great benefits.

But I do believe that we live in a society where we encourage a lot of these safe behaviors and a lot of our kids who are probably best served to transform the world as we know it, but they never get taught that skill because we are much more likely to groom them for this safe way out right, And this is where I think we end up with this culture of like underachievement that by any objective means it's fine, Like kids are doing fine in a lot

of those cases. But when I think about why we I've make cured cancer, but we can order a phone from our watch, I'm like, I think we're just not unleash the passion and talent in a way that is really tapping into everybody's full potential here here, well, it sounds like both of us are on that mission. That's the same mission and all different you know, I mentioned in all different kinds of minds, whether it's autism, whether it's giftedness, whether I mean it could be to twice

exceptional autism and giftedness. Right, I don't know how familiar are you with the twice exceptional movement? Very very very familiar with it, very familiar with it, And in fact, I've lived it, right, I've lived it in a way that forces me to always kind of step back and reflect. I've lived it as a participant and as a spectator. Where when I was in first grade, I was getting in trouble at least once a week. When I say

I was getting in trouble. A guy had this science teacher named Miss Liftshits in real how could you not get in trouble if the teacher was named Aslichit, I would get in trouble every day. And I remember in first pase, she asked me to write an essay reflect on my behavior one hundred words, and I wrote, she did like a science lab thing for our class. So I wrote like I hate science thirty two times and I had four words leftover, so icker right, I hate

you too. And I remember the first grade power professional like the teachers a put my mom aside and say you need to get this kid tested out of speech impediment. I was getting in all this trouble, but the test revealed that I was actually gifted. I had to take

this whole barrage of tests, ended up being gifted. And I predict looking back that I was probably undiagnosed with some version of ADHD because lifelong issues with organization, my issues with like kind of time management, kind of selective effort. I feel like the more that I've learned about this as an educated I'm like, oh my God, Like they probably would never have diagnosed me because it never could have occurred to them that I could be twice exceptional.

But then as a participant, I've also seen as a spectator, I've seen the sharpest young man I've ever come across in my whole education career. In juvenile detention. He was an English learner. He was the kid with like all these severe behavior challenges, but he was a prodigy. Granted, he used his prodigy skills to start this whole drug ring, but he was this exceptional young man that I thought was a perfect example of how we continuously leave genius on a table. And I just look at this and

I'm like, why is it that? And it's a question I always ask gott is it that we don't look hard enough, are always so sort of overwhelmed that we kind of look at like the first thing that we see presented as a summary of what the whole deal is. Oh, this kid is a behavior your kid, this kid is an autism kid, this kid is a gifted kid, and we just kind of like take it at that phase

value and leave it alone. I don't know what the answer is, but I think that if we kind of had this unifying principle around what the purpose of education is, which is to unleash every student's full potential. There's a lot that ends up being built into that definition, right, Like, I've got to know what that potential is. I've got to make it my mission to discover that potential. I've got to know what it takes to nurture and make that potential flourish. I've got to make sure our setup,

like you know, ways to recognize this. And as an education leader, I've got to think about, well, we do have barriers to this. We do have this belief gap in our world where not all education people believe that all kids can truly achieve and even if they believe that, they don't believe that they have the ability to make that achievement happen. So we've got to think about ways we can start to cross those bridges to start closing

that belief gap for folk. So but again, if we make that the end that we have a system that unleashes the full potential of all kids, then I think that's gonna be differentiated enough that we won't end up in this space where we're just leaving so much talent and so much genius behind on a table. I wrote an article for Side of American called talent on the sidelines. About the excellent scap that people like Jonathan Pucker and his colleagues have shown to be true. Let's talk about

the excellent scap for second gift education. Gift education is like predominantly predominantly white, middle class students. What do you think is going on there? These are not easy questions, are they? Of course, of course our easy answers. So I mean, I want to really tackle this one in ways that I think are super important and maybe don't

get talked about often enough. And to be honest with you, Scott, as an African American male who is a product of a gifted program, I feel like it's almost like my responsibility to speak on issues like this and say some of the things that might be a little bit more uncomfortable for other people to say. For one, I want

you to speak your truth. Sure, a lot of really educated, equity forward people often get so caught up in the ideas around the inequities and gifted identification that they almost want to throw the baby out with the bath water, right. And I can tell you, being a teacher America alum who got into education as a social justice movement within my crowd Scott, It's a very funky thing to be in supportive, Like you're supporting like gifted learners. Yeah, it's

like okay, well coming in and I'm like okay. But at some point in our training, at some point for people that are focusing and working in low income populations, do we not recognize that there is brilliant and not classrooms in our communities? Like are we just gonna act like every single kid is coming to us with all these deficits and we are going to be that night

in shining Armor. I say no. I actually say hell to the no. And we need to really focus on making sure that we understand that there has always been brilliance there. There's always been genius there, and we've got to open up our eyes in a way that presents itself. And here is the thing that makes it a little

bit more challenging. It takes a special sort of person to look at a student that writes you an essay that says I hate science thirty two times and gives you the last four words, I hate you too, and think I think this kid might be gifted. What you really want to do is just send that kid to class, you know, kick him out of school, and that's something

that we just have to be honest about. The truth is, if you aren't under stress, if you have really large class sizes, if you're not very experienced, if you're not getting a lot of supports, it might be the last thing on your mind to think about, who are the gifted learners in my classroom that might not get the

support that they need. Oftentimes, too, we talk about like economics, and I think in the financial world, we can talk about the wealth gap, right we can like, Okay, a few generations ago, African Americans can even own property, or they were like redline out of these districts or out

of these areas. So you can look at like the economic wealth gap, and that can make sense when you start talking about like this knowledge gap, when you start thinking about like generationally being excluded from a lot of these sorts of programs, it is a huge difference when you go I was in a pretty affluent district in Texas speaking at a conference there to parents of gifted children, and it seems pretty clear to me that for a really long time, probably since the time these kids were born,

these parents were in the know. Many of them had been a part of gifted programs before they had parents and families that just knew how to navigate these systems and they just knew. So I think we need to think about like the cycle that starts to develop where you're like that gap knowledge winens and when you start thinking about access that gifted programs, we have to realize

it's not just the program itself. One of the big frustrations got that a lot of get the coordinators tell me is like, look like we actually, you know, we did get our numbers up, but we have a lot of our black and Latino kids dropping out of the program by the time they get into middle school. Or we get people that get offered to be in a program and their parents decide not to do it. So you have to think, Okay, what is going on there?

And it turns out a parent looking at options for their kids doesn't just look at the quality of their program. They also don't want them to be the only minority student in the whole class. They don't want them to be separated from their rest of their peers and all of their friends. And when I think about the experience of going to Bronties schools giens, where there were not

a lot of black students. And I remember being a sophomore reading Huckleberry Finn and everybody's having this conversation about the N word, and I just didn't really feel like participating. It just wasn't really the thing. And you know, the teacher is like, so, Colin, what do you think about the use of the ndword and Huckleberry Finn? And I'm like, well, I don't know on behalf of the entire African American race, Like what am I supposed to say here? You know?

And I can see a lot of reason that it's valid that I might not necessarily want to be a part of that, which is why again, having awareness and education around gifted education in high poverty schools become so crucial, because if you can really encourage and build those pockets of giftedness within their existence spaces, I'd rather see that come up that way. I think that would do a lot more for increasing our numbers over the long haul. But I don't know, Scott, I can probably talk all

day about that. Ess Donna Ford writes a lot about this, and yeah, yeah, she contributed to a book I edited on twice exceptionally, Yeah, it's just it's like, I mean, there's so much built up in this whole thing and point blank period. You know, racism has a lot to do with this as well, you know, like it's really hard to see giftedness and populations when your idea of what giftedness is supposed to look like is kind of prescribed by like upper middle class, like white values. If

that's the basic prescription of what it is. And I have a teaching profession that as a whole is predominantly white, and as a gifted teacher, like, I gotta tell you, Scott, I'm always taken aback at the gifted conferences that I go to, and I'm like, wow, Like, why don't more

black and brown educators get involved in gifted education? If that doesn't change, it's going to be really hard to change these numbers at a certain point because those conferences trend a lot whiter than the education population as a whole, and that certainly doesn't help matters a lot of creditors do.

I've heard increasingly more frequent conversations around the equity challenges in gifted education, both in identification and in support of minority populations, and giftedness definitely broad in a lot of it understanding around twice exceptional children as well. So I think the trend is in the right direction, but this

needs to be a bigger platform by and large. And if we get to a point where every single teacher training program required courses in gifted education as a part of that process, where we included twice exceptionality, where we include it like the way that giftedness presents in all of different forms, then we'll get closer to a place where kids all have that equal shot at being at least statistically consistent with their representation in the general population.

So that's a big deal. That would be wonderful for sure. I think you know, there's all sorts of bates about all these topics. These are there are no easy answers here. But you know, there's a distinction that some people make between the importance of equality of opportunity, which is what it sounds like you're talking about, and then a quality

of outcome. So you know, it might not ever be possible to have fifty to fifty, you know, just based on like, like you said, proportional representation, and if you think about how many so like where do you stand on the like do you think there should be a quality of outcome. Do you see what I'm saying. I hear that what you're saying. And you know, we were going back and forth on Twitter this weekend about like not having a tribe. Well you, I really appreciated your support.

This is where I lose part of my tribe. You know. I know that in a lot of our lower income areas when we look at like test performance, like there's a lot of weight is given to growth, and it's important to grow kids. It's important to see that they're like you know, achieving and getting close to where they

need to get to. But there's a part of me that's like, Okay, at the end of the day, there's like one year growth, two year growth, three years growth, but it still turns out that only seventeen percent of these kids are proficient in reading, then only nineteen are proficient in math. I don't think that growth matters, Like, I don't think that that's enough. I think that like we need to actually focus on kind of going back to that issue of you know, seventy five early childhood

centers or full day kindergartens. We need the kids to actually be proficient. So the question is what is it going to take. What do we need to accomplish. Maybe it's going to be the summer, Maybe it's gonna be saturdays, maybe it's gonna be after school programming. How are we gonna make us so that more kids are actually proficient and at grade level, so that like we can stop having that conversation about kids and not being proficient and

not at grade level. What needs to happen? And you might say, well, you got kids at our English learners and the new arrivals, Okay, what do we need to do in the first two years to make sure that by the end of those first two years they are proficient? Because it's never gonna be okay with me that in these schools we're okay with growth and these schools we're looking at proficiency and mastery. And then when you exit twelveth grade, there's this huge disparity in what the outcome is.

At a certain point, the outcome is the opportunity. Because if your outcome guarantees that I'm never gonna be where I'm supposed to be, If the outcome guarantees that I'm now going to college taking remedial everything that doesn't count, and I have to pay for sometimes out of my own pocket. That's not equality in outcomes nor opportunity. Like we have to focus on the bottom line, like what is it going to take to get kids ready? What

is it going to take? And I know tests are not the most perfect indicator, but it's what we've got and it's what we know we're dealing with. So let's do what it takes to make sure at a bare minimal we can say we've got kids to this level. And that's kind of where I focus on because I often find too it's such a chicken or a kind of deal. A lot of times it still comes down

to opportunity. It still comes down to opportunity. Like I was in a classroom the other day observing a sixth grade class and it was English Leinners, and they were doing third grade work. Okay, Now, on its surface, a lot of things could be going on. It could be that the teacher noticed there was a specific deficiency, so she pulled this one worksheet that have these kids working

on this one third grade standard. But more often than not, it's I don't think these kids can to handle the sixth grade work, so let me just make it easier for them so they can experience success. It might be well intended, but it's that kind of love that's grounded and those low expectations that we know. We know we're going to haunt our kids. We know we're going to underprepare them for their futures and make sure that they're ready for neither college nor career upon exit on twelfth grade.

So that's kind of how I look at that whole opportunity versus outcomes argument. Colin. I have to say that was what you said. The outcome is the opportunity is literally one of the most brilliant things I've ever heard of my entire life. And that was a real, real aha moment for me. So I just want to thank you for saying. I don't know if you've said that before in things, but I'm going to make that the opening quote of this this podcast chat. If that's no,

that makes so much sense. That makes so much sense. Yeah, what's so funny you talk about recognizing genius in all of its forms. I think a lot of between my writing and public speaking and stuff like this comes from the fact that, like growing up in Brooklyn and going to this nerdy high school, I kind of balanced it out by hanging out with like kids that were more or less like hoodlums, and we used to rap a

lot and I freestyle. So the ability to like think on the top of my head and like come up with different rats and whatever is a part of like how you can be on a flow. Yeah, passionate about it and just start saying these things, and you know, it kind of gives me permission to be authentic as well. So when I'm speaking truth and I'm able to actually like, you know, get into that zone, it's just like when you catch a hot beat. He's just start going and

you're like, you don't even know what you're saying. You gotta go back and like, let me see that video again. What did I even say? Because what you're saying is just it's just a culmination of all my years of living in unjust systems and then being able to teach in them, and now working with schools in fifteen different states and realizing whether it's rural or urban, or poor or more affluent, it's so much of the same sort of problem being played out over and over and over again.

So yeah, thanks for recognizing that. No, I love it absolutely so related to all this stuff we're talking about. You wrote an article argument the argument that when love is grounded in the soft bigotree of well expectations, it's the wrong kind of love. Could you explain what the right kind? What's the difference between the wrong kind and what do you think is the right kind of love? So what prompted this is that was sitting next to a superinten in of the largest district in his state,

and I asked him, like, what keeps you up at night? Like, what's the one thing that pains you to the core? And his response completely blew my mind. His response was mother teresa syndrome. I was like, what's that Mother Teresa's syndrome?

This feeling that like a lot of kids, particularly kids that are coming from a low income backgrounds, they have it so tough, They've got it so rough that I want to give them the kind of education and space that coddles them, that makes them feel loved and secure. And when he said that, I was like, huh, I

think he's onto something. Because, as I mentioned in that article, there was a first grade teacher that stopped me in the middle of one of my critical thinking training and I was like, look, this critical thinking stuff is great, but as a first grade teacher, I feel I'm in the business of building my kid's self esteem. So I struggle having like work through a problem and then they start crying because they don't know the answer, they don't

know how to figure it out. And I'm thinking to myself, like, yeah, but the problem is when they come see me in middle school and they're still crying because you never gave him that opportunity to have that challenge. If you take away that opportunity to have that productive struggle, like when I say the wrong kind of love. What I'm asking educators to do, what I'm asking parents to do as well, is to not deny our kids the glory of persevering

through productive struggle. It's a glorious moment when kids learn how to tie their shoes on their own. Like my daughter is six years old. From the time she was three, I'm like, go get your milk yourself. Sure that involves doing some acrobatics to get up to the level of the fridge that it's at. Sure it's going to involve a lot of different skills that she has eventually learned

how to clean up on her own. But there's a satisfaction every single time she does that, right, She's like, yeah, pull my own milk, baby, And I'm like, yeah, I to stay on a couch. So like it's a win win situation, but we don't go for that win often enough. We like things to be just so right, Like we want our kids to get ready, we lay their clothes out for them. I'm like, you know, why do we feel afraid to truly transfer that power to our young people?

And then we complain when they get older and we all, they just don't have that hustle, right, they don't have that like fire, that desire. Well, we've taken away any reason they would have that desire. By that point, they come out of the womb with all this intellectual curiosity about the world, ask me why every five minutes. At

some point we start shutting that down. At some point we start saying these things like you know, you know, stop trying to get smart, and these messages that come about, it's like, you know, why should I even do this? It doesn't matter. My mom's going to do it for me, my dad's going to do it for me. Somebody else is going to figure this out. And then they developed these intellectual habits that are less curious, they're more complacent,

they take less risks. And again this was what happened after like time after time of these low expectations, and they don't always seem like low expectations. They don't always seem low. Sometimes they seem well intended. I think about a kid for my first year of teaching, and I talked about him in this story as well, where like he was failing almost every class. Then he turned it around and it was such an inspiration, like to this day.

I got att a chance to have breakfasts with him about five months ago, and I was like, man, he was such an inspiration. But I got to ask this one question, like, well, we had that assembly at the end of the year and like you got most improved student and almost every single one in your classes, why did you just not show up? Everybody had these special speeches to you and whatever. And he was like, I just don't understand why y'all would give me an award

for things I was supposed to be doing anyway. And it made me sit back and think, like, huh, even in the moment where I thought I had the highest expectations, like I was subconsciously lowering the bar and giving this guy the medal of honor, but basically showing up and showing me that he can, like do the basics. He went on to earn his associate's degree. He has actuations to do so much more. But I'm like, what if

we didn't settle for the basics. What if no matter what our kids presented, whether it was behavior or lack of enthusiasm, we demanded the outstanding. We were committed to them reaching their full potential no matter what, and there was no metal, no prize, no nothing until they got to that point. The victory was in the struggle, and we made it clear that that was what the victory was. It'll be a really different world. So that's kind of where I talk about, like the right kind of love.

I can see how me and you would both be annexed from every possible identity, group, imaginal because you're you're a freethinker. I mean, it's obvious to be you're a free thinker. Not every single thing you think is on down one particular party line, you know. So let's talk about this controversial article that came out in ED Week the other day. I don't know if you saw it. The title was grit is in our DNA, Why teaching grit is inherently anti Black? That was the title of

the article. It seems to me like you have a perhaps a little more nuanced view about it, that it's either you teach grit or you help with social inequalities that maybe you can. You know, what are your thoughts on that kind of argument, because some people have criticized, you know, perseverance and grit as a construct in low income schools, especially in African American populations. Some people have criticized it saying what these kids need is not grit

because they already are gritty, you know. What they need is like money, you know, and opportunities and things, and kind of treat it like an either or issue. So

what are your thoughts on this? So I think the problem is and this is by and large, we don't describe things with enough specificity, and that causes like challenges around things like for instance, there's a popular guy in education reform that says these things where he's like, you know, I fought for like civil rights, where we like sad in that counters. So we can be served that the restaurants and today our kids can sid at their restaurants, but they can't read the menus, and people are like

ooh man, yeah, yeah yeah. But I'm like, okay, let's stop for a second. Like kids can't read Hamburger three ninety nine. Get at it. That's not true, right, Like kids are not performing as we would like to unstandardize exams, and those performances are I'm gonna sandarize exams trend on race in negative ways, Like that's what it is. But just because twenty six percent of kids are proficient doesn't mean that only twenty six percent of those kids can read.

But we got to start saying things for what they are. When it comes to the grit discussion, I think that it becomes another similar issue around around like how we describe things. So what I often say and my relationship with grit is like, yes, a lot of our kids already exemplified grit. They are living and breathing examples of grit. The young man I referred to that was a brilliant man that I met in juvenile detention. He had two children. At eighteen years old, he had spent four months standing

in front of home depot doing day laborer work. Until he realized, like nobody really wanted to hire a scrony little boy to do task around the house. He needed to find a different hustle. Like when I think about a lot of our kids throughout this country who were taking care of younger siblings, going through all sorts of drama,

navigating through dangerous neighborhoods. You know, we have some schools on the Navajo Reservation here in Arizona where kids are commuting an hour and a half to two hours a day to get to school. I'm like, yes, on one hand, please don't tell me that our kids don't have grit. Okay, because a lot of our kids are using grit every single day just for the issue is in school that This is the question I always pose. Are we giving

our kids a reason to exercise their grittiness? And I say this because you might look at my life story and say, like Colin, you have a really gritty you've been persevering. Okay, Am I gritty about doing the dishes? No? Am I gritty about doing taxes? Absolutely? Not right. Those are things that I suffer to through. At some point I figure it out. But when it comes to like actual grit, we need to give our kids a reason.

It's actually inefficient to be gritty about every single thing under the sun, totally and in fact, when it comes to like gifted children and often sometimes you know twice exceptional children or autistic children's like you need to really make sure they understand, like kind of like the gambler went to hold them? When to fold them? Like when does the task actually not worth completing? It is the

thing we have to ask ourselves all the time. I'm sure as a researcher there's some projects you're like, you know what, this isn't going anywhere. I got to noticecrap, this, this is not going to really be what I thought it was going to be. Put this on a background. I'll do some other things instead, Like are we giving kids a reason to be gritty? Our approach with think law is we tap into their inherent sense of fairness and justice. Typically, kids are pretty gritty when it comes

to what's fair and what's not. They want to get to the bottom of it or there's a reason why. Regardless of how bad the first three minutes is of a law and Order episode, you're inclined to want to stick it through. You're inclined to figure out like why was that body there who did it? Like, God, you

want to get to the bottom of it. There's a reason for that, and that's kind of what our approach is, and that's what we teaching teachers to do, whether it's math or science, Like that conflict, that drama, that's the

draw to bring out that grittiness and kids. But if we just were more capable about the language and didn't act as if like kids don't have grit and if only they had grit, they'd be successful, and instead realize as teachers, we need to give them space where we're going to tap into that intrinsic motivation, tap into that agency that's going to make them super excited to be able to be in a space where they're sharing knowledge and build a relationships with their peers and just really

pushing themselves. Like that's where the rubber hits the road when it comes to that great conversation. Thank you for that level of nuance. I couldn't agree more. I've used a corny term I've called I refer to organic grit because I say, like, you know, we need to grow grit from within, not you know, from like you fail class if you don't have show grit. It's like, well, maybe your classes sucks, right, Like, it's not the student's fault.

You know that they're not great about your class. So anyway, I've refard of that as organic grit. But so I'm very much aligned with with a lot of what you just said. So let's end with a topic of disruptors as innovators. You've written really thoughtfully about that topic as well. Could you talk a little about what that means and

why we need to recognize disruptors as innovators? Sure? Sure, And this is something that really struck me when I was an attorney at a big corporate firm doing intellectual property and litigation work. And you know, you go to these mixers, and you go to these events and you're like, you know, this guy, this guy goes against the grain, and this is such a different thinking leader, and this person marches it to be to their own drummer, and I don't we represented a dude who he like owned.

He opened up a liquor store in the Las Vegas Airport, which ended up being one of the best selling liquor stores every first he wanted when to go to Point in Vegas and buy some alcohol. But like I'm like watching to be to their own drummer. This guy, you know, is a disruptor. Like we we actually talk about Steve Jobs and you know Uber and these different CEOs. Is like they're just so disruptive, and I'm like, the natural inclination is to kick disruptive kids out of class. That's

a natural inclination. You're disruptive, You're not paying attention and not behaving like you're out of class. And I wonder what we might be missing. And I often ask this question in my training Scott. I asked in this room of one hundred people, how many of you educators were like good students, did your work? You never really got in trouble, you'd be disappointed if you got to be. And like almost every person kind of luckily raises their hand like yeah, kind of smile like they were proud

about their grades. And I'm like, yeah, you know what, you might be part of the problem. And they started laughing, and I'm like, you know, I don't really mean to blame you. I don't really mean to say that you're

a problem for real. What I'm saying is there are many ways that you are breeding and building out this culture of compliance, well doubt necessarily knowing it, but you're building out this culture of compliance where if kids just did this and they just adhere to this and that and the other thing and just follow the rules, they'll be good to go. But what happens when the rules are the problem? What space are you creating for those

kids to be successful? Because there's certain kids that look at a system and they're like, this isn't going to work for me, and those are usually the people that end up being those same disruptors. So why do we want to downgrade their potential success by forcing that compliance? And it's a thin line, right because on the one hand, you're not gonna be able to teach anybody if chairs

are flying through your classroom. But on the other hand, like when students questioning things, it should always cause you to a fucking be like, well, why is this question happening? And maybe I can create space for this answer to exist in this framework to exist to start thinking differently

about this. I'll give you a quick example. There was a discrimination case and a think Low lesson well the teacher polls a question of what would be worse if I threw a stick at you because you were Asian, or if I threw a stick at you because you were wearing a black shirt, and every kid was like, oh, much worse if it's Asian. If you're Asian, you know that it's racist and you can't control what race you're

born into. Whatever have you? All Right, one girl raises her head and I knew this woman, this girl, seventh grader, I knew that she was on IP was kind of like a just a different sort of thinker about stuff, and she's like, black shirt much worse. This teacher knew how to create space for her idea. Though She's like, okay, well, like, how are you justifying it? Why would you say that the black shirt is worse? And she explained, well, at least we know that racism is a thing and there's

actual racist people out there in the world. But if you don't stick to somebody because of the color of their shirt, you might have some more serious issues. And people are like, oh, I haven't thought about that. That actually made sense now I can see that argument as why the black shirt might be worse. But you created that space for diversion thinkers within our classroom space, and it mattered one that that wasn't necessarily a right or wrong answer. Right, it was can it be justified or

can it not be justified? And I think that once we start going along those lines with creating that space for disruptives to be able to thrive, now it's much more likely we've created a pathway to innovation, a pathway to really make sure that every kid is reaching their full potential because you haven't arbitrarily placed a glass ceiling on their success levels. That's awesome calling. Thank you for being your own disruptor and the great work that you're

doing and chattel with me today. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. Skyt. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a reading and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes.

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