In this special summer episode, Michael and Diane are joined by David Yeager, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the new book 10 to 25, which explores key insights into youth development. Together, they dive into the critical lessons highlighted in his book, including the science behind effective mentorship, the significance of transparency and practical strategies to help young people reframe and manage stress.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. How are you?

Diane Tavenner: I am well. This is a first for us. We are doing a special summer episode, and for good reason.

Michael Horn: We are trying to break out of the old structures of a summer break where kids go home and don’t go to school. We’re trying to break out of that model that we’ve always done in this podcast and have an important conversation about a book that is upcoming and will be out by the time this podcast is released. So, Diane, why don’t you introduce the book and our special guest?

Diane Tavenner: I’m excited to welcome Dr. David Yeager to the podcast today. He’s a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and has a long, long list of accomplishments and works with a number of other learning scientists. I encourage you all to go look at that impressive bio. Let me just share personally that we met about a decade ago, and I have always been such a huge fan because David’s work is so applicable to schools, young people, mentoring, teachers, and parenting. He is, in my view, one of the rare researchers who not only has a background in those areas but is deeply committed to making sure his research is actually meaningful and embedded in practice. Over the years, we’ve had tons of incredible dialogues and conversations about very practical things in schools. He had a huge influence on our summit learning model when I was at Summit. I am so excited for his upcoming book called “10 to 25.” 

It’s all about mentoring, which is a huge part of what I have worked on and focused on in my career. I am thrilled that you’re here with us today to have this conversation. David, welcome.

David Yeager: Thanks a lot. It’s great to be here. Diane, I think it was twelve years ago we met.

Diane Tavenner: Wow, Yeah.

David Yeager: You were my favorite person. We met at this crazy meeting where we were briefing thought leaders in education reform. The last question of that interview was, “If you could do one thing, what would it be?” Whatever I said, a week later, you’re like, “Okay. So we did that thing you said, now can you help us?” I was like, I love Diane Tavenner. She’s just gonna make it happen. So I’ve always been your admirer, and it’s great to be on this podcast.

Michael Horn: It’s not just talk with Diane, it is action.

David Yeager: Yeah, be careful what you say. She’ll do it.

Filling in the blanks on youth motivation 

Diane Tavenner: Well, thank you. We are thrilled to have you. I wanted to jump in. This is going to be kind of silly, but I think it’s meaningful. Your new book introduces what I would call a Madlib activity. It’s like a fill-in-the-blank activity and the fill-in-the-blank sentences. I know you’ve asked a bunch of people to complete this, so I’m curious about the different responses you’ve gotten. It starts with this idea: The sentence, “Given that young people are ____, the best way to motivate them is ____.” I鈥檇 love to know your response to that. Also, what do you normally hear from people when you ask them to fill in those sentence starters?

David Yeager: Let me just start with the most common things I hear. The most common thing I hear is, “Given that young people are kind of short-sighted, lazy, hard to motivate, not listening to grown-ups,” or something like that. Something kind of denigrating. Then you tend to see one of two things. One is 鈥淓xplain to them why all their choices now are not quite right and why they’re not aligned with their long-term best interests or motivate them with either threats or rewards.鈥� So, “If you do this, something bad is going to happen to you,” or “If you do this, I’ll give you this nice thing.” Either bribes or threats. That’s the most common answer I see. The second most common answer I see is, “Given that young people are stressed out, overwhelmed…”

Diane Tavenner: Addicted to their phone.

David Yeager: Right. Addicted to their phones, recovering from COVID, lonely, in the middle of a mental health epidemic, etc. The best way to motivate them is to remove their demands, chop up what they’re doing into tiny steps, help them feel a sense of success, let them feel confident, don’t overwhelm them. Basically, make it easy on them to grow up. Both of those internal logics make sense, but neither of them are great. The big punchline from my book is when I started studying people who do an awesome job at motivating young people, even in the most difficult of circumstances, they complete the sentence with, “Given that young people are capable of doing incredible things that make contributions to the world, the best way to motivate them is to inspire them, sometimes to get out of their way, to run interference, so that way things don’t derail their ambitions and hopes, but really support their potential to come alive.” I like this exercise because it reveals how our beliefs about young people are intimately tied to our practices and how we deal with them. That sounds obvious when I say it, but it’s not obvious to most people. They just think, “Okay, the best way to motivate people is the following,” and they don’t question the fact that that’s a choice, and it comes from a belief system, and it’s something that could be changed.

David鈥檚 Motivation for Writing 10 to 25 

Michael Horn: It’s really interesting. I’m feeling jealous at the moment because Diane’s had the chance to read the book in advance, and I will read it once it’s out. What motivated you to write this book, 10 to 25? What was your intention? What’s your hope for the book?

David Yeager: For me personally, the book comes from 15-20 years of frustration, feeling like the advice I had been given as a teacher and later that I saw in the research literature just wasn’t cutting it. It wasn’t good enough. I remember being a mediocre middle school teacher and caring so deeply for my kids and wanting to do everything for them and feeling like I never got that kind of inspiring, enthusiastic love of learning, where kids were embracing the hardest stuff and coming after class because they were curious about the topic. Then when I started doing research, I also felt like the answers I saw in the field were very… I don’t know, just not useful. It was very abstract and bland and not applicable. We’ve conducted a lot of research over the last 15 years, and part of the book is, “All right, let’s put that all in one place.”

I’m often asked about this part of my work. Some people think of me as the community college student success person, others as the purpose-in-life person, others as the youth mental health, and others as the growth mindset. I wanted all the work to be in one place, but the other thing was just an acknowledgment that there was a lot I didn’t know, and I needed to go out in the world and find great leaders who were awesome at motivating young people. The book is a combination of the science we’ve done over 15 years and original reporting on what I’ve learned from the wisdom of practice, I guess you could say.

The Mentoring Mindset

Michael Horn: Very cool. I’m curious, then. Diane teased that a lot of this book is not just about motivation and how to spark students, but a part of that is this mentoring mindset, I think you call it. I’ve certainly bought hook, line, and sinker on the importance of mentoring, but the mentoring mindset is a phrase that is unfamiliar to me. So, what is the mentoring mindset?

David Yeager: Yeah, the mentor mindset is an approach or a philosophy you take with a young person where you maintain very high standards. You’re tough, you expect a lot, but you’re supportive enough so that a young person can meet those standards. It’s not just saying, “Hey, I have super high standards, you can meet them or not,” which often ends up with maybe the top 5% doing well and everybody else struggling. It’s not saying, “I care about you, but I’m not going to ask a lot of you,” where maybe kids feel supported but they don’t grow and improve. The basic mentor mindset is high standards, and high support. It’s a simple idea.

Where does that come from? It comes from this investigation of the most successful people I could find in K-12 education, higher ed, academic research, NBA coaching, parenting, management at retail, grocery stores, management, and technology firms. I wanted to look at anyone who’s in charge of or relates to someone aged 10 to 25 in any of these domains. What do the most successful people have in common? The answer was this mentoring or mentor mindset. In the book, I describe it and also describe what’s the opposite of that. What happens if you don’t have that?

Diane Tavenner: Michael, you’ll love it because it is a two-by-two because you always have.

Michael Horn: You’re saying I’m going to feel at home is what you’re saying.

Taking an Asset-Based Approach

Diane Tavenner: You’re going to feel very at home. I love the mentoring mindset because it embodies the belief system that I’ve had for my career, this idea of high expectations and high support. Let’s just put names on the other ones that you were describing, David. There’s this enforcer mindset which is like you were describing, high expectations but no support, and this protector mindset which is high support but no expectations. One of the things I love in our conversation is you never start from a deficit mindset. You’re always an asset-based approach where you’re like, “Look, even those other two places have one of the two parts of the equation, so they’re halfway there. We just need to get the other half in there, if you will.” Say more about that.

David Yeager: Yeah, I think there are two ways in which it…

Diane Tavenner: Hopefully, I explained that properly.

David Yeager: Yeah, it was great. Later on the test, I’ll give you a high score. As a professor, I’m just walking around grading everyone. Just kidding. There are two ways in which we try to be asset-based. One is that suppose you’re in one of these off-diagonal cases, the enforcer mindset: all standards, low support; protector: all support, no standards. That’s coming from a good place and I started to talk about that. Then the second is, as you’re saying, reframing those two off-diagonal cases as you got half of it right, so just add the other half. Why do I say they’re coming from a good place? Well, I think for a long time people have felt torn. If I’m a manager, a boss, a teacher, a professor, I have a dichotomous choice between being the tough, authoritarian, dictator, kind of hard-nosed person who demands excellence. The negative consequence of that, of course, is kids and young people are crying and feeling debilitated and crushed. Most people don’t succeed.

But that is viewed as a necessary side effect of me upholding high standards. You can see how you could put your head on your pillow at night and feel good about that. It’s like, “I’m the gatekeeper to excellence and high performance, and I’m doing what I have to do, though it’s sometimes unpleasant to uphold the standard for culture or society or performance.” On the other side, where you’re very low standards but high support, what I call the protector mindset, there too, you can feel good about how you’re caring. You love young people. You’re putting their feelings and needs first. You’re being empathetic. You’re very attuned. Those are all good things to feel. The problem is that you’re also a pushover and young people don’t get anywhere. But it might feel like that’s the necessary consequence of protecting young people from the distress of this dog-eat-dog world that they can’t possibly succeed in. Both come from a concern for young people, both the enforcer and the protector. They’re just a little misguided.

The reason they’re misguided is because they’re embedded in this worldview we have about young people generally being incompetent. If you think they’re incompetent and I have to be tough, well, that’s enforcer. It’s like, “I need to maintain the standards, and I’m the last defense against the world descending into chaos.” That’s why I have to maintain rigorous standards. On the protector side, they’re incompetent, they’re weak, but that’s why I have to make up for what they lack by protecting them.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

David Yeager: So the mentor is like, “All right, let’s just take both of what’s good from those. You’ve got the high standards. Great. Add the support. You’ve got the support. Great. Add the standards so you can have two reasons now to feel good about yourself at the end of the day, not just one.”

The Transparency Statement

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, I love that approach. The book is filled with the science that’s behind it. One of the things I appreciate about you is it’s not only all the science and research you’ve done. You are highly collaborative, and you have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the other research in the space that everyone else has done. You are very generous in bringing those ideas into the book. We are not going to spend a lot of time on the science here today because we want to, given our audience, go to the practices that you put forward. But I will say for people who want to do a deep dive there, I’ve listened to the Huberman Lab podcast that you did. It鈥檚 3 hours, and it’s an extraordinary deep dive in that space. So I highly recommend that for people who want to go really deep there along with the book if you want to listen. I want to shift us over to these mindset practices. They’re particularly profound here in conversation.

Honestly, when I looked at the titles of these chapters and when I started digging in, these are things that Michael and I talk about all the time on the podcast. These are cornerstones of, in our view, what redesigned schools and learning experiences need to be building on, incorporating how they need to function, essentially. We are deeply aligned in our agenda for what learning can and should look like. Let me just say off the top because our listeners will recognize these. We’ll start with transparency, which is a really interesting intro. I think you say these go from easiest to implement to probably most challenging. So we’ll talk about that. Transparency, questioning, this reframing of stress, and then purpose and belonging. 

Again, our listeners have heard us talk about purpose and belonging sort of at nauseam, but we can keep talking. Let’s start with transparency because you have this very, very, I would say, easy lift that people can do, called a transparency statement. Tell us about that. What does that look like? How does that get you off on the right foot, quite frankly, in your relationship with young people?

David Yeager: The transparency statement that I write about is very simply explaining your motives whenever you are about to uphold some high standards and/or provide some support so that young people don’t interpret it in the worst possible light. That can be very short. Let’s take Uri Treisman, the world’s greatest freshman calculus professor I write about in chapter eleven. He’ll give students large intro courses in calculus, five problems where they have to find the limit of a function using L’Hopital’s rule. The thing is, most kids, when they take AP calculus, memorize L’Hopital’s rule, and then they just apply it to find the limits of functions. But the problem is that L’Hopital’s rule is not an analytic solution. It’s like a workaround.

So it doesn’t work. It breaks a lot. He’ll give students five problems, four of them L’Hopital’s rule won’t work for, and one it will. A normal teacher doesn’t do that. A normal teacher would think, “You’re a lunatic because they’re going to cry,” basically. Before he does that, he’s like, “All right, I just want you to know the reason why I’m doing this is because you guys are preparing to be mathematicians and to think mathematically. I want you to have careers long beyond this class. I don’t want you to apply math tricks. I want you to be able to take apart the math tricks, figure out how they work, and put them back together again.” He says that before they spend 25 minutes struggling. If you don’t, they would be in tears, thinking, “I’m dumb at math. I’m going to fail calculus. I’m never going to be a doctor or an engineer.” That’s where a freshman’s mind is going to go. You have to say something. In a world in which he says nothing and there’s crying, tears, and frustration, that’s not a great world. The most marginalized students are going to quit first because they’re also dealing with other stereotypes about whether they’re smart enough, etc. But in the world in which he has a transparency statement, it’s otherwise the exact same lesson and the students have the exact same great professor, but it means something totally different in that context.

That’s why it’s the easiest. You can already be awesome at mentor mindset stuff, high expectations, and high support, and you could be coming across the wrong way to your young people. Sometimes all you have to do is remind them of why you’re giving them something that’s a little unpleasant. The societal narrative currently about young people is, “Well, I shouldn’t have to explain myself, because if they weren’t such woke, wimpy idiots, then they would know that I’m here for them.” There’s a version in which people, adults and leaders, think, “I shouldn’t have to explain myself.” My answer to that is, look, for most young people, starting at the beginning of gonadarche and puberty until they’re in their twenties, that day you’re talking to them is the day on which they have the most testosterone they’ve ever had in their entire lives. That day and the next day when you do something else, that also will be the day on which they have the most testosterone they’ve ever had in their entire lives, both boys and girls.

That does all kinds of things to the brain that makes them over-interpret things that might be plausibly offensive. That’s why their head goes to this crazy place of, “I’ll never succeed,” or “You hate me,” or “This is biased,” etc. You just have to explain yourself two or three more times than you think you need to. Not because they’re too sensitive, but because the job of a young person is to figure out if they’re being taken seriously and respected. Just don’t make them guess. Just be transparent.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. One of the things that comes up in the book is this idea that at that developmental stage, they want status and they want respect, and there’s good biological reasons for that. When we are running counter to that, we’re creating all sorts of distance between us relationally, which makes so much sense to me. I can just say from my career, I can’t tell you how many of the rigorous teachers that I knew purposefully would not have been transparent upfront because they were actually trying to scare kids or create what is essentially a threatening environment because they thought that’s what they were supposed to do with high standards. The science is pretty clear that the effect they were having was not the effect that I think they ultimately wanted.

David Yeager: Right. I mean, I think there’s this mythology of the demanding leader that is impossible to please, and it’s a little bit ambiguous if you’ve won them over. In that mythology, you’re supposed to leave people you’re leading a little bit in the dark for a while and then only at the end reveal that you cared about them all along, but they’re supposed to be afraid for nine months so that way you get optimal performance. I 100% remember feeling that way as a teacher. If I tell them too quickly that I care about them, then they’re going to take advantage of me. But that’s not what the mentor mindset leaders do.

They’re super hard, and students are often crying in the first few months of their classes in college and K-12 settings. But they’re also super transparent so that by October, or November, students can now trust that when they ask a question, Mr. Estrada鈥擲ergio Estrada is one of the teachers I write about鈥�”Mr. Estrada, is this problem right?” He’d be like, “I don’t know. Is it right?” Initially, students hate that. But he says, “Look, I would never deprive you of the opportunity to know that you can understand physics. I care about you too much to lower standards. So that’s why I’m asking you the question back. So given that, do you think it’s right?” He’s got to say that for a couple of months. Eventually, students know that and then they start thinking on their own, and they own their own learning. It saves him tons of time. Later in the semester, they become independent thinkers. They go on to the next course in college and can do well. He’s given them that gift of being independent, thoughtful, curious, intellectual leaders, even though it was a little rocky at first because students aren’t used to it. But you’re not going to get there if you wait till May and they hate you all year. That’s idiotic. That’s mythology.

Questioning Techniques: Asking v. Telling 

Diane Tavenner: You’ve led us into the questioning technique. Some of those teachers we’re talking about, their class would also look like the professor not giving them any help or any support. That’s not what you’re talking about. Sergio and others that you profile, don’t they specifically have this strategy around asking, not telling? Tell us the dimensions and characteristics of that approach that are quite different from other folks.

David Yeager: I was really struck by the parenting coach that I followed who is almost always coaching parents to ask questions, not to tell their kids what to do. The similarities between great parenting and great teaching, great tutoring, and good management. The great manager I followed, Steph Akamoto, who was at Microsoft at the time, would do her performance reviews and ask questions like, “All right, how do you think that went?” and so on, get their opinions. Then she would say, “All right, for you to be a top 15% performer on your next performance evaluation, what’s a task you could do that’s above and beyond that would really impress everybody, and that would be something you would want to do and you want to learn?” Then they would generate two or three ideas. Then she’d be like, “Huh? All right, what are you worried about getting in the way of those things?” An example in the book is Steph’s doing a performance review when she was on the software testing unit for Microsoft. They would write manuals that would help the developers know what Windows is doing, for instance. Someone on her team was like, “Well, instead of just testing it and writing the manual, I could go talk to the engineers and fix all the goofy things with the software now, rather than have 20 pages in the manual about how the goofy thing is a workaround.” She’s like, “Okay, what would be hard about that?” “Well, the engineers don’t want to talk to a tester because I’m low status, and the manager is going to be like, ‘Stop wasting my engineers’ time.'” Then Steph would be like, “All right, would you mind if I contacted the manager and said, ‘Get off her case and let her go talk to your engineers?'” “No, that’s okay with me.”

So they formed this whole plan where her direct report could overperform and do something testers weren’t normally required to do. Steph’s out… She’s not doing it for the direct report, but she’s running interference to give her the freedom to be in the room to talk to the engineers. Six months later, her direct report is overperforming as the top 5-10% performer, gets a raise, promotional velocity, etc. But Steph didn’t do it for her. That’s what I mean by questioning. There’s a version of questioning that’s not good. If your kid comes home drunk and you’re like, “What were you thinking?” that’s not an authentic question. What you really mean is, “You were not thinking, and you’re an idiot, and you’re in trouble. I could not be madder at you.” 

That’s what you mean. There are versions of questions that are just about facts. What I’m really talking about is what I call in the book authentic questioning with uptake, where it’s a legitimate question that the person could have a true answer to that, in principle, the asker doesn’t know the answer to. Second, where the question builds on some thinking the person has done. I found mentors did that a lot and did it really well, whether it was the NBA’s best basketball coach, Sergio Estrada in physics class, Uri Treisman in calculus, or Steph at Microsoft.

Reframing Stress

Diane Tavenner: It’s resonating with me on multiple levels because as I build this new product to help young people figure out what they want to do in the future, this was the cornerstone of our approach. We would ask authentic questions of them and help them discover and explore versus the traditional approaches that kind of tell you, “We have this black box questionnaire or test, and then we tell you, ‘Oh, guess what? You should be a firefighter or a mortician or whatever.'” Young people are like, “What are you talking about? That’s not me.” So very resonant. The next piece is a total reframing of stress. Especially coming out of COVID. Michael and I started the podcast during the middle of COVID and everyone, probably at the time, really swung one direction about, “People are so incredibly stressed.”

We have to completely fundamentally change our expectations and our behaviors in response to that stress. I still think there’s a belief that young people and kids are so stressed. This is where I think the protector mindset comes in a lot. The science, though, tells us something very different. We should think differently about stress and then act differently accordingly. Tell us about that.

David Yeager: This was an important chapter in the book because there’s a world in which managers are out there saying, or teachers, or professors, “I’m a mentor mindset. Therefore, I have mega hard expectations for you, and you need to suck it up and just deal with how stressful it is.” That’s not what you see the best mentor mindset leaders doing. They definitely maintain standards. They definitely imply you should stick with it. But they don’t tell you to suppress your stress or feelings of frustration, etc. Instead, they have ways of reframing the negative emotions that tend to come from pushing yourself to your frontiers and reframing them as, one, a sign you’ve chosen to do something important and meaningful. If it was easy, then anyone would do it kind of thing.

But the fact that it’s hard means that you are doing something impressive. The fact that you’re stressed often means you care about it, that it matters to you, and that’s cool to do something that matters to you. Then, second, that those worries actually can be fuel to help you do better. You see that a lot. If you look at great one-on-one tutors or even a good golf coach or tennis coach, they’re really asking you to go take on a challenge. In athletics, choose harder opponents, and if it’s tutoring, choose the harder problems and try them if you can’t master them. Second, that physiological arousal of heart racing, palms sweating, butterflies in your stomach, that’s your body mobilizing oxygenated blood to your muscles and your brain cells, and that’s helping you to be stronger and your brain to think faster and so on. Most people don’t think that way.

They think the fact that I have butterflies in my stomach and my heart’s racing means my body’s about to shut down, that my body’s betraying my goals, and it’s going to get in the way. We talk a lot about the science of reframing away from what’s called a suppression approach. So classic suppression would be, well, as a parent, “Stop crying. Stop being sad.” You just tell your kid to stop feeling the way they’re feeling. But as a teacher, what you often see is, “You’ve prepared. You shouldn’t feel stressed. You’re fine. You can do this. You should feel confident.” You see this a lot. Kids say it to each other, “Oh, you shouldn’t be stressed out.” It’s like, no, actually, you should be stressed if it matters to you and it’s legitimately hard. Reassuring you that you shouldn’t be stressed is a suppression approach. It turns out if you suppress feelings, they just come back stronger and get in the way. The protector mindset leads you to that suppression approach. You feel so bad that you feel distressed that I want you to get rid of it, and I want to get rid of it either by removing the demand or telling you to push the feelings down, you know, push them away, don’t feel stressed, etc. I tell the story in the book about a student of mine who emailed and said, “Look, my mom just died. Most important person to me in the world. I can’t possibly do the assignments for the next couple weeks.

I hope this won’t make me fail, but I鈥檓 just telling you I can’t do it.” I could tell from the tone that most of my colleagues at UT would either imply that she was lying about it and that she had to prove it or would say, “Just take an incomplete in the class,” either to save you the distress or because the teachers are worried about it being unfair to the other students in the class. That wasn’t my approach. I had been thinking a lot about this stress approach, and instead my approach was, “Look, let’s separate the intellectual difficulty of what you’re doing from the logistical difficulty. The intellectual difficulty is you have to do an awesome final project that’s very impressive, that hopefully you can talk about in your job interviews, can be on your resume, and that you’re proud of. I don’t want to take that away from you. That’s why you took my class, was to learn new stuff and do things that are impressive. Frankly, your mom cared for you and rooted for you throughout college because you were doing cool, impressive stuff.

So one way to honor your mom’s memory is to do a great final project in my class. Do I really care that you do the daily busy work that I assigned? No. That’s only there to help you get prepared to do the final project. What I did is I reduced the demands for the logistical stuff, like the busy work, and I was like, just communicate with your group, and whenever you’re ready, come back and then do your final project with them. She took two and a half, three weeks off and just kind of stayed in touch with her group, and then they did a fully kick-ass final project. They created this whole AI-based support to help teachers do empathic discipline rather than very harsh discipline. Three years ago, they did this before GPT was released, and then she talked about it in her interview, got this job for a major financial services group, and now is traveling the world on this rotational program, fast track for managers. She immigrated from Africa, is a very interesting young woman of color who is constantly trying to help improve society and culture.

I caught up with her a year later. I was like, “Did I do the right thing? Should I have just given you an incomplete?” She’s like, “No. Half my professors told me to take an incomplete, but then I couldn’t have graduated on time, and then I wouldn’t be in this financial services mentoring program.” That’s an example where if you have the belief that young people are capable of impressive stuff with the right support, then you start thinking about, sometimes you maintain the intellectual demand or the demand for the work that’s truly impressive, but the way you support them is to reduce some of the logistical demands. I think a lot of people mistake those two. They think being a hard-ass on deadlines is what it means to be demanding. But I think it’s having people own thinking and contributions. That that’s the demand. Deadlines are a means to get there.

Diane Tavenner: I love this chapter. The whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking back because you alluded to this in the beginning, David, but the first two times we met each other were arguably under very stressful circumstances that I would not trade, though. I mean, we were, in the first case, presenting our work to Bill Gates directly, and in the second case at the White House, presenting. If someone had taken those opportunities away from us, I think we would be very regretful. It was stressful. Those are stressful.

David Yeager: So stressful, but it’s stressful in a way where you have to bring your A-game. I think the challenge is to see it as a positive opportunity to perform at your peak rather than a threatening opportunity to fail publicly. When you do the latter, you’re still sweating, your heart’s racing, and you’re worried but doing poorly. But you also are like, all right, let’s go. It’s like if I’m a good surfer on a huge wave, that’s how you want to feel.

Purpose and Belonging

Diane Tavenner: So, David, with our last few minutes here, we’re going to give you the tall task of talking purpose and belonging, which are very significant. I should say the end of your book pulls all of this into whole models and approaches. Tell us the key concept here of purpose and belonging in your work.

David Yeager: I think that, as you know, 10-15 years ago, those were not concepts people talked about in education reform. It was like curriculum and interests were probably the two biggest things. The idea of a meaningful purpose, that wasn’t around. I think Bill Damon’s work brought purpose to a lot of people’s radars, and I did a lot of the early randomized experiments, but even now, I think it’s not as well known. Belonging, for a long time, was thought of as this soft self-esteem boost. Everyone needs a hug from all the world’s friends. It wasn’t taken seriously.

I think the common thread across the two is that they’re super powerful, especially for young people who are trying to make it through the world, having a sense of status and respect. Purpose, because you want to contribute something of value to the world around you. Having a meaningful purpose where it’s something beyond myself is depending on me, that’s super motivating for young people. A lot of education gets that wrong because they just make an argument about making money in the future or using this lesson plan in a job in the future, or it’s a delay of gratification, a long-term self-interest argument. I don’t think that’s ever really going to work to drive deeper learning. But the idea that right now somebody’s depending on you, having mastered something and done a good job, I think that’s really meaningful. In an enforcer mindset, you wouldn’t think of that because you’d be like, well, they’re going to choose the laziest possible way to do things no matter what. The only way we can entice them to do tedious work is through rewards, now, or delayed rewards later.

Belonging is similar in that now that it’s starting to get on the radar, more people are talking about it, but it’s still misconstrued. A lot of people think belonging is, “I’m going to give you a ‘You Belong’ sticker to slap on your laptop, and all of a sudden achievement gaps are going to disappear.” As I say in the book, you can’t declare belonging by fiat. It has to be experienced. One of the big things that has to happen is you have to help young people tell themselves a story of how difficulties could be overcome through actions that they could take. Then over time, they actually feel a sense of belonging in a community. I think that purpose and belonging go hand in hand because one way you know you’re valued by a community is when you’ve contributed something that they perceive as important to that community back in our evolutionary history. I think there’s a lot more in the book and there are stories about how you leverage those two to get deeper, more lasting, meaningful motivations rather than more frivolous things like turning education into a slot machine.

I don’t think that’s going to do it. What’s more important is appealing to a deeper purpose, a sense of connection, a sense of mattering, and so on.

Diane Tavenner: That’s awesome. There is so much more in the book. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I hope everyone will read it and ping us with questions, thoughts, and what comes up for you. Maybe at some point, we can circle back and do even more on the other pieces when we hear from our readers what they think. Michael鈥�

Michael Horn:  I was going to say the same thing. Just huge thanks first, David. Check out the book 10 to 25. I got a lot just from this conversation that has whetted my appetite, and I know many others will as well. Let’s circle back once we have some more fodder because I can tell we’re scratching the surface and you’ve hit these hot-button topics that, as you said, David, we sort of know there’s something there, but the full depth of how it’s understood is not there yet in the education field. I appreciate you writing this and joining us.

David Yeager: Absolutely.

Michael Horn: For all those listening, we’ll be back next time on Class Disrupted. Thank you again.

The study, which leverages a massive survey sample collected online throughout the pandemic, was published Tuesday morning in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. Its findings highlight the mental and emotional toll exacted by COVID, while also offering new insights into how different employment sectors coped with its hardships.

Polling has consistently shown teachers and other school employees reporting signs of elevated stress over the last two years, with education experts worrying that higher levels of burnout might cause more educators to leave the profession. Joseph Kush, a professor of psychology at James Madison University and one of the paper鈥檚 authors, said that he and his collaborators were 鈥渒ind of shocked鈥� at the results.

鈥淥ur thought was that healthcare workers battling this virus on the front lines would clearly have the highest levels of distress,鈥� Kush said. 鈥淎nd they were very high, but we found that teachers were actually quite a bit higher.鈥�

The study relies on data from the COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey, an ongoing measure of public opinion developed by Facebook and Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 epidemiology-focused Delphi Research Group. The poll solicits daily responses from a random sample of Facebook users about their physical and mental health.

Kush and his co-authors, a trio of researchers from Johns Hopkins University, gathered data from between September 2020 and March 2021 鈥� , when deaths often exceeded 3,000 per day and vaccines were still not widely administered. They focused on information from over 2.7 million employed adults, including nearly 135,000 teachers. Demographic identifiers related to age, gender, educational attainment, household size, and level of economic worry were also included.

Finally, they compared self-reported instances of anxiety, depression, and isolation among four different areas of the American workforce: education (from preschool through high school), healthcare workers, office workers, and a broad category of 鈥渙ther鈥� occupations, including military personnel and agricultural workers. 

The results were striking. By far, teachers had the highest odds of reporting anxiety 鈥� 40 percent higher than healthcare workers, 20 percent higher than office workers, and 30 percent higher than members of the 鈥渙ther鈥� category.鈥� They were also likelier than healthcare workers, though by smaller increments, to report feeling isolated or depressed; office workers and 鈥渙thers鈥� were notably more likely than teachers to say they were feeling isolated.

The spectrum of mental health ailments interacts somewhat unexpectedly with the frequency of remote vs. in-person work. While the healthcare category is broad 鈥� encompassing nurses and doctors, but also dentists, home health aides, and therapists 鈥� it is taken to represent the group that incurred the greatest risk of contracting COVID. White-collar employees, by contrast, were perhaps the demographic most shielded from the pandemic鈥檚 effects, with a huge proportion of offices operating remotely through the early months of 2021.

In the middle sat teachers, who fluctuated between in-person and remote instruction depending on timing and geography. School employees often received little clear guidance from or authorities on how best to mitigate health risks to themselves and their students, and most were also navigating a chaotic transition to virtual teaching. 

Kush said that while the degree of remote work was perhaps the single factor most correlated with worsening mental health, the education profession sat particularly uneasily atop the pandemic鈥檚 ambiguities.

鈥淓ducation was unique in that it grappled, even within districts, about whether teachers were going to work in-person from week to week,鈥� said Kush. 鈥淭hat change, and the uncertainty in that, clearly brings this spike in anxiety.鈥�

Notably, the remote-vs.-in-person dynamic was also present within the teaching workforce itself. Teachers conducting their lessons in Zoom classrooms were substantially more likely to experience symptoms of depression and (somewhat predictably) isolation than their colleagues working in school buildings. 

Whether the study鈥檚 findings can be boiled down to a simple mechanism 鈥� that working away from customers, colleagues, and students simply led to lower emotional well-being 鈥� will depend on the findings of further research, including an investigation of which workers reported relatively worse mental health before COVID emerged and after its most severe disruptions were allayed. 

One demographic caveat worthy of further examination pertains to gender: Female teachers were 70 percent more likely than male teachers to say that they felt anxiety during the period covered by the study. The teaching field is predominantly female, though the same could be said of healthcare workers.

鈥淭he makeup of the education and healthcare workforces is relatively similar, and we see gender differences both across all occupations and when we examine teachers exclusively,鈥� Kush said. 鈥淪o not only is this finding generalizable across all occupations, but even within teachers.鈥�

In the third and final survey of young people during the pandemic by the national nonprofit YouthTruth, 49 percent of students talked about the detrimental effects of growing mental and emotional issues while just 39 percent said they had an adult at school to whom they could turn for support. The gap in access to social and emotional help has widened even from fall 2020 survey data, at the start of students鈥� first full pandemic school year.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 蜜桃影视 Newsletter

YouthTruth Executive Director Jen Wilka said adult connection was actually at its highest at the start of emergency distance learning in spring 2020. Those interactions and energy, which students say is key to learning, are not as strong now a year and a half later, evidenced by the declining number of young people who say they have a supportive adult in their school orbit.

鈥淪tudents really felt that increase in their teachers making an effort to sort of reach outside and beyond those virtual walls and understand what it is like,鈥� Wilka said. 鈥淭hat has now waned, and is closer to normal, maybe a little bit higher than normal. We saw that really peak in spring 2020.鈥�

One aspect of student-adult relationships in school that has improved over time is respect. Some 70 percent of students said they think adults treat youth with respect 鈥� up significantly from the 57 percent who believed that pre-pandemic.

A narrative animation compiles student write-in responses on stress, anxiety, and depression and how it affected their learning in 2020-21. (YouthTruth)

YouthTruth, which solicits student, family, and educator feedback, analyzed data from 206,950 third- through 12th-grade students across 19 states and 585 urban, suburban and rural schools. Open-ended and choice responses were solicited via anonymous 15-minute surveys from January through May 2021.

Previous pandemic-era surveys were conducted in 2020 by YouthTruth from (20,000 students) and (85,170 students). Mental health concerns have consistently been a barrier to learning, and high school seniors鈥� plans post-graduation continue to be affected by the pandemic. Students have been vocal about the importance of building relationships with their teachers, and their sense of belonging within their school community peaked in fall 2020.

Twenty-one percent of those most recently surveyed attend high-poverty schools, similar to the national average of 25 percent, and students鈥� racial identities mirror national averages.

For students of all gender identities, depression, stress, and anxiety has become more prevalent as a barrier to learning since fall 2020. For female- and non-binary identifying students, the rates are much higher, 60 and 83 percent, respectively.

Youth cite overwhelming workloads with assignments that lack relevance to their daily life and futures, according to write-in responses and qualitative analysis.

鈥淪chool restricts me from being content with who I am,鈥� one high school upperclassman shared. 鈥淲e need to radically change the education system, it’s way overdue for that and it needs to right now. I cannot get out of bed anymore. I hate school more than how I used to. I’m mentally strained because of distance learning […] However, an English assignment and 11 other assignments are due by 11:59pm tonight because grades are so important – more important than surviving and finding new healthy coping mechanisms after all.鈥�

Education leaders across the country are seeking ways to ameliorate growing concerns for students鈥� emotional and social well-being; a number of states plan to utilize American Rescue Plan funds to bolster mental health access.

In the North Clackamas School District, serving the greater Portland, Oregon area, social and mental health services were established pre-COVID yet leaders saw emotional needs grow during the pandemic. In response to the changing ways students needed access to adults and sought connection, the district partnered with providers and nonprofits to offer telehealth services, devices, and hotspots to youth and their families districtwide.

Through the pandemic, the district sought to make 鈥渟ure that we had established pathways that were normalized, made very typical and open for families to access a mental health therapist,鈥� Dr. Shelly Reggiani, the district鈥檚 director of equity and instruction, told 蜜桃影视 during a YouthTruth press call last week.

In sharing other ways to remove learning barriers and improve engagement, youth said they鈥檇 like to see more real-world topics, like applying for higher education, financial aid, and jobs and learning personal finance.

Survey results show that fewer seniors surveyed this spring will head to four-year institutions this fall, a trend also reflected by declining enrollment rates, which saw the worst single-year decline since 2011. And though more will enroll in two-year colleges than in fall 2020 鈥� about 20 percent of those surveyed 鈥� the proportion hasn鈥檛 yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

Qualitative survey data revealed some of the barriers that persist for high schoolers looking to access higher education. Students recognized 鈥渢he need for social capital (like from a teacher or sibling) as part of college access,鈥� the confusing nature of the application process, which is typically formally taught during the school day, and felt that finding information and choosing to apply came 鈥渢oo late,鈥� YouthTruth researchers told 蜜桃影视.

鈥淭he school is pushing students to go to a four-year college and for most students they don鈥檛 want to go to a four-year college because they don鈥檛 want to go into debt,鈥� one student said.

鈥淕ive us Pathways for the Future,鈥� one of four video animations depicting trends from 480,000 open-ended responses and reflections on the 2020-21 academic year. (YouthTruth)

鈥淭hey’re really searching for meaning in learning, and that’s an opportunity for us as educators to connect learning, and real life, and relevance to help address students鈥� needs here,鈥� Sonya Heisters, YouthTruth鈥檚 deputy director, said.

Other notable findings

• Secondary school students鈥� perceptions of learning and belonging returned to pre-pandemic levels
• Many Spanish-speaking students detailed how language barriers became an additional obstacle to their learning during virtual and hybrid environments, and 21 percent of Hispanic/Latino students cited lack of teacher support as an obstacle to learning compared to just 14 percent of other students.
• Providing inclusive curricula, adopting anti-racist policies, and treating students fairly are common recommendations found among data from 5,000 Black / African-American students.
• Many students enjoyed paper-free learning, and hope to maintain access to online materials with the return to in-person school
• Black/African-American and Hispanic/Latino students report feeling unsafe in school at higher rates than their peers, at 11 and 16 percent respectively vs. 9 percent for non-Black, non-Hispanic students.
• 65 percent of students report that their teachers give extra help when needed, but this is more common among students who receive high academic grades

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to YouthTruth and 蜜桃影视. 

If Dr. Catherine Monk and her research team have their way, these visits soon will routinely include high-quality psychological interventions as well, based on researchers鈥� growing awareness of the effect mental and emotional stress during pregnancy can have on the mother鈥檚 health and the baby鈥檚 brain development.

Monk, professor of medical psychology in the Departments of OB/Gyn and Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, directs the department鈥檚 research laboratory, where a team of researchers focuses on the earliest influences on children鈥檚 development by connecting perinatal psychiatry, developmental psychobiology and neuroscience to study child development in utero.

Their research increasingly underscores the direct links between a mother鈥檚 psychological and emotional wellbeing, and changes taking place in her developing child鈥檚 brain.

As one strategy to help women and prevent mental health risks for their future children, Monk leads a new integrated care program, Women鈥檚 Mental Health @Ob/Gyn, that embeds mental health care practitioners within obstetrics and gynecology, and employs all the tools at their disposal to help reduce stress levels in their pregnant patients.

Adult psychiatric illness and mental health issues such as depression are known to be profoundly affected by the genes a person inherits and by the quality of care they receive as a child. Researchers now know a pregnant woman鈥檚 stress, anxiety and depression can create a 鈥渢hird pathway鈥� for mental health concerns, Monk says.

The precise mechanism of the damage to the child鈥檚 neural development isn鈥檛 fully known, but numerous animal models and epidemiological samples indicate that distress-based changes in pregnant women鈥檚 biology are associated with negative cardiovascular, metabolic and psychological effects in their children. The release of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones creates a chemical stew that can alter the brain chemistry of the fetus: Reduce the mother鈥檚 stress and lessen the harm to the developing child.

Though the womb is a baby鈥檚 first home and as influential as any they will ever have, researchers are just getting started probing its mysteries. 鈥淎bout 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, which is usually in the first trimester. Is that because of such a big stress effect that the baby doesn鈥檛 make it?鈥� Monk says.

鈥淭he second trimester is a time of phenomenal brain development, but the synaptogenesis (the development of neural circuits) really peaks in the third trimester. In the third trimester, we start seeing early births, and stress possibly plays a role in those. We are in our infancy in terms of parsing out which trimester is particularly relevant to what exposure.鈥�

One dramatic effect that is known about stress 鈥� and that illustrates its profound influence in utero 鈥� is that fewer male babies are born to women who are physically and psychologically stressed. On average, about 105 males are born for every 100 female births, but one study Monk and her colleagues conducted measured 27 different indicators of psychosocial, physical and lifestyle stress, and found that about a third of the women were experiencing 鈥渃linically meaningful鈥� high levels of mental stress and sub-clinical levels of physical stress. Among these women, the male-to-female birth ratios were dramatically altered, 40/60 and 30/70, respectively.

After social upheavals such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the relative number of male births decreased, Monk says. Studies have shown that males fetuses are more vulnerable to adverse environmental conditions. This suggests that highly stressed women are less likely to have male babies because they lose the pregnancy, often without even knowing that they were pregnant.

鈥淢any researchers want to study women who are pregnant during our current, very stressful period,鈥� she says. From the COVID pandemic itself to job losses, loss of health insurance, concerns about family members, changes in hospital labor and delivery policies, a woman鈥檚 inability to have her caregivers with her for the birth or with her at home afterward, the Year 2020 wins the stress sweepstakes for just about all of us, and especially so for pregnant women. What this will mean for babies born during this time will bear close watching 鈥� and interventions whenever and wherever they can be made.

Despite the fact that 10 to 15% of women in the U.S. experience depression in pregnancy or postpartum 鈥� and up to 30% when substance abuse and anxiety are factored in 鈥� most pregnant women encounter barriers to accessing mental health services. Most insurance companies don鈥檛 cover behavioral health care or do so adequately, so women have to go outside their network for it 鈥� if they are able to get it at all. The consequences are not only devastating for the depressed woman and her developing child, they are costly for society.

Important Interventions

Monk emphasizes that, though prenatal stress has these effects on the developing child, it isn鈥檛 in itself a life sentence for the baby. Important interventions such as regular obstetric visits that keep a close eye on the mother鈥檚 blood pressure, weight and other health indicators can make a big difference, as can making sure the woman receives adequate nutrition and supplemental vitamins, particularly iron and zinc.

The care and warm interaction both a mother and baby receive during the postpartum period can also go a long way toward mitigating prenatal harms. As it turns out, social interaction is good medicine for both mother and child. 聽听听

The good news is that none of the prenatal and postpartum interventions Monk and her team recommend are massive, intrusive or burdensome. Their Women鈥檚 Mental Health service deploys two psychologists, two social workers and two psychiatric nurse practitioners 鈥� one of whom is a doula 鈥� to meet their pregnant patients鈥� emotional and mental health needs.

Another intervention is called (Practical Resources for Effective Postpartum Parenting), which Monk describes as 鈥渧ery light-touch鈥� 鈥� six sessions in which a coach prepares women for the postpartum period with mindfulness tools so they can find groundedness and calm when they need it. We provide education about what to expect with their baby coming, and provide a lot of tools for them to feel confident in being able to take care of the baby.

鈥淭he mother鈥檚 calm can then help the baby be its calmest self, too.鈥�

Monk says the pandemic has required that these PREPP sessions now be conducted via telemedicine, but that has created a silver lining in showing that even prenatal visits can be successfully conducted through smartphones. This is especially important for women who are economically, socially or geographically disadvantaged 鈥� which all too often means women of color.

As with other effects of intergenerational stress and poverty, Black women and other women of color are disproportionately affected by both physical and psychological stress, which makes interrupting the pattern particularly important. Even families that don鈥檛 have computers at home usually have a smartphone, so the ability to reach these women through telemedicine opens up a whole new arena of accessibility for populations without access to the internet.

Though social distancing is one of the primary keys to controlling the spread of coronavirus, following distancing orders during these times can be especially difficult for pregnant women. Family and friends should never underestimate their ability to stay connected and make a dramatic difference simply by calling, Zooming, FaceTiming and using technology in whatever ways they can to provide the social support that is so essential for a woman during her pregnancy and in the postpartum period.

Monk says her intention is that the Women鈥檚 Mental Health @Ob/Gyn project will serve as a model for embedding mental health care into America鈥檚 obstetric practice nationwide and eventually pave the way for including behavioral health services in primary care settings more generally. When families are able to access counseling and psychotherapy as easily as they can get a strep test or cholesterol screening, that will be one giant step for a healthy 鈥� and mentally well 鈥� human future.