Book Tour Event # 1
The following is a transcript from the 6-26 Zoom Virtual Book Tour event with Dr.’s Angela Duckworth, Pedro Noguera, and Anindya Kundu for The Power of Student Agency.
Cyndi Stivers:
Okay, great. Well, hi, everybody. I’m Cindy Stivers and I am the lucky person who gets to be your moderator today. I’m a longtime journalist and editor. And for the last four years, I’ve been working at TED—the TED Talks people, the TED Conferences people—mostly as a curator, but I also started a program there called the TED residency where I got to meet the man of the hour today. Anindya Kundu was a TED resident and he was such a great participant that we invited him back for a second round and of the hundred plus people that we had in the residency over four years, he’s the only guy who gave two TED talks that were both featured on the TED homepage. So he’s a rock star. And it’s really fun to be here to celebrate his first book.
So if it’s alright with everyone. I’m going to quickly introduce our panelists and then let it get to the brains in the room.
Let’s see, first of all, we have Angela Duckworth also no stranger to the TED fans. I think that’s where I first saw you. Anyway, giving a talk about grit and she is distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania and psychology also recipient of a brand-new inaugural Professorship that is a dual appointment to the Wharton School of Business very, very distinguished. Your 2013 TED Talk is one of the most popular ever.
And she’s also a MacArthur Genius. And yeah, her book Grit stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 21 weeks and she met Anindya after he and our other panelist wrote an introduction to the book and agreed to be on his doctoral dissertation committee.
So welcome, Angela.
Angela Duckworth:
Thank you.
Cyndi Stivers:
Next up is Pedro Noguera who’s a sociologist and distinguished professor at UCLA School of Education. Any minute now he’s going to become the dean of the USC School of Education, keeping it in LA, though, I noticed. He is widely regarded as one of the leading experts on educational inequality and his work extends beyond research and into activism and leadership. He has written more than a dozen books —he’s just getting started and more than 200 articles. He consults with school districts around the world and see, this is something that came up in the articles I read, he gives a talk and people quit their jobs and change their lives, which is basically what happened with Anindya as well. And the two of them. Collaborated on an article, you’re going to hear about calling it…that is now I’m going to forget the name of it… but it’s the opportunity gap. You’re going to hear more about this and he also agreed to write the introduction to Anindya’s book. So, and his book is called The Power of Student Agency and after about 10 years of working in education from Chicago detention centers to New York City Department of Education. Anindya has just gotten his PhD from NYU and he’s writing and teaching, even storytelling at the moment. So that is pretty much a good scene setter for you, Anindya.
Anindya Kundu:
Sure, that works. Thank you.
Cyndi Stivers:
Alright, so one thing we should do for people who are not as steeped in all this as you three are, quickly just define the terms you are known for, and then let you plunge in and among each other. Okay, so let’s start with the first concept that cropped up at least on my radar screen, grit. Angela, could you please define “grit”?
Angela Duckworth:
Yeah, I am a psychologist and I’ve been studying the psychology of effort and achievement. It came out of my background as a classroom teacher wondering why I was not as good as I should have been at listening, motivation, and effort among my very bright students. So, um, so what grit is, this motivation for long term goals and that is different from, you know, delayed gratification for short term goals. Basically, it’s the combination of passion, loving something for you know, really think about like you’re reading, like how many articles has Pedro written, like how many books? Like still edit, still looking at the question of equality and equity in education. Like that to me is what I mean by passion for long term goals and then perseverance. For long term goals which is, you know, a combination of resilience and also daily dedication to constantly get better and I will leave it at that. I will say that I think this conversation, I’ve really been looking forward to because when I started, I wanted to distinguish effort from talent and IQ, which I thought crowded out, you know, a lot of the other things about a student’s capabilities that were also important. But I now realize that my account as a psychologist is also incomplete because it sort of is, you know, notably silent on things like opportunity—any quality of opportunity in particular, and that’s why I’ve been looking forward to continuing to learn from Anindya and Pedro.
Cyndi Stivers:
Okay, thank you. And Pedro, would you like to explain the opportunity gap to us.
Pedro Noguera:
Sure. And maybe it’s also good that I also just throw in a little bit about agency and how it’s different.
Cyndi Stivers:
Well, certainly. And then because we’re going, but you can you can.
Anindya Kundu:
Add to it, you can go
Pedro Noguera:
So, the idea of the opportunity gap grows out of a recognition that these gaps in achievement that the nation has been fixated on are really predicated upon gaps in opportunity, access to learning opportunities. Everything from high quality preschool to summer school to highly qualified teachers to Advanced Placement courses in science labs.
These are the things that really make it possible for a person to, you know, use education to improve their lives. We’ve been focused as a nation on measuring achievement, but we don’t really examine access to opportunity. And when you just look at the difference between how we educate affluent kids and poor kids, you see glaring gaps in opportunity that really have not been addressed. So agency—and I’ll just set this up for fun—Anindya, is what I would describe it as grit plus effort. And actually, it’s absolutely right, persistence, not giving up but agency is different in that it starts with critical thinking. And the reason why critical thinking is so important is because we know there are real obstacles in people’s lives and obstacles related to poverty. Obstacles with your circumstances. The workers right around me right now right here doing construction have lots of grit. They work seven days a week. They work all the time and they’re still poor. What they lack is opportunity. They lack early on in some way to navigate obstacles that allow them to use their efforts to expand our possibilities for mobility and improving their lives.
Cyndi Stivers:
That sounds great. And that’s that missing piece Angela was referring to. Right.
Anindya, would you like to expand upon “agency”?
Anindya Kundu:
Definitely, so I define agency in my book as a person’s capacity or potential to locate and use resources to overcome challenges in their life to create positive change in their life. And so again, that definition is inherently social. It implies understanding that there are these social obstacles that a lot of people face and the resources that I refer to are also social. So, it’s really a social picture. Success resources can be, you know, social networks, being able to ask someone for help, or have someone listen to you about your challenges. Or they can be cultural which can be, you know, having a sense of racial pride, a deep sense of identity or having a mentor in your life that acknowledges that there are different forms of giftedness and that your grit or your talents can be displayed in a multitude of ways. And so, to kind of build off of what Pedro said in education, you know, I think one of the things that me and Pedro realized that grit was missing was this context specificity. There’s this application of grit. To think about it in a very uniform way. But when we apply that to school systems to think about assessing achievement, it can actually be kind of dangerous and not help to close the opportunity gap. And what I mean by that is, you know, thinking about some of the participants in my book, these people who I have profiled, they’ve overcome immense obstacles from homelessness to incarceration to undocumented status, broken families, gang involvement, simply by growing up in a low income background. There’s the student who had to take care of his sibling and was homeless before going to school every day. So that’s a form of credit, there was the girl who realized she was pregnant but still completed all of her regions exams in New York and enter college applications. So that’s a form of grit and today you know the mom, who is an essential worker that has to go work in her minimum wage job but doesn’t really know what to do about childcare because her kid is home from school. She has grit, too. And so, acknowledging these kinds of grit and these kinds of real challenges that people have are very important in education so that we can then start to help them with the specific supports that they will need to overcome these challenges. And I think education presents us the platform to do this.
Cyndi Stivers:
Absolutely. And I love that quote in your book that “education is our greatest collective responsibility”, hard to argue with that. I think. Also, I’d love to, unless Angela, Pedro, have anything you’d like to jump in on right now. Let’s see if anyone is looking up as if they want to.
Angela Duckworth:
I mean, maybe I’ll just jump on the last comment about context specificity and similar stories. It’s a great book. By the way, can I just say that it’s a, you know, beautiful idea and it’s beautifully written and some of the stories I think you know, the most powerful are the ones that you remember. And I think this idea of what grit looks like, you know when I started out researching grit in high school students, you know, I thought like oh, we’ll analyze their extracurricular activities. And just to give you a sense of like pre-Anindya versus post-Anindya and how much I’ve learned from him.
So it just was like, oh okay, my first thought was, I mean I grew up in the suburban like suburbs of Philadelphia. I was like oh, I’ll look for like multi-year extracurricular commitments. Like, were you on, I don’t know, the tennis team for like multiple years? And did you advance? And I do think that can be a signal of an adolescent developing passion and perseverance for long term goals. But you know, post-Anindya and Pedro I’m like now like conscious more than I was that what grit looks like differs so much by opportunity and it’s often visible to your typical college application, you know, like, where do you check off like “I did have to take care of my little sister and more, you know, in grades 9,10, 11, 12” and there are no titles or honorifics that I can use to signal that kind of passion and perseverance.
Cyndi Stivers:
Yeah, that’s not listed in the yearbook under your picture right? Oh yes, Pedro.
Pedro Noguera:
Yeah. If I could add because I want to also acknowledge the way Angela has allowed because it’s very easy to if you start to embrace the idea of grit, then to blame kids that are not too excellent and you say, well, they don’t have enough grit. They just need more grit and not see the obstacles that they confront. And I think, Angela, I know from having read an op-ed she’s written about the way the greatest interpreted can be distorted to become a kind of blame-the-victim.
Angela Duckworth:
Weaponized I think you’d be weaponized which I didn’t foresee but like I completely agree with you, Pedro’s like why would you want him? Kids like you can’t even pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It’s like, literally, physically impossible. And I, and I actually Googled where this expression comes from: pull yourself up by your bootstraps and the original use was to suggest that you can’t do that physically, therefore you need somebody to give you a hand, right and so anyway. Peter, I don’t want to interrupt you, but I’m like, yeah. Amen.
Pedro Noguera:
I just add that we never talked about grit, at least within the context of talking about affluent kids right, that is because they have a privilege. If you have privilege, you need less grit. Now, truthfully, I would say there are a lot of privileged kids out there who need grit, right that who do give up. It’s easy but they have wealthy parents who can get them private tutors who can give them, second, third, fourth chances and so, in the context of talking about athletes and privilege. We really don’t talk much about grit and how important it is. We really save that for poor kids. And I think that’s where Anindya’s work is important because it highlights how gaps in opportunity make it difficult, even when you’ve got a lot of grit to change your circumstances.
Cyndi Stivers:
Well, you just set up perfectly. The other burning question on my mind, which is you know there as I was reading the book The Illusion of the Meritocracy in Education resounded for me and this moment in history of, you know, where unfortunately people have had to die, but this strange combination of the reset moment of as Rahm Emanuel put it in today this hundred year pandemic. A 50 year depression and a 25 year level of you know, social unrest. We’re finally digging into some structural racism issues in America, maybe. Finally, how will this change your work?
Anindya Kundu:
So I’ll jump in. I think my work really wants to be able to acknowledge the moment and bring in that context specificity. To also counter what Pedro alluded to what we call the “scholars deficit perspectives” and so even if it’s not explicit, there is this implicit idea sometimes that the students who don’t necessarily make it or are able to tap into a meritocratic system where the best and the brightest supposedly make it to the top, that there is something inherently wrong with them. And so, what my book does is try to flip that notion. And think about students as being at potential. So specifically, studying the sample of people that I have who have overcome the odds against them. The point is not to say that. Look at this group of people, if they made it. Anyone can make it, but it’s exactly the opposite. It’s to say that this group of exceptional individuals had a holistic support system that allowed them to be successful. And if we could then apply those kinds of supports to other students and challenged backgrounds, we could potentially have more stories success and you’re right this moment is really important, as you alluded to. It’s almost like we have two pandemics. We have the one that causes us to cover our face and be socially distant from our friends and loved ones, but we also have the one that we’re now having another moment of reckoning with it’s the one that’s been here since America’s foundation. Racist, racial, and structural rampant in equality and sometimes that comes to light, maybe because we have better technology right now, we have better ability to capture injustices with cell phone cameras. But it’s, it’s an undercurrent that’s existed in this country for a long time that people are reluctant to call to question because it doesn’t harm them and if anything, it might benefit them. It’s like there’s an invisible poison in the water and some people have the antibodies but we need those people on the side of those who do not—and that sounds like an abstract metaphor—but just saying that aloud you know that reminds me of Flint, Michigan. These are real structural issues. And so my book tries to really bring the dialogue together of structural issues and what are also the workarounds that can help communities build agency, because as Pedro can you know, elaborate on agency is not just an individual trait. It’s also a collective trait. Schools, communities, the country, can build a culture of agency to improve systems for the future. And in order to foster equity.
Angela Duckworth:
If I may just have to jump in on that and like there’s a new study that I didn’t do so I won’t take credit for it, but I think this this idea that Anindya has been teaching me about, which is like when you think about, for example, resilience, etc. You’re not only thinking about the individual characteristics of the girl or boy who grows up and does okay but very importantly, you’re thinking about the social, cultural resources that enabled them to do that. So thinking more like a sociologist honestly than thinking like a psychologist. There’s a new study of the marshmallow test. It’s this task. That’s kind of widely known now publicly. Four-year-olds sit and they wait for a marshmallow. They count how many seconds you can delay gratification, and this ends up predicting a lot of your life outcomes. So, the original design of the marshmallow task was to assess individual capability of self-control. How long can you hold out for something better and resist something that’s immediately tempting?
But in a very recently published paper, they looked at data from a really big sample like about 1000 kids and they were all over the country and they actually had measures of social support. That’s more I think of a, you know, social and cultural likely not like the personal characteristic of the four-year-old, but more like what’s in the four-year-old’s life? And that ends up accounting for a lot of the variation in scores and you know the long-term outcomes. So you know I am trained as a psychologist, but I’m like desperately trying to like think more like a sociologist, because you know we just think like what’s between the ears like, how does the prefrontal cortex work, etc. And I really feel like if you’re serious about any of these things like at some point you grow up to be more like a sociologist and hopefully keep your psychological skills, but I think that’s, you know, the direction I hope to keep growing.
Pedro Noguera:
So if I could jump in too. I mean, one of the things we know is that schools are implicated in the reproduction of inequality in our society. The strongest predictors for how well kids will do in school are family income and parent education. So not surprisingly, kids who come from wealthy families with college educated parents do better in school.
Then kids with less income and less education in their families. Now, on top of that, they tend to go to better schools that have more resources, right, and have more qualified teachers.
We have a conversation in this country about meritocracy, but don’t talk about context, don’t talk about how the opportunities available to us, shake later patterns. So I think that Anindya has done here is try to unwrap that and expose okay what are the obstacle to structural obstacles that get in the way of so many kids and to speak further and elaborate on his point about collective agency. We’re at a moment of collective agency now, right, we’re seeing these social movements spring up around the country to call attention to systemic and structural racism. And what’s amazing about that is when you see communities move together to address these obstructions to opportunity. You can make rapid progress, right. So, we saw that in the civil rights movement, we saw that with women’s movement. We saw that with disabled rights.
That is when you call attention to a problem, identify the barriers, you can start to see groups move forward. We need to do the same things with respect to race and racism in America. And so, for example, the calls to get police out of schools. Which schools have police in there? In inner city schools. Which kids are being arrested the most? Inner city kids. Why are we responding to kids needs with police rather than counselors and social workers? You know that, ask how often do you hear about affluent kids getting arrested in school for marijuana? There’s a lot of evidence that affluent kids use more drugs than poor kids.
Pedro Noguera:
So, but we don’t question these things and I think Anindya’s helping to remind us through his work, why it’s so important to put and create a context with this discussion about individual attributes that are this one last thing. Motivation and thinking about motivation are critical and then so much of our discussion about student achievement. We totally overlooked motivation and what it takes to get kids to be motivated as learners and I think Angela’s work has really helped us in that regard.
Cyndi Stivers:
Okay, great. So what would you, what advice would you guys give for schools and teachers who are seeing this moment now and want to get moving in some way? I mean, besides they can tell everybody to tell all the parents to vote to defund the police and put that money in the schools. What else?
Angela Duckworth:
I was going to ask Anindya and Pedro that exact question like what is your magic wand wish list at this moment in time because it feels to me like the future either could change or we can just go back to the way were, you know, six months ago.
Anindya Kundu:
Yeah, I’ll start. And hopefully, Pedro can jump in. Exactly what you just said. Angela, I mean in the conclusion of my book, I talk about going to the Eric Garner protest in 2014—Thinking that you know black lives matter. It has this potential to make large societal changes only if we keep up the momentum. And so, I kind of pose this question, the extent to which we’ll see structural changes as a result of Black Lives Matter is still to be seen. And here we are in 2020 and we’re seeing the same thing again. And so, the question is, how much have we really been able to keep that momentum?
And honestly I hope this time around, given that we’re in this moment that is so historical for a number of reasons, ideally allows us this opportunity to really have this moment of reckoning and then you know, use it as an opportunity to create better systems. Agency again being collective. I think those moments those social protests, social unrest, they’re also displays of collective agency and then they have to trickle down from people’s day to day actions to make real legislative change. And so, I think it was just this week that the three males who killed Ahmaud Arbary, they were actually convicted and charged and so those are little changes and there are signs of progress.
And then to tie that to education, we have to understand that it’s not just us adults witnessing this moment in time, but that our students and our children are also very much at the table and have a lot of opinions and perspectives and they should be invited to the dialogue, these are, you know, moments of teaching and learning and their opinions matter because in a few generations, they will be the ones who will be the ones making the decisions about how to create better equity. So, we have to ask, how can we include their voice and their perspectives and really treat them as stakeholders? Because if we are able to better educate all of our students, education isn’t a zero sum game. There are many studies that show that, you know, after a recession more educated communities bounce back quickly. So, if we spread that to a country level, we can create a better, more resilient country together if we just put more resources into education.
Cyndi Stivers:
One point of clarification. The three guys were charged for Ahmaud Arbery, they could not have been convicted yet.
Pedro Noguera:
Right, they’re just charged.
Anindya Kundu:
Are just one step in the right direction. We’re still waiting on
Cyndi Stivers:
Yeah Anindya, sorry.
Pedro Noguera:
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of changes that we need to make. But I think that the point that we need to not go back to what we know, but use this reset. It’s an opportunity to start to change some things. It’s really important. We, you know, ideally, we should be making investments in schools serving poor kids because the gaps and opportunities are so wide and vast. This may not be the time for that because we’re going to, we’re going to be entering a depression right now and the resources for that. But what if we simply would shift the focus right now? I would say in many schools we rely on fear of failure as a motivator for kids. You know, we tell them “you don’t pass that test you’re going to fail” “you don’t do these courses you’re going to fail”. Fear of failure as a motivator doesn’t work for a lot of kids especially for kids who already have experienced lots of failure around them. What we need to do is to tap into their critical thinking and motivate by showing kids how they can use education to help themselves, help their families, help their communities. That kind of education forces us to think, okay, well how do kids take what they’re learning in school and apply it to their lives? How can our kids become better problem solvers with their education? That changes the curriculum. It changes the way we engage kids. We focus more on empowering kids as learners, rather than rewarding compliant behavior in school. So, there’s a lot of changes that we need to make in that direction, but I would say, all you have to do is look at affluent schools and the way they treat kids and that we see it right there. You know, if you go to Montessori schools, for example, they’ve been developing the intrinsic motivation of kids for hundreds, you know, over 100 years, right, because they understand that when kids are intrinsically motivated to learn, you don’t have to threaten them. You don’t have to rely on tests, they want to learn. They read on their own. That’s what we should be focused on: how do we create schools that nurture that love of learning and kids and not threaten them with tests?
Anindya Kundu:
I’d love to add an example to what Pedro just said. There’s a school in New York called Medgar Evers College Prep. Pedro actually took me there. When I was a teaching assistant and we took a group of educators from Alabama to come see, you know, a vibrant learning environment. And so what’s really special about the school is that it’s a title one school. All students qualify for free and reduced lunch and the school is pretty much 100% Black and Brown students. Yet they consistently have a higher than 90% graduation rate and send most all of those graduates to college. And it took about 10 years to create this culture of success and agency and belief in all students’ potential, but there are things that are possible to do. You know, until we wait for the rest of the country to catch up to us and make the structural changes. We want to see there are things that are possible to do so, you know, they extended the school day for students who have larger needs that would benefit the parents from a little bit of extra care. There’s a feeder program from eighth grade that keeps the same students so that they can kind of, you know, be with the same students and help them mature and develop into, you know, competent young adults. A lot of the middle school students are already practicing for the region’s exam so it doesn’t hit them in the face when they finally have to do it there. Tons of AP classes offered at this school. There’s also a connection they have to Medgar Evers College. There’s a direct relationship between the two where mentors from the College come in and teach curriculum at the high school including, you know, magazine production and, you know, machine shop and these are ways in which students are able to make the connection and see the relevance of their learning. They’re able to have access to mentors who they can relate to who they, you know, can see themselves in. And so then their perceptions of the world and themselves are increasing and becoming more positive. And so you know that school took about 10 years to turn around. It wasn’t always, you know, achieving at such a high level, but it took one principal with a visionary leadership who is able to get unified staff to say, you know, that mantra of “not those kids” “that’s not going to fly here”, all kids deserve a chance to have a vibrant learning opportunity. And if we provide them with that and believe in their potential, they will thrive, and they were able to prove that. And so that’s one of the few high schools that I profile and the conclusion of my book, ideally provides some hope that this is possible.
Pedro Noguera:
Can we add a brief addition to the story because the backdrop of the story was? I had gone to Alabama to Tuscaloosa, Alabama university town home to the great Crimson Tide. Visited Bear Bryant high school, an all-black school. And I could tell when I was speaking to the educators there, just by their expressions. They had never seen black students who excel.
So I asked him, I said, you actually believe you can educate these kids to be high achievers? And they said, no. I said, have you ever seen black kids who excel in school? They said no. I said, well, let me take you to Brooklyn, I can take you to schools where you can see black kids who excel in education. And to their credit they came, and they were blown away by what they saw in the kids. And this is the sad thing because if you’ve never seen it, and there are too many educators, you’ve never seen it, then after a while you start blaming the kids. It reinforces racist ideas that somehow these kids that are so broken, they come from a culture so pathological that they can’t learn. Well, it just because of the way you treat the kids and how little you expected of the kids. And seeing a school like Medgar Evers shifts the whole frame of reference and that’s why I think an idiot example is so important.
Angela Duckworth:
If it breaks the like self-fulfilling prophecy of “I don’t think you’re going to be much”. So then in a million ways, right, some of them explicit, a lot of them implicit like you just create that future right. I have my own wish list if I, if I might like tag on to Anindya, Pedro is that okay? Like early childhood education. So as a developmental psychologist, I would say that when we see the opportunity and achievement gap, sometimes you just make it like it opens up when you can measure it. And in fact, you know, as early as anybody’s able to measure anything you can find evidence of that opportunity and hence achievement gap so early childhood education. I think funding across, you know. I moved from the suburbs, actually, like, six years ago with my two daughters to the Philadelphia public schools. So I think I got to experience like you know, four miles apart. But like, it’s like triple the amount of funding in the suburban schools compared to the Philadelphia schools. And it’s just amazing that we happen to have this funding system that’s well accepted in this country that just exacerbates the opportunity gap as if we needed more to do that. As a psychologist, I would agree with Pedro in terms of motivation. I think we need to think about, like, when any human being does anything or fails to do something like their homework. There is a reason why, and we should assume that they have some, like, more or less, rational explanation and therefore the schools that can make it a rational thing to work on this purposeful meaningful activity where you have a shot of succeeding. I think, like, in addition to the schools that are profiled in you know, in use broker that touched on an expeditionary learning schools. I think are terrific role model of that.
I think there are ways that I think that classroom teachers and school leaders like principles could get more educated about the modern sociological and psychological science.
For example, Jason Flom who’s a brilliant professor at Berkeley has done research published in the top journals, by the way, on how when you shift to a more empathy-based approach of school discipline from the traditional punitive approach like everyone wins. Like, it’s just there are no losers and this is the like, the behavior incidents go down the students do better, or the teachers feel better. It’s great. I think in terms of assessment because I mentioned or Pedro mentioned standardized tests, I would say that I’m not somebody who wants to take away assessments. I think I have a “more is more” approach to assessment.
I do worry that if we take away standardized tests all together, then it will, you know, sometimes hide inequities that like need to be in the light. But I think “more is more”. So if a kid is more than there, you know, for our performance on a multiple choice test at the end of the year, you know, like, it requires researchers and educational leaders to be more creative and holistic on how we’re tracking how students are doing. And then finally, I completely agree with some things that Anindya, Pedro mentioned about like extending the school day and extending the school year. Particularly because the, you know, not having those resources disproportionately affects, you know, groups of students.
And okay, last thing is I want universal tutoring and personalized instruction for everyone because when a child is born, they are intrinsically curious and they’re very smart.
And then we by mis fitting things over and over again and failing them like they lose that spark of learning and I think universal tutoring and personalized instruction are one of several ways that we can keep that spark going
Anindya Kundu:
One thing. One thing I’ll also add to that is Angela mentioned early childhood education. And I think that’s a part of broadening our perception of education in general, I want to go from pre-K to not just college but also career if we can expand our notion of pathways, we can offer you know internships to high school students who may not have direct entry way into the world of work. If we can build on each pathway and not think of them as isolated, I think that’s a way in which we can, you know, help students become the people who will then contribute back to society in a meaningful way.
Cyndi Stivers:
Mm hmm. Okay, so we have questions from the audience which we weren’t expecting, but there’s one that I cannot resist sharing with the three of you. And Anindya, we’re going to give you the last word. Because I mean time has flown. We have eight minutes to go. So let me pass on this question from Sharon Walter who’s in the audience.
And as I give it to you, Pedro and Angela, maybe you’ll throw in any last thoughts you want to have. And then we’ll leave it with Anindya to wrap it up.
So Sharon Walder asks, “how do we do a mass reeducation of teachers who are committed to using fear as a motivator and how committed are teacher prep programs across the nation to shifting how they prepare educators?”
Angela Duckworth:
You go first. Pedro.
Pedro Noguera:
You know, this is the hard work. What I found to be the most effective is the kind of example that Anindya cited. You got to give people a chance to see the alternative to see what it looks like when we treat kids, tap into their curiosity, empower them as learners. They need to see schools that are doing that because those schools exist right now. They need to see that in poor communities with black, Latino kids, around the country because those schools exist because seeing that lets them know. Oh, there’s another way: we don’t have to threaten these kids. We don’t have to beat them into submission. We don’t have to focus on control and compliance. We don’t have to be afraid of them. And that is, I think the important message. And if we can show them examples like that, then perhaps more will realize there’s another way that’s far more effective.
Angela Duckworth:
I completely agree with that and modeling and like showing what’s possible. It’s like human beings are not very good at imagining what’s possible. Like they kind of need. A very vivid example and then they’re very, very good at like following that example so it couldn’t agree more, Pedro. And then I would just add as a psychologist, that there are two ways to motivate behavior. There’s approach and praise and positive reinforcement, and then there’s the opposite, which is like fear and punishment, etc. And it’s a very well-established finding in animal psychology and clinical psychology that they both work, but the much better one, especially for long term outcomes as well as ethically is the positive and not the negative. So I completely agree that there needs to be a mastery education. I mean, these are scientific findings that are not even new like old but they are not necessarily intuitive and every parent probably listening to this could also maybe empathize a little bit because, you know, I nagged and I schooled and I, you know, say “you didn’t do this right, you did that right” with my own kids and I should be—if I’m psychologically wise—actually catching them when they’re doing a great thing catching them when they’re being kind, catching them when, you know God help us, they unload the dishwasher. So like this positive asset based approach that I think you know both Pedro and Anindya really advocating for as opposed to the, you know, negative punishment oriented one I think is a sea change ready to happen.
Cyndi Stivers:
Great. So, Anindya, I’m going to give you the last word, but a lot. I wanted to ask you, are we able to send a follow up to the people who registered for this that has, you know, Pedro’s articles?
Anindya Kundu:
Will put that together. Definitely.
Cyndi Stivers:
Great. Okay. So, so take us out please.
Anindya Kundu:
I think it’s important to try to end with a note about hope and optimism that Angela was was getting at. I think, you know, it’s important to remember why teachers get into the work in the first place and it’s true that the system can start to bog them down. But at the fundamental level it’s respect for humanity and potential and belief in in children that gets them into the work. And so I do think that positive examples are sometimes the most powerful things that we have to change the system. And so, my book again profiles individuals who’ve been able to do it schools who have been able to do it. Households who have been able to nurture and value educations with limited resources. Another example I would just say is, you know, with that motivation that gets people into teaching we also have to respect the agency of teachers. We have to allow them a little bit of flexibility to bring in themselves into what they teach. And so one example is another school I profile, James Baldwin high school to transfer High School in New York in Manhattan and teachers there get to teach classes called Islamic art.
Islamic art and mathematics, the abolition of racial slavery and they even have one called Dracula and gender identity. So these are classes that teachers want to teach and students wants to take and they’re able to see the relevance of the education in their lives and teachers and students both get excited to show up every day and so those kinds of examples I think are sometimes the best tool we can elevate these narratives to ideally spread hope.
And so, you know, I’ll just kind of close by saying thank you all for your time today.
You know, each of you are a very dear mentor to me and I know how busy you are, Cindy, with taking Ted online and Angela and Pedro with the million things you juggle. Thank you for making it to this Fireside Chat.
I don’t know why I use the word fireside. It’s summer, and it’s the morning.
I’ve just always wanted to. And to extend a poor, a seasonally irrelevant metaphor: if you want to get it, get a stocking stuffer this summer for someone you enjoy, the link to the book is below.
And to end on a word, a word of hope is that we’re in this moment right now that’s challenging and trying in ways that we haven’t seen before, but it also presents us an opportunity to think of education as not just something that happens within school walls but extends throughout environments and requires a community approach. And those are the things that I try to surface in my book to make the case that the education of all people’s children is something that we should all care about because it will help us create a future where we can be better prepared for some of the kinds of problems where we’re seeing today.
Pedro Noguera:
Can I just say one thing very quickly to end here? First I want to commend Anindya and the book and the work. And so really proud of you and pleased to see you getting this out there, you’ve done great work. I also want to just commend you, Angela, because, you know, you could have taken this as a criticism of your work instead you know you embraced it and you responded to it and I think that’s what we’re modeling here today is, it’s possible to have this force over these complex issues and even disagree slightly, but not make each other enemies and you know, at a time when we’re so quick to become polarized and just attack and not listen and not think through things together. I think you’ve demonstrated I think the best way to approach that so thank you for modeling that kind of leadership.
Angela Duckworth:
Thank you. Don’t. Don’t give up, don’t, don’t stop teaching me I have a lot to learn but we talked a lot. It’s good.
Anindya Kundu:
I’m not done emailing you in return.
Cyndi Stivers:
Well, we all have a lot to learn. And I have learned a lot from the three of you and thank you for your continuing work and I will continue to learn from you.
And thank you to this audience, many of whom have posted many, you know, encouraging statements which you can all read and I apologize to those whose questions, we didn’t get to, but these guys were just too smart, too much to say.
Thank you.
Pedro Noguera:
Thank you everyone.
Anindya Kundu:
Good to see you all. Stay safe. Thank you.