The Self-Driven Child
Helping parents raise kids with healthy motivation and resilience in facing life's challenges. Oh, and having more fun while doing it!
The Self-Driven Child
Brainless Education: A Conversation About the Brain Science Too Often Ignored in Most Schools
Welcome to The Self-Driven Child podcast! In this episode, I chat with Dr. William Stixrud, co-author of The Self-Driven Child, to explore the concept of “brainless education” and why the way we approach learning in schools often overlooks the very organ meant to do the learning: the brain. We explore how prioritizing stress reduction, sleep, and autonomy for students can revolutionize not just their academic success, but also their mental health and intrinsic motivation.
Together, we discuss how giving kids more control over their learning and personal lives can foster better stress tolerance and deeper engagement with education. Dr. Stixrud shares research-based insights, and we provide actionable ideas on how educators, parents, and students themselves can shift toward a brain-friendly approach.
Episode Highlights:
[01:58] - Dr. William Stixrud explains the low levels of student motivation and mental health issues
[04:30] - How schools often act as a major source of stress and anxiety for students
[06:12] - The success of Transcendental Meditation for medical students and its positive effects on learning
[08:48] - The three pillars of healthy brain function: learning, mental health, and motivation
[09:24] - How stress impacts the prefrontal cortex and executive function
[12:27] - The importance of the hippocampus and the damaging effects of stress on memory
[18:56] - The critical role of sleep in memory retention and emotional regulation
[20:45] - How sleep deprivation increases stress and worsens anxiety
[25:41] - Developing a sense of control and its importance in mental health
[31:59] - Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation: how autonomy enhances learning
[37:16] - Supporting autonomy in schools and how it improves student outcomes
[42:19] - The argument for making homework optional and ungraded to reduce stress
[44:01] - Final thoughts: fostering a brain-friendly environment for students
Links & Resources:
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If we prioritize getting enough rest, and it's hard, because certainly with cell phones and technology, there's a lot of reasons that kids are besides homework, the kids aren't sleeping enough. And so we're working with schools that if you can't change the start time, make first period optional, or make first period of rest period kids who want to can study, or kids who want to just put their head down their desk and sleep. We've said all work together, that we'd rather teach a kid for four hours who'd slept for eight hours than teach a kid eight hours who slept for four
Ned Johnson:Welcome to the self driven child podcast. I'm your host, Ned Johnson and co author with Dr William stick of the books the self driven child, the science and sense of giving your kids more control over their lives and what do you say? How to talk with kids to build motivation, stress, tolerance and a happy home, how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. For young people, a significant part of their days is about school to get a good ROI on their precious time and our precious tax dollars. We should all have a shared interest in the lives the kids lead in school. In this podcast, Bill and I riff a little bit on what we call brainless education, meaning how much of our focus is on what we cram into kids' heads and how we do the cramming and not nearly enough about brains themselves. In this podcast, we'll talk about what we know about brains, or maybe don't, and what we should all be paying more attention to. We'll talk about three main domains, learning itself, mental health and emotional well being, and lastly, the motivational system, instead of being wired all the while and that kids need to carry into adulthood to build and lead successful lives. Take a listen. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Hi Bill.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Hey, my friend. Thanks for having me on again. Nice to be here.
Ned Johnson:Oh, you know, we never run out of things to talk about. I'm excited for today's podcast because it's built on a new lecture that we are giving about brainless education. Do you want to share with folks how we got to that and what you have in mind? Sure,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:you know, I imagine that many of the listeners podcast know that the things that we've been most deeply concerned about for the last, really, 1520, years are the low level of student mental health and also what we call kind of disordered motivation, where so many kids just are not motivated to work hard to develop themselves, and a lot of kids that We see are just so anxious and driven to succeed, that they are pursuing success in a way that's sustainable or the way that's good for their brain. I think our mantra has been kids need more control of their own lives, in part because a low sense of control is the most stressful thing you could experience, and all mental health problems, you're rooted in a low sense of control. And we know that the things that improve mental health increase people's sense of control. And also because you can't become intrinsically motivated to really, to really have that passion to develop yourself so you have something meaningful to offer the world, unless you have that intrinsic motivation that says, This is my life, and that comes from autonomy. Comes from a sense of control. So we've been working with educators for the last, as you know, for the last two years, really, who are interested in promoting student autonomy, what they call student directed learning. It occurred to us, the more that we work with these educators, that if you went into most classrooms, maybe some, you know, some schools are different. So some grade levels are different, but in most certainly by middle school and high school classrooms, probably upper elementary as well. You'd never know there's been four years of research on the brain that's been applied to education people have been attempting to apply to because so many decisions that are made about policy and how we do things in school don't take into consideration that the kids have a brain, or the teachers have a brain, and I think that we were integral struck by our thinking the last few months, or maybe the last couple of years, really, that for many kids, school is the major source of their suffering. A study out of Yale and right before the pandemic, this huge survey of high school kids where 75% of the emotions they experienced during school they were negative, and more than half say that they feel stressed, tired and bored. Most of the time they're in school, it's
Ned Johnson:kind of remarkable to be both bored and stressed. I mean, being
Dr. William R. Stixrud:bored is stressful, you know, fair, fair, but also they feel pressure, achieved, but it's not interesting. Doesn't engage them. And what you get anxious, it's hard to pay attention. It's even harder to pay attention engaged. So our friend Stuart Slavin, who went into these three suburban high schools in Ohio and surveyed all the kids and was just stunned by how much anxiety depression was and when he had them live. Yes, the various things that made them stressful made them unhappy, all 12 are related to school and academic achievement and achievement related pressures. And we know about that the school refusal up to 15% of kids. We know about that the rate of suicides in kids is much lower on the weekends, on school breaks than in the summer, that is during school, school year and during the school week. And so there's a lot of evidence that this hypothesis, that for many kids, school is a major source of their suffering. There's quite a bit of evidence for it. And I think that we thought, God, if people really paid attention to the brain, what we know about the brain, we do things a lot differently, and do things in a way that we that would be beneficial not only kids, but the teachers and parents and administrators. So
Ned Johnson:sort of three areas I think we want to highlight and dig into, but before we do that, so that so it's not all doom and gloom, folks, do you want to talk for a minute about Stuart slavins pilot that he did with medical students, because this may it's nice to have sort of pin on what it looks like when things go well, and then we can, then we can come back to this and kind of why it went so well. I
Dr. William R. Stixrud:love that every year I lecture to students at the medical school at Loyola University in Chicago who take Transcendental Meditation, which we both practice, as an elective, and they did a study there recently where they found that even though medical students have very reports, really high levels of anxiety and depression, but with just being able to take 40 minutes and completely quiet their mind and Their body effortlessly, but they report not only a significantly improved mood, much, much stronger sense of control of their own lives, better relationships, more empathy, but also having two to five more hours of productive time during the day, even though there's a practical 40 minutes meditate, wow,
Ned Johnson:wow, that's a good ROI.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:It is. And you think, well, that the brain works better when it's deeply related. You know, it's do you relax? It's working in a more orderly way. Why don't we emphasize that? And then, as you said, Stuart Slavin, our friend, Stuart Slavin, who has been in medical education forever. He's a pediatrician, an educator. He was, he was just alarmed at the rates of anxiety and depression than medical students at St Louis University. So they did an intervention during the whole school year where they reduced the amount of instruction by 10% the amount of classroom time by 10% they gave the kids half a day, the medical students half a day to work on projects of their own interest related to medicine, and also just give them a short course on kind of talking, back to perfectionism, other kinds of distorted thinking, and they got an 80, 80% reductions in anxiety and depression during the year. And also, the crazy thing, the students did better, quite a bit better, on the board exams, than the students had in previous years, when they're when they're spending more time in class, more material to master, didn't have that half day to do what they wanted due to basically that's a focus on autonomy, your own interest, your self drive. And what happened then is Stewart got fired, and they dropped the program 80% reduction, better scores. But some reason the Baroque did they got called the carpet for Yeah, so I just think that there's a lot of pressures. But geez, it's not hard. That's the interesting thing. It's certainly not all gloom and do because I we think the schools could turn this around very quickly, that they have tremendous power to do it. I think they understand the really focus on the brain. What do we need for brains to function? Well, we can do this quickly. That's my angle. So to
Ned Johnson:sort of frame up this conversation, if you take what Stuart and the medical students their experience, they had greater autonomy and less stress, which led to one, better learning. Two, better mental health, and three, better motivation, more intrinsically driven motivation, yes, well, well, let's,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:let's go through this, and
Ned Johnson:let's talk What the heck is going on with brains, and what should we as parents and as educators know about healthy brain development and healthy brain function? And let's, let's, let's start with learning. What does the research tell us about brain based, not brainless education?
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, well, I think sometime, probably in the late 1980s I was reading a book about the brain and education, and people were saying that the optimal internal state, state of mind, or state of brain for learning is relaxed alertness. That sounds nice. Yeah, you gotta be alert. You gotta be focused, you know. But if you're really stressed, it doesn't work. And also, the optimal learning environment is high challenge, but low threat. And for so many kids, the school feels threatening, you. And also, if more than half feel bored, these high school students are bored low challenge. It's not sufficiently challenging in a way that's important. And so do you want to, I mean, you know this research as well as i Why did you talk a little bit about so this areas of research that focus on student learning, that if we just applied them, we do things much differently and very quickly, right?
Ned Johnson:And so a lot of people probably familiar with what's called the Yerkes Dodson curve. We talk about this in the self driven child, and if you just picture an upside down U, and so performance goes up and down the y axis, low to high, and then across the bottom stress. And to echo Bill's point, if the stress is too low, if the challenge is too low, then kids are not engaged. If the stress is too high, everything goes to pieces. And somewhere in the middle, there's high challenge and low threat. And this is what optimal arousal looks like. And this is really just based on neurotransmitters of the right, the kind of Goldilocks balance right of enough dopamine and norepinephrine to fuel the brain so it's engaged. It's high challenge, highly focused, but not overly stressed. And importantly, most everyone who probably is followers of the self driven child knows all about executive functions. And the big thing to know is that the prefrontal cortex kindly needs that Goldilocks level of neurotransmitters so for executive functions to work, so organization and planning all goal directed behavior, but also cognitive and emotional flexibility. And really that emotional flexibility is what is tied into poor mental health, where you get bent out of shape and you can't sort of quickly or capably bend yourself back. We'll talk about that a little bit more in part two. And we also know that for the prefrontal cortex to be running the show, we need to dampen down the amygdala, because we all have a stress reaction, but we want that putting things into perspective and get right back to the task at hand. And high stress completely fries that connection between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, meaning too much stress sort of makes us out of our minds, and kids and adults aren't able to do the things that they're allowed to do. I would also point out that too much stress shrinks the hippocampus, if you don't know that one, that's the major memory center of the brain. So when we work to cram more and more stuff into brains, we're actually making the brain structure that holds that learning smaller and smaller. So try to put too many things into a suitcase and watch, watch how well that goes. I think we do the same thing. We risk doing the same thing to brains. You know,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:it's interesting that there is a study of medical students a few years ago that showed what when they're when they're studying for board exams. A couple months they're studying for board exams, the hippocampus got smaller. Hmm, yeah, the crazy idea here is sewer slab and study you try to cram less in, make it less stressful, and the structure gets bigger and retains better.
Ned Johnson:You know, that sounds like magic, Bill,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:what you think about just, I date myself, obviously. But textbooks, when I, when I was in high school, textbook for a biology was 350 pages. Now they're 1250 pages, you know, the same semester, same year, well. And
Ned Johnson:I'll add to that really quickly. Most of the students with whom I work, they've never had a paper textbook. Yeah, yeah, they're all digital. And there's an efficiency to that, and there's a cost savings to that. But of course, almost everything where we insert more technology into the learning environment, it undermines learning and increases stress.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, so. But I think that if educators, the highest priority was create a learning environment and approach to education where the kids aren't chronically stressed and tired because the sleep deprivation, you know, just during the night, making sure that kids get enough sleep and not having kids spend one o'clock doing homework. I mean, what happens during the night is the information that your hippocampus, which is specialized for new learning, your hippocampus, basically stores, and then it shuttles back and forth between the hippocampus, that's kind of the deep part of the brain, and the cortex, the upper side of the brain, where it gets stored. Eventually, that's where the long term storage is in the cortex. And if you disrupt that, you disrupt that process of storing in long term memory what you learn that day.
Ned Johnson:So this is why we kids are often taught, but far too and frequently retain the things that they've worked hard to learn.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, and I think also, you know, when we don't realize that stress kids, the container is getting smaller and smaller, we just cram more and more stuff in. In my experience, the kids oftentimes don't have a sense of what's what's most important. Just I tested Harvard graduate recently, where I just asked her who was president in the United States during the Civil War. You said George Washington. And she's a brilliant girl. But I think that that if I was going to make a list of five things I want people to know about American history that would be part of the discussion would be the Civil War, the Emancipation Lincoln. Do? So I think that if that was the major thing, let's make sure those brain structures work well by not kids be too tired, too stressed. But how would we do things differently? We prioritize? What are our values around? We're gonna
Ned Johnson:have an interview on the podcast with a guy named Tim Donohue, who's written extensively about grade inflation and grades going up and up and up, a learning perhaps not tagging along same level. And he mentioned a school district in Arizona where things have not gotten better, despite an increase in instructional time. And one things that he noted in the 90s, the school day was from 9am till 3pm or maybe 240 I forget he said now the school start time, wait for it is 720 and so you think how much learning is lost despite greater instructional time, because we have these brains that are true pointer, tired and stressed and yeah, not well primed for learning. Yeah. The other thing I'd love to have you unpack a little bit when we think about what's going on at a brain level for learning is the default mode network. And I know you said you were just lecturing to those medical students, none of whom had heard about the default mode network. Yeah,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:I was actually about to about 30 medical students. They're first year students, so they okay, but actually, there's one who studied some neuroscience. Is vaguely familiar, but I asked him, How many of you know the default mode network. And he's the only because I studied but he's the only one who heard of it. Yeah, this is the brain structure. It really it's circuits in the brain, these integrated circuits in the brain that use 80% of the brain's energy. So must be a pretty big and they call it the resting state of the brain. And the idea is that we have certain brain circuits that specialize in focusing on a task, completing a task, and then we have this whole network of systems involving parts of the front of the brain and the back of the brain that have to do with memory and kind of future thinking. Because you think about it, the default mode activates if you don't have your phone, you're sitting waiting for the doctor's office. You aren't reading it, you're sitting your own head. That's when the default mode activates when you aren't focusing on a task, and that is 80% of the brain's energy. And we know, wow, that all kinds of mental learning, emotional, attentional problems involved. In some ways, the default mode network is not working right. And we know that the default mode is really important for learning. Because you're taught something, you need time to kind of just think about it in your head and not be have to focus on something else. So if you're constantly going from one stop to another, and you have time to reflect on it, you don't remember a lot of it. You don't encode it as well. You don't understand it as well. You don't make connections as well. And we know the default mode is that kind of being in your own head, hugely related to problem solving, to creativity, to for younger kids, the development of identity, a sense of identity, and the development of
Ned Johnson:empathy. Those seem like important, the important work for teenagers to be doing, it does. And
Dr. William R. Stixrud:there's a brand new study came out of China, the title of which is rest to promote learning.
Ned Johnson:Wow. And I think that I
Dr. William R. Stixrud:was just, I really date myself here, when I was in kindergarten, we napped as a half day kindergarten, and people had nap time, and I was, I was almost six when I started, so I didn't I was, I was no longer napping. I was bored to lay on my little little rug for 20 minutes. A lot of kids fell asleep. You know, do kids not need to nap anymore? So I think that the studies on stress and rest, yeah, and just not getting enough rest if we prioritize, brings being relative low stress, high rest, high you know, high focus, that relaxed alertness learning would just be infinitely better,
Ned Johnson:as would mental health. Right?
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Should we talk about mental health. Yeah,
Ned Johnson:it sure, sure seems like him and I, I mean, for me, I have so many kids I work with who are just, they're lovely kids, and they've got lovely families. And go these wonderful schools, and they're all not all, a Concerningly high percentage of them have anxiety and or depression, all kinds of stress related disorders. I was just talking with a kid who's up in New York sophomore and, you know, anxiety diagnosed for years, and started talking to him. Found, I always find a way to sort of noodle in and ask about sleep, really, starting from a learning perspective about, well, maybe, maybe the reason you learn math and then forget it is, and then try to find a delicate way to tiptoe into talking about is anxiety, and I have not had a kid yet who's diagnosed with anxiety, who understands the connection between sleep and anxiety, knowing with you know science. Goes that difficulty sleeping is a cause of anxiety and also a symptom of anxiety, and so it takes probably a little bit more care and attention than we're currently given, unless we be on this vicious cycle of tired and stressed and tired and stressed and on and on it goes,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:yeah, and certainly there's a lot of factors that kids aren't sleeping as well, I think, yeah, in the self driven child, we talk about sleep in its role in emotional regulation. And you know, you were familiar Ned with research and showed the amygdala, the part that very primitive part of your brain that just senses, the reaction to threat and when a perceived threat starts, the stress response, right is 60% more reactive if you don't sleep well one night,
Ned Johnson:the negativity bomb, right as to gold calls it, yeah,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:yes. So you memorize a list of words at night before you go to sleep, and several words like flower, beauty, love, you know, really positive words. And some are words like death, destruction, devastation, not necessarily D word, negative stuff and then neutral words, like table, flower, fork, you know, stuff like that. And if you don't sleep, well, you don't remember any other words as well. But what you remember better than any is the negative words, and the Robert sticker at Harvard said this is a negativity bomb. And also talk about that, weakening that. Matthew. Matthew Walker, yeah, weakening those connections, right, right, right, yeah,
Ned Johnson:no, it's funny. We will simply put sleep deprivation. The single best neurological marker of mental health is how strong the connections are right between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, and the more underrested We are, the more those connections are frayed. And he has the wonderful, wonderful book called Why We sleep. And Bill and I picked up a thread from that and wrote an article for Psychology Today of why it's always better to sleep on and based on the insight that he made that during sleep we go through stage 12344, being REM sleep, and every cycle that we go through, it repeats throughout the night. The percentage of REM sleep gets deeper and deeper. And he made the point that it's only during REM sleep that we revisit experiences in ways that are chemically neutral. So, you know, Bill and I got in a fight. Now that's what we do. But he calls me mean names. I call him me names. We're both gonna be a little upset, and we'll reflect we never had an argument,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:right? We'll give
Ned Johnson:it a try and see try this experiment, right? And and so you that, gosh, I can't believe he said though, gosh, I can't believe he said that. And we would, when we consciously revisit, we'd feel the sting of that, right? But during sleep, all those adrenaline and norepinephrine, these, these things are not in cortisol. It's not there. So the brain is able to go back and revisit experiences without with all that that you'd feel. And so in this article, we met, we sort of liken it to if you were trying to understand a movie and the motivation of characters, maybe in a horror movie, but the lights are turned on and there's no creepy music, right? You say, Oh, here comes the guy with a chainsaw. Oh, yes, those are teenagers. I wonder what his motivation, and you would experience it very differently. And so he makes the point that we can think about adequate sleep as equivalent to overnight therapy. That there is a study, though, for folks who are depressed and because anxiety, then depression, you have all these problems with sleep when they could fix the sleep for these folks, slightly over half of people were no longer depressed. Sleep alone was able to soothe and heal their minds. And so knowing that adolescence, their brains are under development, we sure want to do everything we can to have that overnight therapy of being well rested, so that they can process all the hard things that go along with being a teenager and develop that stress, that stress tolerance, that resilience, that's so important that they develop as they carry and then carry that into adulthood. If
Dr. William R. Stixrud:we prioritize getting enough rest, it's hard because certainly with cell phones, there's a lot of reasons that kids are besides homework, the kids aren't sleeping enough, but 720 start school. Start Times for high school kids who need nine to 10 hours of sleep not to feel tired, not such a good thing. And so we're working with schools that if you can't change the start time, make first period optional or make first period of rest period if kids who want to study or kids who want to just put their head down their desk and sleep just we've said all work together, that we'd rather teach a kid for four hours who'd slept for eight hours than to teach a kid eight hours who slept for four Right. Right? Be much more productive. And also just in terms of neuroscience research that informs mental health, that if we pay attention to our bread and butter, our main thesis about a sense of control, we know, as I said, that all mental disorders involve a disorder, stress response, an overly sensitive and reactive stress response. They're all stress related problems. So. And we know the research sense of control, that a low sense of control is the most stressful thing in experience. One of the reasons we decided to make that our main thesis, our main focus, if mental health problems are rooted in low sense of control and a low sense of control is most stressful experience, this must be a big deal. And then Steve Meyer's work. I mean, if people have paid attention to that, this guy who studied a sense of control for years in rats, who concluded that if you have a sense of control, meaning it starts I can handle, I can manage stressful situations. I'm not helpless. I don't give up. I can manage them. I can cope. That inoculates you the harmful effects of stress, and you become hard to stress.
Ned Johnson:And what I would add to that is is one thing that he noted is that a sense of control is not that about setting the organisms yearn for it, but the wiring, the brain wiring for a sense of control is something that has to be developed. And so to not just do children and teens deserve a sense of control. They need a sense of control in order to wire their brains for for that resilience and for that coping. And so the challenge for us as parents and educators, when we see kids struggle, we act. We want to go in there and fix the problem, you know, and save the day, but, but we want to be in the supporting role, not in the leading role, because otherwise the brain wiring is in us, not in kids. And we want kids to have the opportunities to recognize that they can solve their own problems, that they can handle hard things, because they need that, lest they be failure to launch and just kind of live in basements for next decades of their lives. Wonderful
Dr. William R. Stixrud:point. You know, one of the other areas of research that if schools paid attention to it would make a huge difference is the research on stress, stress contagion. It turns out that all emotions are contagious. And if you're around somebody who's really angry, and your amygdala picks it up, or your neurons, your frontal cortex, watching the kind of mimic it, so you start to feel person's feeling, and also, if you're as somebody's very calm, you tend to feel safer inside. You know feel threatened, your amygdala kind of calms down. There's research, for example, on students in schools who had burned out teachers and they have high higher cortisol levels, stress hormone levels, than students who have a teacher who enjoys their job, that students brains pick up on the stress in their teacher and vice versa. It's I think, that if we knew that we don't want teachers to be so, I think our conclusion has been that anything that makes life more stressful for kids, their parents, their teachers, administrators, ultimately, it's going to be not good for kids learning and their development, because they don't learn well if they're highly stressed and tired, and being highly stressed and tired ain't great for emotional development. We say the formula for becoming depressed is to be too tired and too stressed for too long. And I think that the thing we've been focusing on is that research informs student learning and student motivation. I mean, it's student mental health, but also student motivation. Yeah.
Ned Johnson:I mean, you know, one of the challenges that we all face is that in yielding to or granting to young people a greater sense of control. By definition, it means that we as adults, as teachers, as administrators, have to work with kids, not work on kids, and we, and we, we are going to feel a lower sense of control. And so we can often fall into Not, not for bad reasons, but because we want kids to do well, we can often default to kind of extrinsic motivators. And if we are honest about this, most grading systems are this where, you know, it's, it's a carrot or a stick, you know, I'll give you the A or I'll, you know, take away something as a way to motivate kids. And that's fine if at some point extrinsic motivation and extra motivators somehow miraculously morphed into intrinsic motivation. But that's not the way that it works, right? And so the dominant model that we, of course, lean on for intrinsic motivation is what's called self determination theory. And support the kind of three profound psychological needs that kids need to have, that all people need to have, to feel competent, to feel related to their teacher or the topic, and to feel a sense of autonomy or control, and it's really easy to lose track of that and come down on kids in ways that we, you know, you're way behind, and everybody else can do this that undermines their competence, sense of competency, that makes us not be a supporter, but kind of, you know, an enforcer, and undermines relatedness and then autonomy. Unless people think this is kind of like, well, that's nice for them to be intrinsically motivated. There are very significant differences in what goes on in brains when they're intrinsically motivated versus extrinsically motivated. The big one to start with is the availability of dopamine, the neurotransmitters kind of get up and go. Let's focus. Because let's set a goal. Let's go achieve it, knowing that when kids go into adolescence, by definition, their available level of dopamine drops. This is why you have teens I'm so bored all the time. Well, they're not wrong, because their dopamine is low, and this is a way to help them crave novelty, right? Because teens are supposed to go out and explore the world beyond their bedroom and be beyond their room and meet new people and try on new things. And so when kids are in, kids are intrinsically motivated. They can pursue the things that they want. We get. We get this big boost in dopamine. And so sometimes this can when they can be engaged in things even outside of the classroom. You know, it's it's sports, it's after school activities, it's robotics, it's student government, it's a part time job, and it jacks up the available level of dopamine that then can become available to fuel them in classes and schoolwork that they know they kind of should do but they don't otherwise feel like they want to do. So it's a really big deal. The other thing that I and you shared this with me a few months ago, Bill, is that when kids are in when any of us are motivated intrinsically rather than extrinsically, there's a big change in how we pay attention to the mistakes that we make that are invariably a part of learning. When we're intrinsically motivated, we we purposely pay attention to those things. We crave them because it's feedback of, Oh, I was, you know, that chord was wrong, you know, in my band, you know, I didn't make that shot. Ooh, that the way I expressed that in the paper isn't quite what I was trying to say here. Where, when it's extrinsically motivated, we either don't pay very close attention to those mistakes we make, they give us important feedback to get better, or we just kind of want to sweep it aside and say, Hey, good enough, and move by. And this is where a lot of kids, if they're meeting things, the extrinsic demands on them to what's necessary to get an A. That's the goal. And as soon as I'm at that level, it doesn't matter, because it's instant, really about what matters to me and my learning. It's just notching the A and moving on to the next one.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah, it's interesting too, that there's been research on perfectionists and people who have what they call a healthy drive to excel, and that people have a healthy drive to so they really want to do well, so if they're making a mistake, they want to know about right. But increases in the brainwave activity, something that's called this error related negativity wave. This is more active and intrinsically motivated, and also people who had healthy desire to excel, and it's lower than people who are intrinsically motivated and imperfection is perfectionist, who don't want to make mistakes. You don't want to know about it, certainly don't want anybody else to know about it. So pay attention to it.
Ned Johnson:A paradigm example that jumped to mind me the other day, Bill was thinking about kids who are taking music lessons, who are forced to practice, you know, half an hour a day, or whatever it is, and all that they're really doing is look at the darn clock and wait until they're done, as opposed to you're trying to learn a song because you're playing at the school talent show or something, and you're really want to impress a friend or someone you think is really cute, then you really care about Getting those notes right. And it's not about the half an hour. It's about it's about the mastery of that song, right?
Dr. William R. Stixrud:You know, the self driven child we talk about the research of a guy named Reed Larson who studies, for many, many years, studied adolescent development, and for a while he was studying adolescent motivation. He's trying to figure out, How do children turn into self motivated adolescents and adults. And he concluded it wasn't through always doing their homework, this through what he called the passionate pursuit of pastimes. It was that that intrinsically motivated flow experience of being deeply engaged in something that's important to you, that you want to do you want to get better and better and better at. And he said, You know, when you're that flow experience. If you're really doing something because it's enjoyable to you want to get good at it. You're really working hard at it, you're combining a brain state of high energy, high focus, high determination, high effort, but low stress. There's just a beautiful brain state. I mean, I don't remember with this in the book, but when we've lectured about this topic, I mentioned my experience as a high school student, where I was a two, eight high school student rounding up, and I just, I just really, I really, I never turned homework in on time, and I oftentimes didn't turn it in, but I was just completely passionate about rock and roll, and I spent hours every night trying to learn new songs or practicing the organ or working on something with complete focus and effort and completely lose track of time. And my father died when I was a senior in high school the very, very end of the year, and it kind of woke me up. And two and a half months later, I started college, and it went from a two, eight student who turned in nothing on time to a straight A student. And it's not like I got smarter over the summer, but what I realized as I got older and started to study this stuff, is that I sculpted a brain as an adolescent that could go pedal to the metal when something's important to me and what school became important to me. I worked really hard at it, but it wasn't as important to me when I was in high school as girls in rock and roll. It's. So in any case, so yeah, we know that intrinsically motivated kids, that they learn better, they work harder, that they're happier, and also low intrinsic motivation. Not having a lot of intrinsic motivation is related to all kinds of mental health problems. So it's a big deal. So I think our thesis is that if schools really paid attention to the research on these aspects of brain functioning that relate to learning to relate to student mental health, that relate to student motivation, these would be completely different, and it would happen fast, and teachers would be happier, kids would be happier, parents would be happier. But there's a lot of headlines. There's a lot of forces that that lot of politicians who know nothing about the brain or not care. We say we need our kids to be competing better. And so there's all this work on standards and all this stuff. There's so much focus on like the thing that gets us. There's so much focus on what we're going to cram into kids heads and how we're going to cram it in, with so little attention to their heads and how their heads work, and how to make your heads work better. I guess. Basically, yeah, we are. Well,
Ned Johnson:let's leave it with a few suggestions we include in this talk. I mean, the first thing, I think, is obviously just support autonomy in every way that you can. And so this is from parents at home. This is for teachers at school. And autonomy doesn't mean, you know, letting the teens run the whole show, but it just means that they have choices, you know, to degree of what they study, of how they study, of how they might be assessed, of choosing projects. And again, this isn't all or nothing, but when we've looked at some of the really great and creative education that's going on across the country, you know, Nathan Gorsuch out there in Colorado, or it's teachers, parents choosing to support their kids in schools where the schools are supporting kids for autonomous learning. And so this the shift, of course, of moving from people have heard it before, being the sage on the stage to the guide on the side, trusting that kids want to go to school and be deeply engaged and do things that are meaningful. And to your point, work hard to get good at something that actually pulls them forward, rather than they have to be pushed from behind. And so in every way, little and large, that we can give kids more autonomy in their own learning, we're going to get such a better ROI on our tax dollars and adolescent energy.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Yeah. And then our new book, which comes out in March 2025, we have a kind of a menu of things that educators can choose. Some starting from the kind of graded level of challenges, starting from just when you give assignment, just say, I want to know if this helps you. Let me know. I wonder how much time you spend on was it helpful? Is there stuff you could be doing? This more helpful to help you learn this stuff? Just like taking your opinion seriously, they got a brain in their head. They want to learn like that all the way up to creating schools like Nathan Gorsuch Village School in Colorado Springs, where the whole thing is about student directed learning. And the interesting thing is that the kids that we talk to there, they're much less they're high school kids. They're much less stressed. They said they learned so much easier because they aren't tired and stressed all the time. And the teachers give them this huge teacher shortage in public schools that they have a huge waiting list, and the two teachers just recruit their friends because their friends are in schools who are burned out in other public schools and come teach here. It's a public school.
Ned Johnson:It's so much more fun to teach kids when they're enjoying the learning process. Yeah, don't feel like you're dragging kids up a hell. That's
Dr. William R. Stixrud:right. When you're there. You're there to support them and mentor them and guide them, but not to kind of force them constantly to do stuff they are interested in or try to, as one educator says, not constantly giving them the answers for questions they aren't asking. So certainly, I think the other thing I had to kind of list the things that I think are hugely important. The second thing would be, kind of creating a brain friendly environment, as you might say, kind of, let's reduce nuts. Sonia lupiens formula for stress, new situations, unpredictable situations, perceive threat and a low sense of control. Nuts. And I think just how do we create a social environment? That's less stressful? Well, certainly I'd rather have a kid come to nine o'clock in school, nine o'clock and have shorter classes, less instruction material, work at stuff they want to, they can learn on the wrong Yeah. And just have a shorter school day and have kids come to school world Western that, in itself would make an enormous difference. Yeah? Or just have them come to 720 the busses have to bring 720 let them rest for a couple hours. Yeah, there's so many things that we could do. I just this, this nuts thing is really interesting, because we were talking to an educator, your friend, Katie. Katie, yeah, Arizona, who says, I'm always talking with teachers and coaches and administrators, and they just don't realize that so often, the way they approach kids, they approach them in a very threatening way. Yeah, and how that shuts kids down when it feels like this threatening to them and just this nuts. Let's minimize
Ned Johnson:she said that every disciplinary issue she's ever seen has been something where things went really off the rails in terms. Of nuts, because when kids get if they get upset enough or stressed enough, they literally are incapable of thinking it's the freeze, fight or flight response, and a lot of times they're falling into that fight and doing things that are bad for them, their futures, and not at all fun for teachers, administrators and classmates to engage with as well. Yeah. And so when we can lower that nuts, everybody thinks better, yeah, yeah. And
Dr. William R. Stixrud:certainly, part of that supporting the time, as you said, is developing that in schools that consulting or that the guide, guiding rule, as opposed to just being to deliver information. And the Enforcer, my experience, is that nobody goes into education because they hate kids and they don't want people go into it because they like children. They want to make a difference in this world, and that's what I'm finding and just working with a lot of these schools that are trying to promote student learning, the teachers feel so much happier and more fulfilled. They really feel like they can make a difference in somebody's lives when they get to treat them as human beings develop relationships aren't contingently trying to force them and make them do stuff they have no interest in. The other thing is, if you have good relationship, a teacher has a good relationship kid, you can say, Look, you want to graduate. I know you don't love that. You don't love biology, but let's get through this together. They'll help you get get through this, because if you want to graduate, you got to do this so that we know when you have a good relationship with someone, you can take something that's not intrinsically motivated and develop and turn it into intrinsic motivation, yeah? But when you feel trusted, okay, this is my part of my goal, so I don't love this, but I can get myself to do it. Is serving my goal.
Ned Johnson:When you don't try to have power over kids, you're so much more likely to be able to have influence over them, right? Yeah, yeah, our last big one. And the people, people love this is the idea that, from our perspective, most homework should be optional and ungraded. I mean, we get kids who are getting C's. They get they've got a C in a class, they got A's on all their exams, so they've ostensibly demonstrated the mastery, but they they got dinged because they didn't do the homework. And if, if the point of homework is to support learning, but it isn't contributing, particularly when kids are doing 234, hours of sleep, a night of homework at night, and they're crowding out sleep, and they're crowding out, you know, passion, pursuit of pastimes and time with their family and time with their friends. It's a pretty high cost with a pretty low ROI. Yeah,
Dr. William R. Stixrud:a couple weeks ago, I tested a kid who just is in 11th grade. This year. As a 10th grader, he took geometry. He's got a really good mind for math, and the teacher, in this little form that the teachers fill out for me, she said, just what you said, which is that, you know, he got C's, even though he got A's on almost every Quiz and test his intended his homework, it sounded like a really good most a lot of stuff he wrote was very insightful, something, he's a really good teacher, but he didn't question the idea that. Well, if you didn't need to do the homework, why should he do it? If it wasn't necessary for him to learn, certainly wasn't necessary for him to turn in, why would he do it? Wouldn't it be a terrible waste of his time? Maybe he's finding better ways to learn. I'm just thinking of that lecture that we gave 1000 students in Illinois, so Bern, Illinois, this very high achieving high school, we gave a talk called creating a life that you want, right, right? Try to help kids kind of think in a healthy way about how pursuing their own development and their own goals and not getting too locked into this, this idea that you have to you don't have a life unless you go to the most elite college, right, right? But this one girl stands up and says, Because homework causes so much stress and suffering for kids, should teachers be held accountable for all the emotional problems that their homework causes? Wow. The other 999 students in the auditorium stood up and gave her a standing ovation that narrow in stage and literally, the rafters were shaking. There's so much energy behind this idea of we don't believe that teachers be able to be they're just part of a system, right, right? It's not paying attention to the brain. That's our rank. They're good people that wanted to do a good job. But
Ned Johnson:if you make an option on grading, you try to you try to inspire kids and not require kids, right? And it goes back to fostering that relationship and being to have influence, rather than trying to exert power, which which all humans will fight. And it puts us on the opposite side of what should be a shared endeavor. And I'll share this quote that I'm so glad you shared this with me, but I'm happy to pass this on that from the this from the 19 in the 1960s the American Educational Research Association wrote this, whenever homework crowds out social experience, outdoor recreation and creative activities, and whenever it usurps time devoted to sleep, it is not meeting the basic needs of children and adolescents, like I said, he can say the same thing for teachers. Won't they rather be engaging with kids rather than grading homework that kids just dash off anyway.
Dr. William R. Stixrud:Just are kids that much different now?
Ned Johnson:Yeah, yeah. I well, I mean, fundamental. So that we're talking about the development of brains, and although technology has changed a lot in the last 60 years, I doubt that brains have changed that much in the last 60 years in terms of what they need. Well, put well. Bill, thanks for this conversation about ideally brain not brainless. Brainful. Can you be brainful? Brainful education folks. If you have questions, shoot us an email, shoot us a text, find us on social media. If you'd like us to come and talk to school and try to talk them straight or share some ideas about what we think might help you. Help your kids. We're always happy to do it with our inimitable Dr, William R sticks, and I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Hey folks, Ned here, over the past 25 years, I've talked to countless parents of high school age students who care deeply about their kids' education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed. It can help parents to work with a team they trust won't just pile on more pressure to achieve better scores and grades. That's why I founded prep matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation and academic tutoring. This podcast and my books with my friend Bill sticks reflect our company philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school age student and would like to talk about putting a plan together, please get in touch with us. Visit our website@prepmatters.com, or while your kids may only text, you might want to actually talk with a person, if so, you can reach us at 301-951-0350 you.