June 3, 2025
145: Spot 'magic' moments that can set up a lifetime of success, with advice from 'one of psychology's greatest', Dr Greg Walton
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What do you think of this episode? Do you have any topics you'd like me to cover? Wouldn't it be great if we knew when and how we parents and teachers can make a massive long-term difference by doing something relatively small? What if we could catch those moments that might set off either an upward or downward spiral, and help our kids find the best path? Well, that's what this episode is all about. Dr Gregory Walton has been described as 'one of psychology's greatest architects of how to ch...
What do you think of this episode? Do you have any topics you'd like me to cover?
Wouldn't it be great if we knew when and how we parents and teachers can make a massive long-term difference by doing something relatively small? What if we could catch those moments that might set off either an upward or downward spiral, and help our kids find the best path?
Well, that's what this episode is all about. Dr Gregory Walton has been described as 'one of psychology's greatest architects of how to change behaviour for good', and 'one of the most important psychologists in a generation'.
He is co-director of Harvard's Dweck-Walton lab and coined the term 'Wise iInterventions'; things we can do or say that hit the spot just at the point when another person is asking one of life's fundamental questions.
His new book is called, Ordinary Magic. It's all about the science of how we can achieve big change with small acts. These are things that go much further than the small nudges that help people to make better choices. This is the sort of deep magic that can last a lifetime.
Contact Dr Greg Walton:
https://www.gregorywalton.com/
CORE QUESTIONS:
- Can I do it?
- Do I belong?
- Am I enough?
- Who am I?
- Do you love me?
- Can I trust you?
KEY POINTS AT WHICH CORE QUESTIONS TEND TO CROP UP: TIF's
- Transitions
- Identity
- Challenges
THE PRINCIPLES FOR THINKING THROUGH 'BAD' EVENTS:
- Avoid negative labels (I'm not bad)
- You're not the only one; you're never the only one. (It's normal)
- Recognise causes that don't malign you or others (I/you face real obstacles)
- Forecast improvement (It can get better)
- Recognise opportunities (Silver lining)
Thank you so much for your support.
Please hit the follow button if you like the podcast, and share it with anyone who might benefit. You can review us on Apple podcasts by going to the show page, scrolling down to the bottom where you can click on a star then you can leave your message.
I don't have medical training so please seek the advice of a specialist if you're not coping.
My email is teenagersuntangled@gmail.com
My website has a blog, searchable episodes, and ways to contact us:
www.teenagersuntangled.com
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https://www.instagram.com/teenagersuntangled/
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https://m.facebook.com/teenagersuntangled/
Susie is available for a free 15 minute consultation, and has a great blog:
www.amindful-life.co.uk
02:43 - Transitions and Belonging Experiences of feeling out of place The concept of "tiff bits" and small events triggering larger doubts
06:35 - Surfacing Doubts and Wise Interventions
09:21 - Narrative Principles and Growth Mindset
15:01 - The Role of Teachers and Mentors
25:50 - Motivation and Purpose
27:27 - Wise Feedback and Trust
41:49 - The Purpose of School and Building Self-Esteem
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Often we give that praise to young people who we think have low self esteem, to try to raise their self esteem. We sit like you have a kid who seems unsure of themselves, and you say you're number one, and that actually lowers kids self esteem because it sets up a standard that they think they'll never reach. And then there's other kids who actually do have high self esteem, and then they get that kind of praise, and that sets them up for things like narcissism. Instead, what we need is
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Hello and welcome to teenagers untangled the audio hug for parents going through between and teen years.
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I'm Rachel Richards, journalist, parenting coach, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now, he's been described as one of psychology's greatest architects of how to change behavior for good, and one of the most important psychologists in a generation.
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He has conducted a great deal of research with Carol Dweck, who's known for her groundbreaking studies on growth mindsets and intelligence, and she describes his new book ordinary magic as life changing. I'd like to welcome Stanford psychologist Dr Greg Walton, Greg, welcome to my humble podcast. Thank you so much for having
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great Well, thank you so much for helping us all. I'd like to just give the listener an idea of what we're going to cover. We're going to talk about the fundamental questions that come up at key points in our life, and often they're not even aware of how we can spot those questions and offer what Greg terms a wise intervention to stop a downward spiral and encourage the development of a growth mindset and an upward spiral instead knowing when and how to listen and also how our culture is sending us messages that are unhelpful to Our ability to achieve our best now fundamental questions that we might be confronted with, will we all worry about? What would you say are the main questions that we tend to have to confront at key points in life? Yeah. I mean, you know, you you have goals for yourself, right? You have things you want to accomplish, a kind of person you want to become, a kind of, you know, achievement you want to have, or good you want to do for the world. And there's all sorts of doubts that come along line as you try to pursue that. So you might ask a question, like in a school setting, is this a place I can belong? Is this a place in which I'll be fully included and valued? You're confronted with a challenging task, something you don't know how to do yet, like host a podcast or learn mathematics or something, and you wonder, you maybe you fail at that first?
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And you think, can I do this?
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You have an interaction that that goes a little sideways with someone you care. You ask, Can I trust you? Do you care about me?
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Do you love me? And these are questions that are important to us, because they're relevant to who we can be, who we are and what we can do.
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Let's just start with a situation. So for many parents, our kids are about to start a new stage of life. So you know, transition period like going to a new school or a new college or shifting to senior subjects, and we want our kids to flourish. What you talk about in the book is the downward spiral and how that starts. So can you just sort of explain to us what you know, why would a kid starting in a new school?
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Why would perhaps they get there and then things don't go quite
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Yeah. I mean, let me just tell a little story from my own experience going to university. So I was brought up in Michigan, and Michigan is a really long ways away from California, and so when I went to college here at Stanford in California, it felt like a really, really long ways away.
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And you know, I had that feeling that it was so far, even though I had all these advantages, actually, like my father was from California. I'd been to California many times. My parents are both university professors. I grew up in a university town, but still being at this foreign, you know, institution, it seemed it felt foreign to me. It just felt really, really far away, really far away from everybody I knew, everybody I cared about, and I didn't know if I would make friends, if I would be, if I would be able to be kind of respected and included in that environment. And so then the very first quarter of college, I was coming back through campus, and I saw this In N Out truck and in and out is this California burger chain that does not exist in Michigan. And it was in the middle of campus, and there were all these kids, I presumed, all of them from Southern California, like, lined up to get their in and out burgers. And I just had this really kind of pissy thought that that I know now reflects that feeling of homesickness, but I didn't know it at the time, and the thought was just, I'm not going to stand in line for a burger. And so that I marched off to the dining hall and I had lunch by myself, and I just kind of sat there, right and if I had been a little wiser, if I had understood that right?
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in some sense, we're all far from home, everybody's looking to meet new people, I could have said, Oh, this is what I'm feeling. I'm feeling some of this discomfort I wouldn't have been suppressing that. I could have gotten in the line and I could have asked somebody hey, like, what is in and out? Like, I've never heard of.
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In and out, and they would, oh, I love in and out. And here's animal style, and you should get it animal style. And at least I would have had a good interaction, you know, a positive interaction, with a classmate of mine. But the suppressing of it, the unawareness of it, didn't let me engage in that way. That's a spiral, right? Because then I'm not actually building the relationship
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that then sets off this whole set of events going forwards, where now you haven't actually connected with them, and then you will look at other things and think, Oh, well, that's because, you know, they're different to me, rather than because you had making it.
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Made a choice right at the beginning. I actually made that point with my daughter, who'd gone to Oxford to have an overnight stay there to meet other students, and she felt really othered because she didn't understand what the meal deals they were talking about were same thing. I mean, I was a study abroad student at Oxford as a Stanford student, and I made a joke at one point about, what if you didn't know how to pronounce maudlin you were like, Magdalene or something, you know, like, there's all these Yes, yes, cultural cues, little being in the know. And if you're not in the know, and especially if you're not in the know because of something to do with your group background, like your social class background, or your race, ethnicity, or if you're a woman going into a very male dominated field, it can, it can feel like this is just not the place for me, yes, and that that situation, that circumstance, actually puts that question up on the table, like, do I belong?
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And it's because of the social circumstance, and then you had this wonderful word for it.
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There's a tiff bit, yes. Can you talk more about I love that term,
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yes, a tiff bit is a tiny fact with a big theory. So there's a little thing that happens. It's like, objectively little, but you have a big theory about it. And so like, the the in and out, like seeing the line in and out, like, if ever there was a tiny fact that was a tiny fact, right? It's just a burger truck on campus with people in line, and I have this disproportionate reaction to it. I i am constructing this whole response to it and and constructing that response because I'm viewing that event through the lens of the homesickness that I have, through the lens of this question, am I going to be able to make friends here? And then you see all these people hanging out without you, and you're already worried, am I going to be able to make friends here?
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You just feel bad. And so it's very helpful to be able to to notice when you have a tidbit response, like, to see, oh, like, I'm having a kind of big response to something that you know doesn't seem like it has to warrant that response. Why is that? Like, don't you don't have to be mean to yourself, don't, don't criticize yourself. But ask yourself, try to figure it out. And that's part of the surfacing process, part of the understanding you mentioned in your book, Michelle Obama trying to get her sheets out, and she got the wrong size sheets for her bed, and it made her then think, well, maybe I can't do this. I can't be this person, because I can't even work out the right size sheets. Yeah. And so Michelle Obama is first generation college student from the south side of Chicago, a woman who's a descendant of enslaved peoples, and she's going to Princeton, which is an institution built by and for the wealthy and the white, including by slaves. Most of the first presidents of Princeton all own slaves. So, you know, if you were Michelle Obama, like, would you wonder, is this a place in which I can belong? And the the thing about that is that it that worry sits directly alongside the hope that someone like Michelle Obama has, that the recognition that an institution like Princeton can give her incredible opportunities. And those two are kind of in juxtaposition with each other.
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And then something happens in her case, as trivial as not having the right size sheets that fit the dorm room bed. And she thinks, like, I don't, I'm not in the know. Like, clearly, this is not the place for me. We do that as parents. I mean, there'll be one thing that our child does, and we catastrophize, and we think we were talking about this the other day, you know, if our child hasn't made friends on the first day, we then think, Oh, they're going to be crazy, lonely cat lady.
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We like, look, for these little cues, and then we construct artifices of meaning and bigness around them, and we do that when
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Well, let's talk about surfacing and wise we have these doubts that are kind of serving as the lens through which we view those events.
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interventions. Now, as a parent, there are things that we can do, and so when you talk about a wise intervention, what would the process be?
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So there's this beautiful, wise intervention in the Robert McCloskey Picture Book One morning in Maine. And so in one morning Maine, it's about parenting. And it's a young Sal is, like, maybe four years or three or four years old. Sal wakes up and she says, Mama, Mama, I have a loose tooth. I can't go to bucks harbor with daddy. And so for Sal, the loose tooth is serving just as that kind of tiff bit.
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It's this little fact, but she's got this big meaning around it.
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She's not gonna be able to have her great day with daddy at bucks Harbor. And her mother then says, Sal, when you lose a tooth.
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Truth, that's when you become a big girl, and, and, and Sal, the whole first, like, essentially two thirds of the book is Sal kind of trying out that idea. So there's, there's this question that Sal has, does having a loose tooth mean I won't be able to have my big my great day? And what her mother does is her mother sees that Sal's asking that question, and she offers Sal. And the verb really is offer. She offers Sal an answer to that that might be better for Sal. And Sal then is playing with that answer. She's saying, oh, did, did? Did you lose teeth when you were little? Has Baby Jane lost her teeth? No. Baby, Jane's too little. She's just a baby. Does the seal have teeth?
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Do the crows have teeth? Right?
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And the whole thing is about the process of thinking about what it is that it means when you lose a tooth in the in the world outside of picture books, right?
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Sometimes things are more opaque. Sometimes things are we don't see them so clearly. So in one morning in Maine, Sal says it right aloud. She says her fear right aloud to her mother.
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But sometimes we don't say them aloud, and sometimes we don't say them aloud, even to ourselves. So if you go back to the you know University case, a student who's going to university who's like 18 year old and wants to belong and is excited and hopeful, like they don't want to say that they feel like they don't belong, like that's not their motivation. And so we have to create structures that make that visible, that help people see that, that make it okay to talk about that, that make it normal, that make it clear that these are worries that are coming from a context and from a situation, and that we can contend with them. And so we're a parent, and we're looking at our child and we're thinking, something's they're not comfortable. There's something wrong. What kind of question might they be asking right now?
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Is it? Can I do it? Is it? Do I belong? Is it? And then maybe actually helping them say that question to themselves, yeah.
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Like, is there something wrong with me? I mean, like, you know, every teenager has asked that question in some form, yes, am I enough? Am I attractive? Will people like me, you know, like, it's, there's the onset of puberty and the changing sort of social dynamics of that. I mean, teenagers are like, the project of being a teenager is the project of building an adult out of a child. Like, what kind of adult Are you going to be able to be? And so it's really important that there are ways that teenagers can see the good and successful person that they can become, and that they can have that image sort of well represented, including and in fact, especially when there's no evidence for that yet, or they're really struggling. So I think one of the most beautiful examples of ordinary magic is when you have an adolescent who is really struggling. Maybe they're doing very badly in school, maybe they're getting in lots of conflicts. And a adult, often a non parent adult, but it could be a parent as well. But I think often non parent adults play very powerful mentors.
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Teachers can say, I can see the good and successful person you can become, and to represent that kind of really clearly and help that person become that.
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And I think often we kind of do the opposite of that, right, like in ordinary magic. I quote some incredibly insightful young people in the Bay Area who, as teenagers, struggle with substance use issues, got caught in school with things like marijuana. And the feeling that they had was that they were a bad kid. They were seen as a bad kid. And that's a really like that's really that's really toxic and damaging to have that representation and a fixed negative representation like that. You may have to recognize the challenges of something like a substance use situation, but you do have to also have faith.
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And I think sometimes the word really is faith, faith in who that young person can become, yes, I love that, and it's interesting, because a lot of teenagers will presume that people don't like them or don't think that they're good enough.
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I've had my daughter come to me and say, Oh, I don't think her mum likes me. And I say, Well, why would you think that? And it's if you haven't been explicit that you actually, you know, like that person, then they just make the worst assumption. This is a different thing from nudging, isn't it?
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Yeah. So in nudging, like you can take like an object, like you can nudge it, right? There's the verb itself implies a kind of superficiality, like it's not really contending with doubts, right? So with a nudge, you try to, for example, rearrange a school cafeteria so it's easier to get the healthy foods. Yes, that's that's a good thing, but it doesn't contend with how you're actually thinking about something like healthy eating, or what you might do once you're outside of that cafeteria. So in that way, it's kind of as more has the depth of like clinical psychology, in that it's contending with sort of deep.
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Questions that people are thinking about often, that they're suppressing. But it doesn't begin with the assumption that there's something that's distinct about you or distinctly wrong about you. It begins with the presumption that there's something very normal about you and things like worries like, Will I belong in university?
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Like issue from the context itself. You've mentioned normalizing things a couple of times now, and I one of the bits in your book that I loved was when you were talking about therapy, but before things metastasize and go wrong, if we can actually get in early with the questions and allowing our kids to go, Oh, I'm feeling this, and then say, well, that's normal, yeah, obviously I think if it is normal, but all these questions are kind of things that we really all feel, yeah, I do think young people today have, there's really been great progress compared to my generation in their ability to talk about mental health issues and so there so i There's a story in the book about it's really kind of a canonical example of surfacing and surfacing between two people, not just in one person, but in a conversation where I was serving as the faculty advisor in the Stanford program in Berlin, and I was having a dinner with this incoming students who were there for the term, and I happened to sit next to a young woman, and I was asking her about her life.
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She was from the West Coast of the United States, and she told me that she was very competitive gymnast in high school, and then she blew out her knee, and she couldn't do gymnastics anymore, and then COVID happened, and she couldn't see her friends anymore. And she just said it to me very openly and bluntly. I'd asked her, what was important to you? What have you done? And this is part of what she gave me back that I felt very comfortable in saying back to her, did that make you depressed? And she said, Absolutely, I was already seeing a therapist, but for sure, and I think of that conversation as a kind of ratcheting conversation, where together, we were identifying this space of common ground, where we were understanding together. Like, yeah, you're 18 years old, you can't do what you love, and now you can't see your friends. That make a person depressed? Like, of course, that would make a person depressed, right? There's nothing wrong with her. She knows there's nothing wrong with her, and I don't think there's anything wrong with her. We're just saying there's a situation here, right? We're not We're not downplaying the situation. We're not putting our heads in the sand. There is a situation, but it's not that there's something wrong with her, and that's a point at which you can actually pragmatically talk it out. And you know, if you were in that situation, you would be able to think through. We were talking about the past there, but if it was an accident situation, be able to think through. Okay, well, what do we do with this?
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Yes, one of the important skills is actually the listening, because we can't see someone else's perspective if we just go, Oh, I'm just going to think what that person might think. We actually we can only really do it if we listen really deeply.
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Have you gotten beautiful basic laboratory research that shows exactly that point where they asked different kinds of relationship partners, from strangers to couples to take each other's perspective. And they found that people thought that would make them more accurate in understanding each other, but actually it makes people with anything less accurate and yeah, and anything from like, what is the other person's preferences for a Friday night to, would you rather spend a weekend in Paris or Rome? You know, like anything. But when they did a last study and they just gave people a chance to talk first and ask each other questions, they got far more accurate, and they underestimated how beneficial that would be. People thought it would be helpful, but they didn't. They didn't fully appreciate how helpful it would be. And I think often with kids, we we don't actually have, like sincere, we don't have as many sincere conversations as we could have. I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day, and he told me that he was, he was a very highly ranked cellist in China, and as a teenager, and this was how he'd gotten into a leading Chinese University. And so I asked him to tell me the story of his cello. He said that when he'd been very little, he played the cello, and he'd kind of taken, taken to music very quickly, but then he kind of put it aside for a long time. He put it aside, the cello kind of sat in the corner. And at one point, his father said, when the my colleague was telling me the story, he told me this was the first time he had like, I think he used the word real, like a real conversation with his father, and I think what he meant was an honest, kind of equal status conversation. His father gestured at the cello and said, the cello like, what do you think?
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And it was not a loaded question. It was not a manipulation.
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And my colleague then said he thought about it for a couple days, and then he said, You know, I want to do that. I do want to do that. Yeah.
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And his father said, okay, so he took out the cello. He practiced on it some. He found that it wasn't a very good cello. His family wasn't very well off, but his father invested a large amount of money in buying him a very nice cello, which sounded much better. And that set his course, the course of his learning and growth. And with this conversation in which his father had just opened the space and asked him and listened, let him come to an answer,
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yes. I think so often as parents, we've had our own experiences through our own lives, and we look into a situation, we think, Oh, I can fix that. Like I think I know what the answer is, and we forget that actually it's a unique experience of that person, and we can't tell them.
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We have to allow them to come to their own conclusions. So we have to be really good at listening. But also, there are certain times when these big questions that you talk about tend to come up, because a lot of parents are really, really busy, and they have, you know, this mother who wrote to me the other day. She's a doctor. She's got four kids. One's a toddler, you know, two teenagers. It's it's busy, and we can't be 100% all the time. So the question is, When should we really be paying attention ideally? And so there are, you have this wonderful acronym for when those circumstances tend to arise, ticks, yes, yes. Great acronym.
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I'll put it in the podcast.
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Notes. Okay, great transitions, identities and challenges. So the first transitions, like the world is changing, like you're going to a new school, a new grade, everything's rearranged, and you're asking, you know, what is this place? Who can I be here. Maybe it's a family move.
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You're trying to figure things out right identities. Sometimes the most toxic kinds of questions that we face are ones which our identities are on the line, where right it feels like it's not just you, but like someone like you. So in Michelle Obama's story, her story is profoundly different from my in and out story, because her story is laced with the history of, you know, us, history in it, the history of class and the history of racism and slavery and whether a person like her could belong at a place like Princeton. I didn't have that depth of the worry and then challenges. So you know something goes wrong, maybe you fail a test, maybe there's a breakup, maybe there's a fight or a conflict, and at those moments, the challenge itself can serve as a cue to those doubts. So in relationship conflicts, for example, if two people are having a conflict, it's easy, even implicitly, to think, in some level, is there something wrong with us? Are we broken, like, am I a bad parent?
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If you're a parent, and that's, am I bad at this role? And those questions, then can feed the dynamic? Yes, I think that's so spot on. You bring up in each chapter this one great section of narrative principles, of five narrative principles, obviously you think they're really important. Can you talk us through what they are? Yeah, so so often, like something bad happens, and then you imply, apply a label to it, like you say, like you fail a math test, and you think, I'm bad at maths, but so that the first the first principle is to like, not have these labels to get into kind of verb phrasing rather than norm phrasing and noun phrasing. So things like, I failed the math test, yes, like I did, like I didn't. I didn't understand that maths. That doesn't mean I'm not a math person.
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A second principle is that it's normal is probably far more common than you think. Probably other people have been in this situation before, and it can be normal. A third principle is about growth, finding ways to grow from where you are. And that comes directly from my colleague, Carol Dweck, work on growth mindset. But it's it applies very, very broadly across spaces. And then another principle is, sometimes we can find silver linings. We can find positive experiences, even in the negative, and those can become helpful for us. And then there's the recognizing things can get better, right? Yes, yes, yes. Sometimes things get better passively,
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and sometimes things get better actively. One of the important things that we are confronted with when we're trying to help young people, and I've got four kids, I've got two bonus daughters who are now in their 27 and 30, as well as my teenagers, and you can see it happens all the way through this question of, can I do it? And as parents, there's obviously the sort of helicopter parent who would want to try and push and what's the better way that we can help our kids, rather than trying to sort of scare our kids or shove them through it? Do you have tips for Yeah. I mean, there's.
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There's a lot of sort of basic truths here, like help kids to challenges that are in the right dome, and then support them in engaging with those challenges. But they really have to be the ones who do it. We saw this weekend at the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime, I don't know. Oh yes, yes, I've seen it. Yeah, it's amazing.
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Yeah. At the end, there's this beautiful line where he says that Christopher, the main character, says, I went to London. I was courageous. I solved the mystery of who killed the dog, who killed Wendell. I think I found my mother. I can do anything. And there, there was this, like he he had had these experiences that had allowed him to take on real challenges and then achieve them. I thought that was beautiful. And then, as a contrast, last week at our elementary school, our son is, you know, playing the recorder.
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In fourth grade, they're up on the stage, and they're going to do their their little recorder concert for the parents. And the teacher says something like, well, this is pretty easy, but it's kind of hard for these kids.
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What? What? Yeah, and, and I was like, well, that's terrible. If it's hard for them because they're newly learning, then you should talk about it being hard for them, and you should applaud the progress they make. That is your job as a teacher, right?
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Yes, the importance of that is in the psychology, like it's in the developing children's understanding of themselves is taking on challenges and going through a learning process. It might be easy for you because you've been playing music for four years, but it's not easy for a 10 year old who has not done that right. So we need to honor we need to honor that learning process. We do not need to trivialize it. There's so much we can do, but there's also so much that is circumstantial, so much about the school setting or the work setting that will will impede some people's progress because they don't allow for this growth opportunity. We can talk about that, right? We can say, like, look, that wasn't right. Like, like, we can use our kind of prefrontal cortex to kind of correct things like that. There are these kinds of influences out there. There inevitably are going to be these influences out there, and that's not right.
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That's not who we are. That's not what we value. Like you worked hard. This is challenging.
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Might be easy for somebody who's already learned how to do it, but knowing how to do something and learning how to do something are completely different tasks.
00:27:31.759 --> 00:27:51.940
Yeah, and so we should honor that that progress at every stage. Yes. And you made a really good point, which is that you can't just put on a growth mindset. It's not a coat that you wear, it's something that you grow. I mean, what that did was that betrayed a kind of way of thinking with the teacher.
00:27:48.279 --> 00:28:49.059
And you also mentioned a really great study that I've used in my episode on setting high expectations, and it's about pretty much the Pygmalion effect. It really is sort of powerfully about the expectations that other people can have for you. So that play then inspired Bob Rosenthal to do this research in the 50s and the 60s that was about teacher expectancies for children. And so what he did was he went into South San Francisco, originally in South San Francisco, working class community south of the city, and he gave a test called the Harvard test of inflected acquisition, a whole bunch of big words test. And then he told teachers that certain kids had been identified as likely to show great academic growth this year. These were the academic bloomers, he said. And unbeknownst to the teachers, the kids were selected at random, and the kids themselves were told nothing at all.
00:28:50.140 --> 00:29:41.259
And then at the end of the year, he came back, and because this is the 60s, he gave everybody an IQ test, this is like the fad of the day. And what he finds is that particularly the kids in the youngest grades show these extraordinary growths in IQ when they've been labeled as bloomers, and so like giving teachers this representation that certain children are going to show, this great academic growth, had led the teachers to behave in a way that made that true. They elicited from the students the growth that they were led to expect and and so that, you know, that's been like, really powerful in education and psychology and parenting in general, in terms of understanding high expectations. It's also misunderstood in some time. So it's not, it's not high expectations for performance.
00:29:37.039 --> 00:29:51.220
It's not like the expectation is that these kids are going to meet immediately, going to perform well, because that would be, you know, obviously untrue if you if you were to do that.
00:29:46.779 --> 00:29:59.920
Instead, expectation for growth, and it really enlists the teacher. It really directs the teacher's attention to producing that growth that they've been led to expect. And so teachers presume.
00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:30.559
Probably are kinder. They give more time for the child to ask answer a question. They're more supportive, and that is, in fact, what produces the better academic outcomes. So that's at the teacher side, but in the high standards and assurance, the focus is on the student side, and the students perception of the teacher's belief about them. Here what the dynamic is, a teacher gives a student critical feedback. So the student writes an essay.
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It's not very well written.
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Maybe it's a recorder performance. It's not that good yet. And the teacher is now going to tell the students like all the things that they did wrong. And on the one hand, like when we step back and think about that as a third party, on the one hand, that's like the best feedback, that's the most useful educational intervention ever, right, specific, direct feedback of what you've done from somebody who knows that you can kind of take and use to take your next step. On the other hand, you might feel terrible, right? You might feel like it's like a ton of bricks, and you've been kind of hit by that. And so this particular research on wise feedback was inspired by observations of really high performing teachers and educational programs, particularly for students of color. In one of the examples is a Jaime Escalante, who's the calculus teacher in South Central Los Angeles in the 80s who was depicted in the film Stand and Deliver the Escalante had produced, at one point something like one in three Latino boys who'd achieved five on the AP Calculus test in the entire nation. Within his school, within his classroom, so much so that the kids were accused of cheating, and they made them retake the test, which is a whole other story, but one of the things that Escalante did was he gave really tough, critical feedback, but he paired that by saying, I know that you can reach these standards with more work. So it was called high standards and assurance, I have very high standards, and I am confident that you can meet these standards with more work. And so that then led to a long series of research studies led originally by Jeff Cohen at Stanford and by David Yeager, who's now at UT Austin. And in in some of the paradigmatic studies, they worked with seventh grade social studies teachers in Connecticut whose students had written essays about their hero, and the teachers had marked up those essays, and then the researchers appended paper clipped notes onto these essays that the teachers had written previously.
00:32:39.200 --> 00:33:53.079
But the researchers did this so that the teachers wouldn't know which kids got which note. And one note said, I'm giving you this feedback because I have very high standards, and I know that you can meet them. The other note just said, I'm giving you this feedback so you have comments on your essay. It didn't say anything. And this was done early in seventh grade by seventh grade teachers. And it was done in a school that was about half white students, half black students at middle class low to lower middle class school. And it was done in a context in which the researchers were aware that in prior years there were declines in trust between students and teachers over school year, particularly for the African American kids, and there seemed to be this kind of kind of racial mistrust that was developing. And what they found was that in the control condition, very few of the black students chose to revise their essay for a higher grade. So all the students were told, you can revise your essay for a higher grade, and only something like, I think, 17% of the black students who got that control, that placement note, did that, but when they delivered the wise feedback note, 69% of kids did, wow.
00:33:54.819 --> 00:34:20.659
And more white kids did too. And then, when they did the study again, and they made everybody revise their work, they found that the kids who got the wise feedback note produce better revisions. And then when they track students over the school year, they found that that stabilized the trust that single note at the beginning of seventh grade stabilized the trust between black and white students. And then they found that like the like, life goes on, like the spirals continue.
00:34:20.960 --> 00:34:29.360
So like, imagine you've now completed seventh grade. You're feeling that teachers actually can have your back in school, that they're not out to get you.
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So then they look at kids in eighth grade, and they find that they they get in fewer disciplinary conflicts. They're not in conflict as much students. And then they find that they are more likely to get into higher performing academic tracks, and they're more likely to go to college, to a four year college on time at the end of high school. All is it statistically and causally as a consequence of that one note at the beginning of seventh grade.
00:34:54.940 --> 00:34:59.860
And so here like what there is, is like adolescents are moving into.
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:38.840
An awareness of a broader world, like, as you go out of the kind of child world of the family, where the family is very, very central, into a broader world, you're in the project of becoming an adult, and you're asking, like, Who are all these other adults? Will they treat me fairly? Or might they be mean to me or unfair to me? Will they have my back, or will they use anything against me and and so a climate of kind of racial stereotypes that feeds that, particularly for African American kids, for example, can erode those relationships with teachers and erode the entire educational experience.
00:35:34.340 --> 00:35:47.440
But if you have that note that happens at the beginning that disambiguates why the teacher is giving you that feedback? It's not because they're not to get you. It's not because they think you confirmed the stereotype.
00:35:47.440 --> 00:35:48.820
It's because they believe in you
00:35:49.960 --> 00:35:56.079
that can transform a child's life amazing, and that's why you're talking about ordinary magic.
00:35:56.079 --> 00:36:55.599
They're really small interventions, aren't they? Each one of the ones you talk about in the book that's a spiral up that then, incredibly, will just continue without you having to keep intervening. A lot of these systems like work inherently over time. And so the earlier you can kind of get ahead of things, the better. Yeah, I love that. And another thing that you talk about, which I absolutely love is this question of, Do I need a break? Have I run out of willpower? Have I run out of energy? You know what? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, right. Like, isn't that a great myth that we have this, like, really limited willpower, and you can only work hard for a little bit of time, and then you're all done and have to go have a Snickers bar and put your feet up. Like, it's amazing that that marketers were able to sell that to us? Well, it is it is them selling Isn't it like I think we're not conscious of it, but there has been an entire system of marketing campaigns talking about breaks, because when you take a break, then you'll consume something. So they need us to take breaks.
00:36:52.659 --> 00:37:15.179
You're gonna go take a cigarette break, you're gonna go take a coffee break, you're gonna take a candy bar break. You're gonna have to go lie down for a few minutes, don't keep doing this stuff that's gonna make you successful. We need you to be taking breaks, right? You've got a great story that you have told about how you've dealt with this with your daughter, when she had to cycle across the campus.
00:37:15.239 --> 00:37:32.000
Yeah, we had, when the kids were little, we came home from preschool by bike, and they would be on these little, tiny bikes with these little like 12 inch wheels, and we would get within a block or two of home, and then they would sit down on the curb, and they would wail, and they would leave the bike.
00:37:34.219 --> 00:38:39.500
So then I thought about this research by my very good friend Veronica yaab, who's at the University of Vienna now, but she was a postdoc at Stanford at the time, and she was doing this work on willpower theories. Do you think of willpower as something that's very limited and quickly runs out, like you need a break all the time? Or do you think of it as something that's not so narrowly limited that you have sometimes even working hard at something you care about, can give you more energy to keep going? And so I said to them, it's when you're tired and you keep going that your muscles get stronger, yes. And then a few weeks later, we were coming home, and there was a big, steep hill we had to get through, and Lucy, Our older daughter, was trying to get as far up the hill as she could on her little 12 inch wheel bike, and we had brought chalk to mark where she gotten each time. So this particular time, she crushed it like she she got all the way to the top, the winding up these steep curves. And Oliver, who's like, you know, one and a half an hour at the bottom, we're cheering. We're cheering. And she says, You know how I did it?
00:38:39.619 --> 00:38:44.440
I said, No, how'd you do it? And she said, when I wanted to stop, I just kept going.
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I love it. I love it. I remember seeing a piece. I think it was Dr Becky, who did a really good graphic about how we start with a and we want to get to C. But in between is this very uncomfortable zone, yeah, where we got to learn and we've got to grow and and it's the longer we can stay in that zone, the more chance we have of getting to that.
00:39:11.159 --> 00:39:59.920
But we don't like to do that, so it's that sitting with discomfort sometimes. I think that you know how, like, some people seem like really good at picking up second languages, and other people are less good. My mother is very good at it, and I think one of the reasons she's very good at it is that she's okay with being like the fool. You can't speak the language, you can't even ask, can't do anything. You feel so incompetent, right? Yes, and like, if you are able to get yourself in a place where you're okay with that feeling like you're okay with with being incompetent for a while, you're okay with feeling like people might be judging you, then that's actually a space for for you, to let you practice and learn and work on that language, to like, bumble through you know your pronunciation or screw up your.
00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:26.179
Conjugations and have people react and then try again, like, that's the learning that literally is this higher hitting the road. But if you're so uncomfortable with that that you can't do that, then you don't you deprive yourself of the learning. Yeah, coming back to one of the really great points you've made in your book, is this whole normalizing, the discomfort, normalizing that you know you're sitting there thinking, Oh, do I look really stupid, but and you just say, well, we all feel like that.
00:40:24.139 --> 00:41:46.780
That's okay. That's not, that's not You're not broken. You're not terrible at this. This is something we all have to go through, but maybe you can spend longer in it. I love that you pointed out that the thing that really motivates people is common goals, like spending time with other people or spending on other people, which creates more happiness, and that telling a teen how important something is isn't necessarily going to make it happen. When I was talking about vaping and how to help kids think about whether they should be vaping or not, rather than saying it's going to make you ill, is saying all these vaping companies and the tobacco companies are desperately trying to sell you on vapes while you're young and you don't really understand what you're doing, because then you are a pipeline for them for the rest of your life. So they're just trying to get you hooked. And I think that's a more effective way of getting our kids to I think that's more effective, and I think more effective, yet would be to phrase that all in the second person, like, third person like they're trying to do this to other people. Like, think about these, these kids who maybe don't know as much as you, who are maybe don't have access to the same information as you, who don't know about these health situations, and these companies are trying to screw these kids over. Oh, I like the kids. So yes, you enlist the kind of pro social, anti authority, like attitudes of teenagers to like stick.
00:41:49.480 --> 00:42:18.780
That's a really good I'm going to put that back in the in the podcast. That's great. And when it comes to the purpose of school, one of the things you pointed out, because I think a lot of us parents, our kids, go to school, and we're focused on the learning. We're focused on, oh, my co my child needs to get good grades, and that's probably the last thing that they're really thinking about. And I loved it because you actually pointed out that it isn't just about what you can do. It's about discovering who you are and the communities you belong to, values, all that stuff.
00:42:19.920 --> 00:42:49.119
Yeah, I mean that. I think that's why, like, belonging is such an important part of school, right? You really want to. It's like a mini society, in a sense, and you want to, you're, you're playing with different roles within that society. Maybe of a school newspaper, maybe you have a school music or dance group or a theater group, or there's a science club or maths club, and you're playing with all these parts, and you're practicing and becoming the kind of adult, and you're trying on these different roles that you might want to be.
00:42:49.119 --> 00:43:56.559
And part of that is certainly the skills, like you might need to learn how to set a, you know, do the software for a journalism class that's producing the school newspaper, or you might need to improve your recording abilities as a musician. So there certainly are skills that are very important, but they're in the service of this identity of who, of who you are and who you can become. And at the end of the day, you know, I think that that is the most important function of the teacher, is to be able to show to a young person who it is that they can become, and give them that representation as a plausible view of that that's apt for them, for the child, for the student, for themselves, and then to support them in their process of becoming that person and that vision that the teacher can give more than any skill that they're imparting that can help that young person organize their efforts in order to realize that vision. You've also put it as a kind of described it as like being walking around, seeing mirrors of ourselves, but that they're not often mirror representations of what we really think about ourselves.
00:43:53.679 --> 00:44:59.920
They're like Fun House mirrors which make us feel really awkward and uncomfortable, yeah, all the time, right? So you get put in a box, right? Like, yeah, you know, you get put in a box defined by all sorts of identities. You have personal experiences you might have had. You get told who you are, sometimes you're told that by people who are sympathetic, and sometimes you're told that people by people who aren't sympathetic. And that's why the right kind of visionary teacher can help a person become you know, we talked a little bit earlier about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime. That's a story about teaching, right? The central character, Christopher, has two parents who are really struggling, like they don't know how to raise they're struggling in different ways. They're struggling with each other, and they're struggling with him, and they're not bad people, they're good people, but they're struggling and they don't know how to raise a neurodivergent child. Christopher really wants to take his A levels in maths, and he flees his father's house at the end of the first half.
00:45:00.780 --> 00:45:32.719
Worked and goes to his mother's in London, and the second half, and then his mother is kind of can't take it with him, having to take his A levels back where the father was, and says that he won't be able to do that. In the end, it's the teacher who orchestrates the opportunity for Christopher to take his A levels and like, that's the teacher sort of seeing how important this is for Christopher as a vehicle to who he can become.
00:45:28.940 --> 00:46:51.519
It's not her teaching him math skills that's also important, but that's not actually what the play is about. It's about her sort of having this vision and creating that opportunity for him to take that step and to kind of lead, actually, to lead the parents in supporting Christopher in that way. I think when I've looked at situations with neurodiverse kids and just any of our children, the most important thing is holding up a belief in them, even when they don't believe in themselves, and helping them to find their way, because I think very often, when they're stumbling on these questions, like, Can I do it? Do I belong? Am I enough? That's the time when they need us to believe in them more. You don't get to that success by just telling kids something like, you're number one or you're the best, yeah, like, that's not the vehicle. There's a colleague in Amsterdam, Eddie Berman, who's done a lot of work on parapraise practices, and he has a kind of three part set for raising young people with high self esteem. He's written papers that have titles like my child is God's gift to humanity, which are about how undeserved excessive praise cause harm, and the kind of harm they cause is.
00:46:46.960 --> 00:48:28.039
First, often we give that praise to young people who we think have low self esteem, to try to raise their self esteem. We sit like you have a kid who seems unsure of themselves, and you say you're number one, and that actually Eddie shows lowers kids self esteem because it sets up a standard that they think they'll never reach. And then there's other kids who actually do have high self esteem, and then they get that kind of praise, and that sets them up for things like narcissism, like kind of excessive self focus. So Eddie says that instead, what we need is we need, first, we need unconditional regard. I love you no matter what. Like, my love for you is not conditional on anything. And then second, we need honest feedback. Like, here's where you are. Like, this is, this is kind of coming from wise feedback, a little bit like, here's where you are. And then third, we need the growth mindset. So I believe you can become so it's the high standards, and then the assurance part, and that Eddie argues, is the kind of recipe, the kind of simple, three part recipe, raising kids with high self esteem, amazing. I think that's one of the things we all struggle with, like, how do I convey to my child that they can do this? Yeah, right, yeah. So in summary, we need to be looking out for those moments when our kids might be asking those big questions, and often they don't know that those questions are coming up to them, knowing that those things will come up is so, so helpful. And that's what I love about your book. Yeah. I mean, one thing we didn't talk about here, but it's just worth talking about it.
00:48:28.039 --> 00:48:47.320
Like, in one in one morning in Maine, Sal asks her mother, like, did you lose your teeth when you were little? And, like, think about that as a metaphor for everything. Like, I remember when I was 12 years old. I remember when I was 14 years old. I remember, like, the goods and I remember the bads and like, those are things to talk about,
00:48:48.400 --> 00:48:55.960
you know? Those are things to talk about. Like, that's a normal part of the experience. Here's what it was like for me. No, I love that.
00:48:53.079 --> 00:49:14.880
Do. My kids frequently ask me whether I went through the same thing, and even if I didn't go through it in exactly the same way, being honest about the experiences of being that age are very helpful to them. Like, there's like a memoir level of the analysis, like, this was my story and this was your story.
00:49:11.760 --> 00:49:23.719
This was my child's story. This was your child. But there's also a more Gestalt level of the analysis, like this is our story. Like this is what those individual stories add up to.
00:49:23.719 --> 00:49:37.820
This was my version of it, this was your version of it, and this was your child's version of it, this was my child's version of it, and, and when you see it like that, you can see how normal it really is. Yeah, yeah, absolutely brilliant. I love it.
00:49:37.820 --> 00:49:59.920
I think this book is really I'm going to go back and have another reads, because there are so many interesting points in it, and I think very often with the skills that and the understanding that I'm trying to encourage with the podcast, these things take time in the same way that with our kids. So if we think about how hard it is for us to learn and then relearn, and then we understand it's the same for our kids it takes.
00:50:00.000 --> 00:50:07.260
Time, doesn't it to but you have to be going in an upward spiral rather than a downward spiral.
00:50:03.360 --> 00:50:25.340
Yeah. So we can't get these things overnight. I've been doing so much learning. Greg, thank you so much. If people would like to get in contact with you, I'll put some notes in the podcast. What's the best way for them to get in touch? I'm not on social media, but they can go to my website and contact me through there. I'm wishing you well with the rest of your research. Thank you. You too.
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