Recorded on Tuesday, March 25, 2025

TRANSCRIPT

Jason Zengerle '96 Welcome, everyone. It is great to have you with us tonight. Thank you so much for joining us for this sweet talk about how parents can motivate their kids in school, featuring Rebecca Winthrop from the class of 1996. This evening's talk is, as always, sponsored by the Swarthmore Alumni Council. My name is Jason Lee. I am also a member of the class of 1996, and I'm a member of the Alumni Council.

Before we get into Rebecca's talk and I turn things over to our moderator for the evening, Amy Brennan, who's from the class of 2000, I just wanted to go over a few preliminary pieces of business. For those of you who are new to swap talks, or for our regulars who just need a reminder, tonight will go like this.

For the first half hour or so, Rebecca and Amy will be in conversation. Then for the second half hour. Rebecca will answer any questions you might have. Please ask your questions by using the Q&A feature at the bottom of zoom, and please be sure to include your name and class year when you do so. Amy will collect those questions and we'll pose as many of them as she can to Rebecca during the Q&A session.

And now that that is out of the way, I will get out of the way and turn things over to Amy.

Amy Brennan '00 Thank you. Jason. And welcome, everybody. It's great to be with you. As Jason mentioned, I'm Amy Brennan, class of 2000, and just really delighted to join you tonight to learn more from Rebecca's really important research. I have a professional and a personal interest, so a little bit about me. I currently serve as Deputy Superintendent in Mason City Schools, which is a beautifully diverse school district of over 10,000 students and north of Cincinnati, Ohio.

And in that role, really, I'm driven by the mission everyday of trying to ensure each and every one of our learners discovers their purpose and potential. And, and on a personal note, at home, I also am the mom to two teenagers, Ellie, 16, and Jack, 13. So that mission continues around the dinner table and on car rides and so on.

So I recently had the great pleasure of meeting Rebecca, actually at a gathering of other assistant superintendents, chief academic officers from across the Midwest. She was sharing her book. And, really, as I listened to her really compelling research, her thoughtful insight, I don't know how else to describe it except to say my Swarthmore Spidey senses started to activate, and I just thought, could I could she be also a fellow alum?

So a quick Google and confirmed. Yes, I had found another slot, and have already felt so lucky to learn from her. So having had the chance to now hear from Rebecca, myself and read the book, I know that we are in for a great evening of learning and practical insights that you can apply with your own children or other young people in your life.

So, it's really about not just students learning and children learning well, but also living well. So without further ado, it's my pleasure to introduce Rebecca Winthrop. She is a pioneering authority in the field of education, dedicated to ensuring that every child has the opportunity to thrive in life, work, and as an engaged citizen. She leads cutting edge research and initiatives aimed at transferring warming education systems around the world to better support children's learning and development.

Rebecca is a trusted advisor to both school communities and national and international organizations. So welcome, Rebecca. I'll hand it over to you.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Thank you. Amy. And in my current role, at Brookings and I, I teach a tiny bit at Georgetown. I get to travel around the country and meet incredible people and swap connections. Never ceases to amaze me. So, yay for Swarthmore. We are all doing amazing work in many different corners of the globe.

So I am going to share my screen for a couple minutes. Just a couple slides to kick us off, and then I will stop sharing and we will have a discussion that Amy will lead us through for the rest of the time. So bear with me as I try to make this work, which I think does a good thing.

Yeah, okay, great. So what I want to share with you all today is from a new book I've coauthored with a journalist, colleague, and friend of mine named Jenny Anderson. And this has, this came out. Gosh, it seems like a long time ago, but really, I think it came out in January. What are we? March? So recently.

And it was the result of several years of research that had lots of good data in it. Qualitative data. We followed 100 kids in the US and some in the UK. My, my coauthor is London based and some of them over multiple years, partnered with an education nonprofit called transcend, the Brookings transcend partnership on, large scale survey data and lots and lots of interviews and focus groups and all that good stuff with parents and educators and and people like Amy across the country.

And our big takeaway is that kids really don't like school the more they spend in it. Now, we at Swarthmore may be the exception. I'm not sure if this was all of our personal experience in that school, but by and large, when we see that, you know, in third grade, 75% of kids say they love school, and by 10th grade, it's flipped on the 25%.

And the question: do you love school? Is not to indicate that that is the most important thing. We're not saying kids should be, you know, joyous and happy every moment of time. Learning is hard. Life is hard. They'll be hard, a range of experiences. But we did find that it was a pretty good standard. It's not a perfect standard to how engaged kids are, because, after all, as Amy and anybody else who spent time in a classroom can tell you that how kids feel about learning really impacts how much effort they put into it.

So that was finding one. The other, sort of high level finding I want to frame for you all, is just how important student engagement is. And in the world of education, parenting, education system, transformational, all these things we often forget that student motivation and engagement, which are sort of two sides of the same coin. I should pause for a moment here.

Student motivation is internal and engagement is what kids do with that motivation. So, for example, I'm very motivated to work out. I don't want to use purposes, but I have yet to join a gym, so I am not engaged in working out. That's the difference. And a lot of times we think we royally, especially those of us in the education community, think about student motivation and engagement as sort of the nice to have after everything is in place.

The sort of cherry on the top of the ice cream sundae, you know, after you deal with school safety, that's a really huge thing. Classroom management and behavior management problems and getting your, Nape scores, which is sort of your academic, performance up and a good grade level, etc. and then, oh, and let's care about student engagement.

But really what we found is that it is actually central to everything. It's more of the ice cream in the ice cream sundae than the cherry on top. So I always say to my fellow education colleagues, if you really care about improving attendance and completion, you will. You should really care about student engagement. We have a very large chronic absenteeism problem in this country with still, on average, latest data, about a quarter of young people chronically absent from school.

You know, this was a huge spike in Covid and it's slowly coming down, but by no means fast enough. If you care about student achievement, some of you may have seen in the news that, you know, young people are not, regaining a ton, a ton in their sort of literacy and numeracy skills, from the Covid dip.

And that's still a problem. You should care about student engagement. And certainly if you care about children's well-being and mental health, everyone knows about the adolescent mental health crisis, again, heavily exacerbated by Covid, but also technology. And, and I would say a range of other influences. You should definitely care about kids’ engagement at school.

So that is sort of why to care about it and why it's important. In terms of what is it? The, the, engagement, researchers in academia isolate, talk about engagement as a multidimensional construct. That means they're sort of several dimensions that all work together to make a young person engaged in school. And the first three are very well established in the literature.

It is what students do. This is behavioral engagement. Do kids go to school? Do they do their homework, do they follow instructions, etc.? The second dimension is what kids feel, how they feel about school. Excuse me. It's called emotional engagement, which is do they feel they belong? Are they interested? They do. They find what they're learning is relevant?

Are they excited, to be at school and, and particularly, I would say excited to learn. We found, parenthetically, that a lot of kids like to go to school, like school, to see their friends, but don't love what they do in school. And the third dimension is, you know, how kids think, which is called cognitive engagement, which is: are they engaged in what we might call education, deeper learning strategies, self-regulated learning strategies?

So are they connecting what they're learning in one class to something they just read on their own, or another teacher talked about, or something out there, you know, outside of school. And, can they persist when things get hard? Do they have strategies for getting help and finishing their work? So those three dimensions in the academic literature are all very well established in terms of agreement across many academics that these are core dimensions of engagement.

And then there's lots of other, you know, dimensions that are being tested and looked at. But there's one dimension that we added that actually, it has been very rigorously studied. But a lot of the teams are outside the US, and even though they're multiple Americans and they've done a lot of work in the US, and this is called a joint task engagement, and this is what kids initiate.

And you can be engaged behaviorally, emotionally, cognitively and be just in receiver mode. I come, I'm sort of listening to what I'm being told what to do. And I follow instructions. The piece about a genetic engagement is that you are actually initiating in small and big ways. Sort of initiating conversations that will help you have a more interesting learning environment in a more supportive learning environment.

So that might be asking a teacher for help to pursue something you're interested in. If you're a kid, it could be, asking a teacher to do a, you know, we're doing, you know, we're writing about, I don't know, we're doing a project on the solar system. Can I study Mars?

I really love Mars. It could be saying, oh, can I can I actually, I think working with a friend would be really helpful to me. Can we go do study buddies? So, again, it doesn't have to be, you know, massive ways, but when, when we talk about student engagement, we talk about these four things.

And the reason we really included what students initiate is that proactive component of student engagement was shown in the literature to be really impactful. Kids who had that component, who got better grades, had better mental health, and we would argue, are being prepared for a world of artificial intelligence because they're able to be proactive and sort of guiding their learning.

So that is, what we define as student engagement. However, it's very difficult to use that framework if you're a teacher or a parent, because what are you supposed to do? Look at your kid and think about the, you know, each dimension. How would you even assess that as a parent? And we found that teachers found it very difficult.

And so I think that has been part of the problem is why avoid student engagement? Has it been so central and in perhaps a lot of our educational discourse, our practice? So what we did is really, help develop a new language around student engagement, in part because we found it. Student engagement is very hard to see. So adults are pretty poor parents and teachers, pretty poor, assessors of emotional and cognitive engagement.

You do have to ask kids for that. They're good assessors of behavioral engagement. And so we ultimately found that kids show up in four different modes to their learning. So this was the framework we developed. And, we literally spent, I think, an hour and an hour and a half a year and a half of coming up with these words.

Gosh, I wish it was an hour and a half, to try to get the right words. So it would be very usable, very understandable, not so wonky. And kids, the, the kids engage most often in passenger mode in our survey with trends. And we found that about half of middle school and high school students report that their school experiences are ones that inspire passenger mode.

Passenger mode is when kids are behaviorally engaged, but they're in school, but they've dropped out of learning. They're coasting. They're doing the bare minimum. They might like to go to school because they see their friends and they might have straight A's. A lot of kids were pretty bored in school and just coasting, doing the bare minimum.

Some were really struggling and needed help. So passenger mode is actually worrisome because it's okay to be a little bit of a coaster sometimes, but if your entire schooling experience you're coasting along, you are not developing the learnings. Those proactive, initiating gentle engagement learning skills that kids really are going to need out in this world of generative, artificial intelligence.

The next mode is achiever mode. These are kids who are trying to get the gold star on everything that's put in front of them. They can be developing lots of good skills. You have kids and happy achiever mode who are, you know, developing organizational skills and goal orientation. They're getting lots of feedback that they're doing well.

They're feeling good. Though you do have lots of kids who tip into unhappy achiever mode, these are kids who are behaviorally engaged and cognitively engaged, but not emotionally engaged. So they sort of don't see the point. They don't find it relevant, they just feel they have to do it. And they have no real agency. But overall, whether happy or unhappy achievers mode, those kids actually are quite fragile learners.

We found everybody thought the top of the engagement mountain and they really aren't, they are very risk averse because they are afraid of not getting the top or getting the best grade. We heard a lot of stories of kids stuck in achiever mode who would say things like, you know, the thing that frustrated them the most was when their teacher wouldn't tell them exactly what to do to get a good grade, and that just really pissed them off.

Which of course is a skill that they need to be able to problem solve and uncertainty in the world. We're in or they were really excited about an interest in something and wanted to answer and write an essay, an answer, a question. A teacher posed one way, but didn't think the teacher would like it and didn't think they would grade them well, so didn't do it.

Which, you know, maybe that's an element of strategic thinking there. But again, pretty risk averse. And not a lot of productive struggle. We can come back to that, kids in resister mode. These are what everybody, the adults in the world around them, than the problem children. We all know who they are. It's what we typically see.

When people talk about disengaged teens or disengaged students or kids, that's who people are thinking about. They're avoiding and disrupting their learning. These are maybe class clowns who then move to not turning in assignments, who maybe then start skipping a class here or there, or maybe skip school and you can go all the way around or quit.

Could be quite disruptive, but they do have something, which is they have actually a fair bit of gumption, and they're using their voice and they're taking initiative to influence the flow of instruction, which is the definition of a jump to engagement. It's just not in a constructive way. A gentle engagement influences the flow of instruction to be more supportive, or interesting to you towards a learning goal.

The, the, you know, teacher classroom has and they ended up being able to move pretty quickly to explore mode much more quickly than passenger in a chamber mode in our what we saw in our research when the context changed around them and explore mode is really where we want kids to spend a lot more time than most kids are currently.

This is where kids really love learning. They have it. They are genetically engaged along with other dimensions of engagement. And you know, it's sort of curiosity meets drive and they become quite unstoppable. They do get better grades, better mental health, and as I said before, are that those are the Skills Explorer modes. Muscles and skills are what kids need to navigate this, an environment of uncertainty.

And the last thing I will say before I turn it over to Amy is that these really are modes. They are not labels. They, you know, they aren't meant to pigeonhole kids or define them. We were really worried, actually, about even putting these out there for fear that they would be misused. And what we did find is kids move across these modes, sometimes across a day, depending on the teacher they have, though more often we found kids were in passenger mode in school and explore mode outside of school, some kids into chamber mode, less than 4% of middle school and high school kids reported experiences that said they were really, in explore mode in school. So a lot more room to spend more time in explore mode. And the thing we care about most is that they don't get stuck in resistor, passenger or chamber mode because it can become an identity. And that becomes quite problematic. So, Amy, with that, I think I'm going to hand it over to you.

Amy Brennan '00 Thanks. Great overview. And I want to, with some of the time we have, get a little bit deeper into each of the modes. But first just a bigger picture question. Because I think some would maybe listen to your talk or read the book and think, yes, this is the problem with our educational system. This is an education or a school issue, not a parenting issue.

Yet you wrote and your coauthor wrote the book with the parents' audience in mind. Yeah, certainly very relevant to educators as well. And I was wondering if you could start just by telling us a little bit about why you had that audience in mind.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Yes. Well, I had both a professional and personal experience. So, a slightly longer, long winded, more long winded answer here for you, Amy. And folks tuning in than I would normally give is this I did a lot of work on education innovations and wrote a book, eight years ago called Leapfrogging Inequality. Really looking at how can you leapfrog in education?

It was a global perspective. And one of the things I found was we interviewed 100 sort of really innovative leaders across 15 countries, plus did a lot of analysis of 3000 edited versions. But the thing that kept coming up was that there could be really good innovations that actually, really would help young people. And when rolled out, often parents freaked out and pushed back.

And leaders have to stop. And those innovations had to die. And so I, I really started thinking about, well, why is that? And really what I settled on was, we are not. You mean everybody else in our field do not do a great job of helping families and parents, and, frankly, the public understand what good learning looks like.

We have very limited feedback loops. It's largely academic report cards. And grades. We have, you know, a couple touch points a year for a parent with the parent teacher meeting, and I and we know and I've done a lot of work since, at Brookings on family, school, community engagement and really building those feedback loops and conversations.

And we know when you have that, schools are ten times more likely to be improving. And so that I really wanted to help parents understand what could learning look like. So that was my professional reason. But I also had a personal reason, which is I have two boys who are in third grade and sixth grade.

And during Covid, I realized I misjudged, which was really which of my kiddos were really engaged and learning. And I thought my older son was not going to. I wouldn't have to worry about him at all. He's fine. He got straight A's, was always happy to pop out to school, and he. The minute I live in Washington DC and the minute schools closed, they went pass fail.

He told me, mom, if it's not counted, it doesn't matter. So why should I even do anything? And he lost all motivation and didn't do anything, virtually anything. And my little one, who had you had really struggled in school? It turned out, right before Covid it got diagnosed with dyslexia. He. That was why he was struggling, but he didn't know it.

And he really had internalized this idea that he wasn't capable, wasn't smart when able to keep up. And the minute he got to learn at home, freed from keeping up with his peers, he totally blossomed. We got him some good dyslexia intervention, and I realized, oh my gosh, he's totally engaged in learning, not necessarily the school environment that he was in.

So he caught up to grade levels during Covid and was a total independent learner. So, you know, personally, professionally, I just knew that we, you know, bringing families and parents in is really important. And parents have a really big impact on student motivation and engagement. We parents are not teachers. So we might not be, you know, best prepared to assist with teaching history or reading or, you know, calculus or whatever.

But we do have a really big role to play when it comes to motivation and engagement.

Amy Brennan '00 Thank you. So thinking a little bit about the mode, you mentioned that the mode that the highest percentage of our middle school and high school students are in are is a passenger mode. And you said, I think 50% of middle school and high school students in that passenger mode. And that's sort of, as you mentioned, behaviorally engaged, but that's kind of it.

And I actually appreciated I had marked in the book you have a list of some signs, your kids passenger mode on page 30 and I think a lot of parents would really relate to a lot of these, in terms of they focus on the minimum requirements of assignments and not the content. Like, what do I need to do to just get by?

They declare everything boring. They frequently use fine. To answer the question, how was your day? I, you know, I don't know a parent who probably hasn't heard that at some point. And yet it's interesting because in the book part of your argument, I think a lot of parents, when faced with this, their inclination is to do more.

Right, be more on top of what is the assignment? And are you and are you doing everything you need? And could you be doing more and will you join this club or that club? Yet your argument in the book is actually for parents to do less control of students, back up, and really encourage more autonomy from their children.

And how is that the answer? Tell us a little bit, because I think that it’s counterintuitive.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Yes. So part of why we wanted to develop a new lexicon that's much more accessible is also because we found that every parent knows this and every teacher knows this, that kids are different. They need different things. So in some ways, the modes is almost a helpful diagnostic tool for us as caregivers.

Because what you want to do with a kid who's in achiever mode is different from the kid who's in passenger mode. There's some things that we cut across, or the kid who's in resister mode. So, the passenger mode kid, there's a couple of reasons. There's I should say, by the way, there's many reasons, kid.

Get kids get into these modes. But the many, many, many reasons. But we found a few common ones. So passenger mode, it's two of the most common things we found was that kids were outside of their zone of proximal development, which is a fancy way to say school was either too easy or too hard. So a lot of kids, it's too easy and they literally are bored to tears.

And, we are really clear to say this is not a teacher problem. Teachers are squished between a system that requires them to get everyone up to grade level, and if you come in a little bit below grade level and you're up to grade level pretty soon thereafter, you're just kind of coasting the rest of the of the class, even though, you know, teachers do try to, you know, differentiate instruction and give every kid, stretch them.

But it is quite hard because the kids to get them below, it's too hard. They need often need a lot and to get them up above grade level. So that's one thing. So it's either too easy and they're bored or it's too hard. And kids really have missed things. They need things. We found a lot of neurodivergent kids in here.

And, they need particular supports in order to get into that learning sweet spot, which is called the zone of proximal development. And where it's not either. You know, where you're. Yeah. Oh, never mind. You know what I mean? And, the other reason was school just seemed not very relevant, like not connected to what is happening in the world and very divorced from that.

So, parents, I think if you're if your kid really has missed something, if there are an urgent, urgent need to do more there. But in general, the kids who aren't in their learning sweet spot, the they're and or if they just don't see the relevance like honing in and pushing and you know, basically nagging. We all do it, I do it, I do it much less since I wrote this book, I must say, and actually has the reverse effect.

So sort of parental nagging shuts down. There's been really interesting, neuroscientific studies here, shuts down the problem solving part of adolescents' brains. Brain. So they don't … they're in a space to really do the thing you're nagging them about. And so a better strategy is really helping them plan, make a plan, help them get the tools themselves to do the work and or really helping them see why what they're learning is exciting and why it's connected, why it's important in the real world.

And being that bridge. And really, actually, sometimes kids in passenger mode, they just really need discussions about the content of, of learning a lot more than their performance.

Amy Brennan '00 Okay. So I'm going to keep asking you questions, but I know others have tuned in and they have been, adding questions to the Q&A. So I will turn to some of those. And, I'll start actually, because I think this is a natural segue, a question from Thad, who is asking for just for you to speak about strategies that help move kids between the different modes.

And I think you're already hearing this a little bit about what it could look like to move from passenger out into a different mode. And maybe I know in hearing that it's, it can be different depending on where a student is, could also focus on, you know, explore is the place where kids are healthiest and happiest and thriving.

What are some of those strategies that parents can use to help students move, or their children to move towards, right and explore?

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Right. It's a great question. So the second half of the book has an engagement toolkit, which really is what are the things you can do for all kids? And then, you know, common reasons kids get stuck in passenger mode, achiever mode or resister mode, and what you can do to nudge them out of it. So I talked a little bit about passenger mode.

You know, planning, modeling, the thrill, the thrill of learning. Absolutely. One thing that's really important for kids and passenger mode is we talk about finding their spark, which is their interests. Interests are, you know, like catnip for cats. It's for students who are learning if they're interested in something, they have higher attention spans, they're more motivated.

They put more effort, they remember more, they dig in. And you really want kids to move from, you know, there's all science at Swarthmore. Profs, he didn't read and read in order to move from individual interests to, no, situational interests where they sort of a passing fancy to, individual interests, where it really is sort of part of your identity, where you, you know, maybe you try skateboarding once, but at a park or with a older brother to actually, I'm a skateboarder, I know how to do it.

And I spend time in and I dig in and I practice and I try flips and etc. and you can apply that to, to any, anything. And that interest development, that spark is, is really important. And a lot of what we do as parents and as educators and this is less probably teachers and more school, policy is when kids start struggling academically, we take away enriched, interesting creative learning experiences and extracurriculars.

So there was a nationally representative survey that showed that students, excuse me, who have on average season days participate in arts extracurriculars. About 30% of students with season days do that versus students with straight A's it's about 60%. And if you look at sports and other types of extracurriculars, there was a similar gap.

So really helping them find their spark can be a great motivator. And there is a spillover effect if they're getting really excited about something that is outside of school, by the way, you can build explore muscles and learning habits anywhere. It does not have to be in the classroom, but often that sort of will spill over, for kids and achieve remote.

Often the reason they are stuck is it's a case of socially prescribed perfectionism, which does heavily come from parents. But not only, and this idea of narrow pathways, that there's only one route for success and happiness and a good life and surviving. Well, and that's to get to a really good, well ranked or one research university or something, or Swarthmore or some other version.

And the, the and there's and in that mindset, there's a big problem with competition. So when peers are competing for sort of scarce resources in adolescence, it is very isolating at a time when they're prone to want to get and connect and be social. And, that is a real problem, particularly for mental health. And the CDC actually, added several years ago, Amy, I'm sure you know about this alongside kids with, parents of, who are facing, homelessness or drug abuse or death in the family or other things.

They added kids, kids, they added another category of at risk kids, which are kids in highly competitive schools because they have such high mental health and suicide rates. So for those kids, it's less about getting their spark and getting them going and getting them excited about something. And it's more about taking their foot off the gas, talking about a wide range of pathways and modeling that at home, really modeling that at home.

And you know, we it's the achiever mode is very difficult because we do there's we do want our kids to strive for excellence. That's wonderful. But when they start strive for perfection that is next to impossible. So we have to think about at what cost. So, you know, making sure they get sleep, making sure they don't stay up all night studying.

We talked to so many kids who are like, yes, I, you know, I, I come home, I do my homework, I'm late at night. I can have my phone and I have my and of course the Google Chromebook. And your parents don't know I have to do my homework, mom. And they do. And then they're exhausted at midnight and they have to relax to just decompress.

And so they go on YouTube for two hours a night. They go to sleep at 2 or 3 a.m., and then they wake up in the morning at seven and take two Red Bulls and go to school. Like, I kid you not, this is real. Like that's how some of these kids are living and like, no wonder, they're really struggling.

So that's one piece for achiever mode. There's a lot more there that I can come to, which includes also, I would say productive struggle. One of our characters in the book is this incredible young woman named Amina. Who got in was a total achiever mode, happy achiever mode, get in high school, got into all eight Ivy leagues that she applied to what ended up going to one, and once she arrived, had a total meltdown because she didn't have any skills to navigate it.

Unfamiliar terrain. And when she got rejected from a social club and then she struggled in a class, two things easily surmountable. She would have been fine. She was very smart and capable. Had an existential meltdown because she thought, does that mean I'm not who I think I am? That I'm not smart because smart kids don't ask for help and don't struggle.

And she said, I wish I'd had failure therapy. I wish I'd been in high school. I've been able to fail. And then I learned how to pick myself up and come out of it. So again, this idea of productive struggle is a useful experience for those kids in achiever mode and for kids in resist or mode. I know this is a lot, but kids in resister mode, the very first thing you have to do is figure out you have to get to the why?

Why are they resisting? There's always a reason, there's always a reason. The things we found that were most common were bullying, overwhelm, external mental health problems with peers, with family members. That really influenced school. And you have to address that. And that's and then there's also quite a bit of good things.

There's some great exercise around helping them imagine a potential future self, which isn't like, what do you want to be when you grow up? But in a year from now, what? How do you want your life to be different? And then thinking about what they have to do to get there? So those are some of the some of the things to unlock kids who get stuck in those modes so they can be an explorer mode.

Amy Brennan '00 Thank you. And for context, Douglas had asked about what percent of kids and I know your research is focusing more on those middle school to high school age kids are in the modes. We talked about passenger mode being about half of those. Those. Yeah, but what about Resistor Explorer?

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 And let me see if I remember this because it was third through 12th grade. But if you really look at middle school and high school, it's about half in passenger, a third in achiever. And what would the 15. Yeah, approximate a little more than 15 in resistor and less than five of less than four in explorer.

Amy Brennan '00 That's helpful context. And I guess building on that Margaret had the sort of bigger picture question of does our capitalistic society really want kids to be an explorer? Mode is part of the purpose of school, is just to sort of raise good members of the proletariat in education people.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Yes. Yeah. So, you know, and there's also another I feel like there was another court action around public, private, traditional versus progressive schools. In terms of our sample. So are we our.

Amy Brennan '00 International versus U.S as well.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Yeah. The research really was … we looked globally on in terms of our literature review and our interviews with experts and academics, but our our research with students, family, and teachers was heavily US and UK and our survey work was public, charter private, and there was a mix of traditional schools and progressive schools, but it's heavily sort of the survey work was heavily, heavily traditional public schools, because that's actually the most schools that are in the US and I would I would say this answers Margaret questions in some ways.

You could … there are schools. They're just really the exception. There are schools where being in achiever mode is being an explorer mode. So in other words, succeeding in that school means you are required to be an explorer mode. And so there are, there are. And we actually have a list at the back of the book of some national nonprofits who support schools to do that.

So one of the characters in our book is from the school called Iowa Big, which is a teeny tiny school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. But it pulls across three school districts. And what kids do is they're in school during they take a few core classes in the morning, and they're sort of technically part of their traditional high school.

So they can be on the football team, they can be a cheerleader, they can go to prom. All that. But the bulk of their day is spent working in teams, solving community problems with, with teachers who are interdisciplinary or helping them, you know, helping the kids come up with problems that are, and solving problems across disciplines, drawing from across disciplines.

And so these problems are sourced by the local city council. It's like, hey, this we had a flood, the bridge washed out. How should we rebuild it? Or local businesses or local non-profits? And students are actually spend all lots of their day and time, out and about pulling together content knowledge, but for a purpose to do something.

And that really is incredible. Explorer mode. And lots we actually there's different examples of that sprinkled across the US in small pockets, of whole schools that embrace that philosophy. Sometimes there's a class or a collective, but not it's rare to have a whole school. And there you really are. An achiever if you're an explorer. And I think that's actually what we would like to see all schools be like, be to sort of merge the achiever and explorer mode.

So I don't know. Amy, what do you think? You run so many schools? Yeah. You mean, you know, do you think it's because of our capitalistic society? What is your… I have my own opinions, but what do you think?

Amy Brennan '00 I think that schools have been set up over time to reward like the targets often. And it was actually a question I was going to pursue a little bit with you around college, and especially in recent years, where it's been much more of a push of college for all. I think we're starting to see the pendulum, start to go the other way a little bit more.

But then when that is, that is sort of measured by what are the grades, what are the test scores? That there is not a lot of incentive or there hasn't been or can be easy to say. I'm just going to sort of fall in line in that way. It's harder to be someone who's working outside of those.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Yeah. I, I, I, we have a little bit of this in the book, around, like, wait, why why why is school like this? And I wrote a piece. It's on the Brookings website. I think it's called Why Wait 100 years? It was. It was quite a while ago, where I was looking at the gap globally between rich countries and, and poor countries and kids and basically a while ago.

And I don't think it's changed. The gap between kids in rich countries and poor countries was would take 100 years to close, given the current pace of change. But part of what I looked at or made the argument around was that actually in capitalist societies, in, you know, more rural agricultural societies, not super industrialized societies, the model of schooling is the same.

And it really can be traced back to sort of the advent of universities being the arbitrators of truth and not religious institutions 600 or whatever. Years ago, with the rise of universities in Western Europe. And then that is was a radical change. Schools and non you know, not the pope, you know, it was the holder of truth.

And then that really shifted down into schools, being the feeder to the holders of, of truth and needing a way to rank and sort. And that is actually the basic architecture of school of every school system around the world. Is around ranking and sorting. And we make a larger argument in the book that, you know, that especially with AI, that we need to move away from this age of achievement ranks and sort of achievement on a few measures to sort of an age of agency in education.

Amy Brennan '00 And that certainly here is the conversation that we are having. And I think it and I appreciate your how you opened our first question about the parent audience. It's a partnership between schools and families. But I also recognize it's scary for many parents who we know, the schools that we experienced and for, you know, many of us, it was what it was, what led us to success.

So to imagine a learning experience that's different or grades that are not grades as we know them, or even look at the kind of the conversations about how math might be taught differently. That's scary in terms of, is my child really going to be ready for the future? And so I do think it's it's about growing all of our understanding and about what world we're preparing our students and our children for.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Amy, I'm not trying to do your job, but I see a question here.

Amy Brennan '00 Yes.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 And I'm like, I think I might know this Sarah Lytle. We might work together. But I didn't know she was a Swatty. But maybe it's a different Sarah Lytle, but which asks about the demographics of the research and that. I'll take one second.

Amy Brennan '00 Yes, please.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Yeah. Which was basically our surveys, are nationally representative, by race, sex, parental education level, gender or something else I can't remember. And our qualitative research was, Across, race, socioeconomic, school type, rural, urban, and immigrant nonimmigrant and neurodiversity. So those were sort of the dimensions that we made sure to gather from.

So we did our very best to get a wide perspective.

Amy Brennan '00 Yeah. Thank you. And I think that kind of relates to also Christine's question in terms of is it just surveys, student surveys and grades or what the evaluation criteria are? And I also saw a related question in terms of how do you measure what Moda as the child is in.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Yeah. And the second question is, is there a relationship with the modes of your child's friends and their own work? So, we could talk about measurement, Amy, because we actually talked about measurement and we were together last. So how do you interpret Christine's question? Is it about the methodology of the research?

Amy Brennan '00 I think so, yes.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 So, Christine, I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but the methodology was mixed methods. We did qualitative research. We did, which was primarily, with kids and their parents and often their educators. And officer, you know, focus groups, in-depth discussions, interviews. We followed kids off with several, not all of them, but, over several years, over three years.

And then we did quantitative research in the form of surveys, and then do a lot of literature review and expert interviews. So the question, how do you measure the modes kids are. And so we developed these modes, based on what we were seeing in our, qualitative data and alongside, the literature and the research studies.

And so there isn't an existing, they've been out in the world publicly for the last two months, so there isn't an existing measure specifically for the modes. However, we are talking about sort of thinking about adapting other forms of student engagement measures, because there's many different types of ways to measure student engagement, and people look at different dimensions.

So I don't think you would need to invent whole cloth, but you might need to combine them. And the bigger question we have is how would it be used? Because we really don't want, you know, what mode your kid is in to be used, like, high stakes measurement tool or a behavioral management tool, because then that defeats the purpose.

They will not tell you what they're experiencing. And that is an entire that's part of our dilemma here is that to really see engagement, it's kids. There's a lot of internal stuff going on. And so you need to listen to kids’ voices. And so we are thinking of more of like a tool that kids themselves can use to and to reflect on how engaged they are and what, why, why are they sort of seeming like they're coasting?

What is it that they need? And that could be a conversation between a parent and educator and the kids themselves. When you, you know, when kids really touch base, and could go, well, sit alongside as another set of feedback loops alongside sort of report cards and grades. I mean, what do you want to add to that?

Amy Brennan '00 Because you well, I was going to say in the book you offered a great example. And I know many of us educators would have examples of teachers doing similar things where, yes, of educators actually using them either, not necessarily the modes, but you could use the four modes of. Yes. And there's other scales to have students reflect on where they are in terms of their level of engagement.

And you share the really powerful impact on then outcomes at that had for them.

Impact of agency. Right. Yeah. So now I'm thinking about where am I and then think and how might is that where I want to be or not? Maybe sometimes it's okay to be in passenger mode in this staff because I'm getting ready for something else.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Yeah.

Amy Brennan '00 It or maybe.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 You bring up something actually really important. Amy. That it's. We want more kids to be an explorer mode, but we're not saying we want each kid to be 100% and explore mode all the time, because that would be exhausting and impossible. And you nor I, Amy, are an explorer mode 100% of the time. And so a second piece that we want is to just make sure kids don't get stuck, and that they can move between the modes intentionally.

And as you say, with self-reflection, like, what is it that I need? In order to be, you know, more engaged tomorrow? Maybe I'm confused. Maybe I'm sitting next to a friend who's just talking my ear off, so I need to sit down in a different place. These are all examples of things that kids have told me when they self-reflect.

Not using the language of the modes, but reflecting on sort of their engagement and learning that teachers do in the classroom. Not, you know, standard practice, but plenty of teachers do. And it is very powerful because kids can be more intentional. And, you know, for example, one kid said, and this is I think you're alluding to chapter ten in the book.

Right, Amy, with the schools and teachers in Texas who are doing this, who, you know, was like, look, I'm I'm just going to be, you know, coasting today. They didn't use those words, participating that different lingo. But, because, you know, my parents had a big fight last night, and these are fifth graders, you know, young kids.

And I just I'm super tired, and I just get to try and get through the day. And like, teacher was like, okay, let me know if you need anything. And tomorrow let's talk about where you want to end up. So, you know, there are moments I really just like budget meetings. I find them so boring. And you know, I know what to ask, but I sort of coast through and, you know, keep my eye on the prize.

How much money do we need? How much money do we have, basically. And, and then let the other financial managers dig in and get excited. It's their explore moment. So we don't we all it's okay to sometimes coast.

Amy Brennan '00 Absolutely. Nancy raises a great question. About you know, a lot of the in the title of the book is the disengaged teen but sort of asking about is there anything parents hindering early childhood do to foster explorers or maybe so when we're not chasing it after that engage, you show that chart of how engagement dropped so dramatically from grade 3 to 12, that, you know, instead of reacting, are they're proactive measures we might do put in place to help to have obviously not an explorer mode all the time, but to be ready to be there and to thrive.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Yeah. I mean, I think, And, Amy, you should weigh in here too. My, my, my take is the following kids are engaged, are born in explore mode, and the system beats it out of them. And of course, naturally, as you grow up, you're going to be a little less explorer. Explorer ready? Because, you know, when you see a chair, every time you see a chair, you're not going to be like, what?

What possible use could this be? You know, I could stand it on his head. I could balance on it. Note you sort of learn sort of norms and customs and how to get through the day. So that's normal to a certain extent. So what I think we don't want to do is. Succumb to this push that is basically pushing down sort of academics, further to younger and younger years.

So, you know, there's a lot of talk in the education community how kindergarten is a new first grade, how, you know, you're supposed to be hold it. Right. You know, writing and knowing how to read. And it's like, wait, not what? No, it's okay. So like, or preschool, and any of these sort of pushes and, and I have to say, there's a lot of apps and edtech products and, you know, a lot of businesses who play on parents fears, and, you know, the best thing you can do is just give your kid space to explore and grow.

And, and when they ask you a question, respond and talk to them like, really? That's all you really have to do, to help kids stay in explore mode in early childhood. And then it's really about, I'll give you one, story from my own personal life, trying to protect that as much as possible. So we, my kids, this was pre-COVID.

They were young. Are. And go to our neighborhood local public school here in DC. And in first grade he had my oldest son who had an incredible teacher, and she would give huge packets of homework. And I thought she was really great, but they were really long, like 30 packet worksheets. I mean, these are young kiddos. And they would come home and I remember, you know, his friends on the block.

He can't come out and play, you know, on Saturday has to finish his homework. And after a couple weeks I went to her and I said, you know, do you expect my son to do this pack? And she goes, no, no, I just give it because the parents are pestering me for their kids to be prepared.

And they and they say they only their perception of being prepared is worksheets. So like as much as you can. And I didn't say anything ever to anybody. And she and I just looked at each other and I never did those that worksheet packet the entire first grade and he was fine.

Amy Brennan '00 Yeah. It is a balancing act, I would say from a school lens. One of the things that we're really focused on is how do we, from a young age, help, our students to really know what are their strengths and that those may change over time, but who are they as a learner? What is easier loves.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Us about your district.

Amy Brennan '00 And thinking about how they contribute. So and that's part of it's a special class. It's an experience for them. And sort of setting goals that might be short term goals, might be longer term goals. And thinking about themselves, we use the frame of who are they as a learner, who are they as a leader, which might just be something within their own classroom?

Who are they as a citizen? And that that's unique for each of them? So I think starting those conversations early at home, too, we were shocked at how, you know, one of the insights was you get to middle school and how hard it can be for those students to even talk about one of their strengths. And so it's really eye opening to say, how do we help that self-discovery and self-reflection mode happen earlier?

So, I know work. That's great. I, I for one, we had one request I definitely don't want to pass up, which was I don't know how hard this is going to be to do at the last minute, but you had a slide that I think had your URL for the book.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 So I will.

Amy Brennan '00 I will link it up on my screen and look.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 I will put that up. But you can go to my website for the book, which is, the disengagedteen.com. Yep. Or Rebeccawinthrop.com, either one. Yeah. That's it. I have a LinkedIn newsletter called Winthrop's World of Education on LinkedIn. And what else? My coauthor has a Substack called How to Be Brave, and I think, yeah, you'll, you'll you'll find us.

Amy Brennan '00 Great. Well, I couldn’t recommend it more. Get the book to anyone who has children in their lives.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 So would you, Amy. And please, if people do get it and do read it, please do an Amazon or GoodReads review. That really apparently is very helpful for the book. So thank you in advance if you end up doing that.

Amy Brennan '00 All right. Well, thank you, Rebecca, for sharing tonight. I learned a lot and was glad to spend time.

Rebecca Winthrop ’96 Thank you for doing it, Amy.

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