The Self-Driven Child

A Superhero For Student Autonomy in Schools: Talking With Mike Nicholson About What Works

• Ned Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 46

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Hey folks, Ned here! You know how much we all want our kids and students to thrive, but sometimes, despite our best efforts, it feels like we’re stuck in the same old patterns that just don’t work. That’s why I’m thrilled about today’s episode. We’re talking about the concept of student autonomy—why it’s crucial for engagement, learning, and even mental health. And joining me is someone who’s not just talking about change but making it happen: longtime educator and reformer Mike Nicholson.

Mike has spent decades in education, from being a teacher to a superintendent to a consultant, and now he’s working directly with schools to help them give students more meaningful control over their learning. We talk about what happens when students have more agency, the impact of constant micromanagement in schools, and how even small changes—like making homework optional—can lead to huge shifts. If you’ve ever wondered why student engagement drops as they move through school or how we can turn things around, this conversation is for you!

 

Episode Highlights:

[2:46] – Mike Nicholson’s journey in education and why he’s passionate about student autonomy.

[4:42] – The shocking decline of student engagement as they progress through school.

[6:44] – Why behaviorism (carrots and sticks) isn’t working in education.

[10:49] – What educators discover when they shadow students for a full school day.

[14:23] – Would any adult willingly go through what we put students through?

[22:04] – What school handbooks reveal about the culture of control in education.

[33:09] – The case for making homework optional—especially in math!

[41:46] – A real-world example of a school successfully giving students more control.

[45:51] – Shifting school from something kids "have to do" to something they want to do.

 

Links & Resources:

If this episode has helped you, remember to rate, follow, and share the Self-Driven Child Podcast. Your support helps us reach more people and create more content that makes a difference. 

If you have a high school aged student and would like to talk about putting a tutoring or college plan together, reach out to Ned's company, PrepMatters at www.prepmatters.com

Ned Johnson:

Hey, folks, Ned here, like me, you want your kids, your students, honestly, all the young people you know, to thrive, and you know how much you can help. But like me, you probably also recognize that you fall short more than you'd like to, in part because we tender virtual old ways. We hear a great suggestion or learn a new approach, but to easily fall back into the same darn things that didn't work before, it isn't easy, which is why I'm really excited to share with you that Bill and I have a new book out this spring, the seven principles for raising a self driven child, a workbook. Our goal is to make it easier to put into practice more of the advice from our first two books, the self driven child and what do you say? Full of reflections and exercises to do yourself, with your partner and with your children, we want to help make the self driven child way your way, so that you can, more often than not, be as effective as you want to be with your kids in ways that we know you want to be if you get a chance order a copy bill, and I and your kids would be grateful.

Mike Nicholson:

I would offer this. It seems to me, it doesn't seem proper that we would ask kids to do something that we wouldn't do right now, I don't know of any adults who would willing sign up for what we put our kids through, and if we did it at an earlier age, I don't know how relevant that is, we wouldn't do it now. We wouldn't we wouldn't do it now. And I and I think the kids are facing a different dynamic, a different meta culture, than we did we were younger. I think I just know few adults who sign up for what we put our kids to right now.

Ned Johnson:

Welcome to the self driven child podcast. I'm your host, Ned Johnson and co author with Dr William stick shoot 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 in our work, Bill and I focus on the need for greater autonomy for students in school, and like so many parents and teachers and students themselves, were concerned about the way things seem to be headed. The wrong way. You can imagine then that I get pretty fired up by folks who are doing the hard work to bring young people the autonomy and agency that they not only deserve but need to engage in school, and more so to thrive in the young lives that they're building. I think you'll be jazzed then by this conversation with education veteran and honestly, a bit of a rebel. Mike Nicholson, I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast, so I'm delighted to have my partner inscribe, Dr William sticks you join me, and of course, our guest Mike Nicholson, Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Nicholson:

Hey, thanks for having me here. It's a scribe. We're looking forward to it. So

Ned Johnson:

Mike, Bill and I, of course, friends with you for a while now, and sort of, you know, partners in crime with with your little venture. But can you take a moment and just introduce yourself to folks a little bit and tell them a little about the work that you're doing and why we're so enamored

Mike Nicholson:

of it. Sure, I don't know if I can cover last part, but I'll do the first part. I'm Mike Nicholson. I am a long time educator. I have I come from Buffalo, New York, and I have been in this business for about 30 some odd years. I've been everything from a substitute teacher to Superintendent. I've also been eight years as a education consultant for a not for profit out of Columbus, Ohio. We live in Columbus, Ohio now, and for last three years, I've been working with school districts to get figure out how to give kids much more meaningful control over their educational lives. So

Ned Johnson:

we're fans of that. So tell us a little bit how, how did you come to I mean, because you were in education to your point, for, for, you know, decades, what made you really center this work of giving kids more control over their educational experience, what led you to that? So

Mike Nicholson:

the last, the last five years before I went out on my own and started this, this venture, was with education, not for profit, and I'd gone around the country doing strategic planning and community visioning, and I'd always ask school districts whether it was rural, suburban or urban. Just to give me a baseline, give me three years of your student report card, grade, just a raw data export. Give me three years of your student attendance, grade, just a raw don't aggregate it. I'll do all the aggregation, if that's such a word. And then give me your student perceptions of their relationship with school, how they view school, any climate survey would do, and after they give me the raw export, I'd aggregate across K through 12, see how these perceptions or attendance or performance would change over the grade levels as they ascend through the system. And undoubtedly, it didn't matter what the school system was, you'd always have a downward curve After elementary school

Ned Johnson:

and in school, engagement or their happiness or so. I

Mike Nicholson:

think these are manifestations all of engagement. I think they're whether it's attendance, where they vote with their feet, whether it's performance, which we know is a function of engagement, or whether it's their attitude towards school, which is a function of engagement. I think they're all different expressions of. Engagement. So yes, I think these are all declining curves of engagement, and that the Gallup organization has known this for a number of years. Actually, at the educational literature goes back 50 years, knowing that kids engagement drops, but to see it firsthand, no matter with all these districts, was just kind of striking. And so during during the pandemic, when I got to work with education leaders on Friday, I'd organized. I've been around the neighborhood enough times where I brought school leaders from in Ohio and different states together on Friday, you guys end up joining that, what that came to be. And we talk about this. We never talked. We never said it was a problem of practice, but that's what we were talking about. I said, Why do you guys think engagement drops after kids leave Elementary School, and unfortunately, now we're seeing it back up into elementary school. Oh, geez. Nobody had, nobody had a real great explanation. Some people tried to do the trial balloon of, well, it's just kids being kids. But nobody thought that was set. Nobody thought that was satisfactory. Yeah, at the same time, we came across this self determination theory, DC and Ryan and coming from Buffalo, they're out of Rochester. So that was kind of interesting, and we came to learn more about it. And then, as you know, during COVID, when zoom was novel, we could hook up with different experts around the country. So we had Sam Levin, who started his own high school, started his own high school program in Western Massachusetts. We got young child from the West Coast. We got to talk with him, so we got to talk with these different experts about self determination theory. We were really taken by that because we it made sense. We know there's not one explanation, but that seemed to predict and explain a lot more than behaviorism did. We are all familiar with behaviorism, whether by this, by design or by default, that

Ned Johnson:

seems to be explained to behaviorism really quickly to folks may not know that.

Mike Nicholson:

So that's being motivated by motivated by rewards. And pun, you know, rewards or sanctions or carrots and sticks. Sometimes they're called contingent rewards, but that's, you know, if you incentivize someone to do something, that's what, they'll do it. And if you punish them for doing the wrong thing, they'll stop doing that and that again, by design or by default, that seems to be how how schools are set up. And obviously it's not working.

Ned Johnson:

So Bill, do you, as the neuro psychologist, want to jump in a little bit about in addition to engagement, why you and I have talked quite a bit about why low engagement is so bad, not just for learning outcomes, but for mental health outcomes.

Bill Stixrud:

Well, you know, it turns out that that low intrinsic motivation, when you had that experience of most of what I do, I being required to do. I don't really feel like doing. I've been forced to do. I have to do it that that low intrinsic motivation is a trans diagnostic predictor of mental health problems. Trans diagnostic feature, meaning that in many different mental health disorders, including anxiety disorders, depression, substance use, one of the things that one of the markers, one thing that goes along with it is low intrinsic motivation. And you know, we've been arguing the last decade or so that the sense of control, which is very much related to autonomy, is actually the key to not only that self motivated, engaged behavior, but it's also the key to mental health, because the low sense of control is the most stressful thing you'd experience In anxiety disorders, depression, substance use disorders, eating disorders, they're all stress related disorders, so

Ned Johnson:

and so, if I put those two things together, if we have a school system, and this may overstate it, but let you guys chime in. If we have a school system that seems to as schools ascend, their engagement and sense of control and intrinsic motivation descends. We're not only getting lower engagement and probably a lower ROI on tax dollars, we may also be contributing to mental health disorders in young people. Is that overstating it? Well,

Bill Stixrud:

I think it's unquestionably true. I mean, if you think about what anxiety when you look at the levels of anxiety disorders and mood disorders in adolescence, and you realize that anxiety means my thinking is out of control. I can't stop worrying. I guess I'd like to, but I can't stop or depression. I can't get myself to do things completely. That lack of internal drawing that tends to this is my life, that I can make decisions. I can make choices, is really lacking. And it's, it's, I'm writing something now you'll be writing together. Now I'm just drafting it. We're arguing it's in basic, not only basic psychological need, as as self determination. There that you mentioned, Mike, well, it's a basic biological need that the it's, it's bad for the brain if we don't have that sense of autonomy or control of our own life, wow. So why? Just a couple years ago, you sent us a list of like 40 or 50, maybe 60 reasons why student autonomy is such an important thing. Can you just share a few of the most important ones with

Mike Nicholson:

this? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So when we started working with school districts, one of the first things we do is try to establish the why we need to give kids more control, and we don't. It'd be kind of it'd be kind of oxymoronic for us to tell them why we want them to choose their own doorway. And we have 40. It's now been consolidated. We got 40 perspectives about why we need to give kids more control, and certainly at the top of that list would be stress, would be mental health. But then there's also relationships. Relationships are improved when you support each other's autonomy. American ideals are on there. We also have students shadowing about go walk with the shoes of kids for seven hours to gain a perspective about why giving them more control would be helpful to not only their engagement, but the whole enterprise of education. What have you seen when

Ned Johnson:

you've done what can you tell us? What have you learned when you've done a student when educators have done student shadowing?

Mike Nicholson:

You know, it's really, really interesting, so we actually built it into our grant. We're philanthropically supported on this student agency cohort in Ohio. The Jennings foundation out of Cleveland supports us. So we wrote it in the grant. So

Ned Johnson:

Amy Bookman, her her Grant was through you guys, yes, oh, okay, yes, exactly reason to like what you're

Mike Nicholson:

doing. So so we actually got districts for the first year, and this is our third year of this project, we're excited that we got this in here this year, and it was eye opening. So Amy, as you referenced, I was on her campus when they were debriefing about shadowing the students. And unfortunately, what you often find, or we have often found, is that when you ask the adults to shadow kids, you often find some who offer some pretty quick excuses why they can't. And I'm sure some are legit. I'm sure some are legit. I'm not sure all of them, but I'm sure some are my

Ned Johnson:

car in the shop. I gotta vacuum the cat, whatever.

Mike Nicholson:

Yeah, I gotta caulk the bath, bathroom, tub. But or of some that did do it would bail with two hours left in the day, which you thought that's that's you guys go the whole Yes, exactly. But Amy and her team stuck it out the whole seven hours. And so when they were debriefing, we were all in this room. We went around in a circle, and at the first one, people were first offering what their observations were. There was a sense of politeness around the sense of, when they asked how it went, Oh, it was, we saw some good things in each class. But then, as each person went, and

Ned Johnson:

they don't want to distur colleagues, right, like, right, got it exactly so.

Mike Nicholson:

But then people started taking some risks and offering what they really saw. And then, you know, by time one of one of them went towards the end, we were halfway, more than halfway, going around the circle of these 10 people. Somebody said I was looking for any stimulation whatsoever. Throughout the day, I was just bored. And she said, if some kid was bobbing his knee, my eye went right to his knee, just I need some stimulation. And then when they were all done, the last person to go was the principal. And he said, I guys, I don't know any other way to say this, but it just sucked. I just I felt for the kids. And he said I was thankful the day ended. I was thankful to be able to go back to my office. And he said, there on my office desk was a discipline referral, and I pick it up and I read it, and it's a teacher who's writing up, writing up one of the students because he fell asleep in class, he said, and he ripped up that discipline if it was, I totally understand why that kid fell asleep during class. And you know, again, I don't know, I don't know if he's, I don't think he's being critical of teachers, but just the the system we set up, and several of them, several of the teachers, I observed that they were scrambling every 45 minutes, picking up and going to something, you know, a new situation, a new learning and it just sort of atomized the whole, the whole learning experience. So, yeah, it's shadowing a student. I few things I think are more powerful to understanding what we are setting up for our kids. Let

Ned Johnson:

me ask this, because I can, I can imagine a lot of people listening thinking, Well, when I was a kid, it wasn't that bad, or is it really that bad for kids today? Or, you know, I mean, okay, sure, that's adults, but there are adults with fully formed brains. I mean, clearly a seventh grader can tolerate this different because, you know, they're not, they're not as capable, they're not as bright, and they wouldn't be bored where I as an adult would be bored. What would you say to that?

Mike Nicholson:

I I would offer this. It seems to me, it doesn't seem proper that we would ask kids to do something that we wouldn't do right now. Would we go through what we what we have our kids go through? I don't know of any adults who would willing sign up for what we put our kids through, and if we did it at an earlier age, I don't know how relevant that is, we wouldn't do it now. We wouldn't we wouldn't do it now. And I, and I think the kids are facing a different dynamic, a different meta culture, than we did we were younger. I think I just, I just know few adults who sign up for what we put our kids through right now. Phil, you might have a different answer to that.

Bill Stixrud:

Well, I think the food a few adults would sign up for routinely getting three hours or four hours less sleep they need to make this, make the high school on time. And I also think that it's just your the experience from shadowing Mike is so consistent with it that big study out of Yale where they surveyed 2020, some 1000 high school students, and the majority of feelings they reported experiencing in school were negative, and more than half said when I'm in school, I primarily feel tired, stressed and bored. How could he be How can you be stressed and bored at the same time? Well, being bored is really stressful. I've got to sit through this thing. I'm born out of my mind, but I can't do anything about it. Talk about a low sense of control. Yeah,

Mike Nicholson:

I can't leave bill. That's exactly what those those two authors from this disengaged team says. It's a rare combination of lack of stimulation and pressure.

Unknown:

Wow, wow. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to ask you Sorry. Go ahead, Mike,

Mike Nicholson:

one other thing too, is this, this experience that we have, that we just described in various ways, I think, create this soup that just not it's not good for anybody. There's also an element of micromanagement in there that few adults would sign up for our if you think about our kids are being tracked in every class for learning and behavior, five days a week for 40 weeks a year. That isn't that can't be healthy. And again, few adults will sign up for that kind of micromanagement. And so again, what type of healthy environment are we? Are we setting up for our kids? And again, is it? Is it really a mystery where kids lose, lose engagement when they're put through these realities. And it's gonna

Ned Johnson:

say in your point about, you know, relationships being so often, you know, the secret sauce of why. You know, kids don't tend to go to school for the learning. They go there really, for their friends and often the teachers that they like, right? And if we're trying to get kids to engage in a in a, you know, more authentic, agentic way. I got a I got a text from Katie McPherson. I've mentioned you Bill knows, and this really good educator out of out of Arizona, and she, whenever things aren't going well for parent, people always find their way over to Katie McPherson. And she there was a boy who was in seventh grade and he'd been written up for whatever he was doing that wasn't appropriate, okay, but he's super ADHD. And so, you know, his self control is a little, you know, developing nascent, I guess. And so all these reports came, you know, you know, Joey showed up, you know, to school, and he took a long time to take a seat, right? Or, you know, he sat down, then he started talking to his friend, Bill, right, you know. And I mean, all these things that are just like, completely age appropriate, and we're asking, well, where's, I mean, you basically just put him the, you know, the optic on right, and they're just, they're watching him for problems, rather than, well, yeah, over micromanaging is, what is? What your point about micromanage made me think about this poor kid that you know he got, gets write ups from eight different teachers of all the infractions, or six different teachers that he makes every single day, and like, Who would want to who would want to go to that? Well, here's,

Mike Nicholson:

here's another way. Let me operationalize. I might try to operationalize what that micromanagement looked like. That micromanage if you picture metaphorically being followed with a clipboard and all these classes for learning and behavior. And on that clipboard the kids are being evaluated. They're being assessed and and so remember i at the beginning, when you asked me how I got into this, and I asked, give me, give me three years of report card grades. And so here's a Midwestern school district I was working with. There's 2500 kids, and I asked them, give me a dump of all your report card grades. Now these, these are not these are report card grades that go to the families. We're all familiar with them. I with them, and only 2500 kids, but they could only give me grades four through 12 to not even give me all 2500 kids. They're giving me some truncated set of that. How many grades did I get over those three years from a dish that has given me less than 2500 kids, grades, 140,000 grades. Now remember, these are grades have already been averaged and summarized to get to the report card. So it's a multiple of that that these kids are swimming in. What other time in our life are we constantly evaluate like that and that whole experience of being evaluated? How are you measuring up. How are you measuring up? That can't be healthy? Well,

Ned Johnson:

and your point about sort of, you know, ascending through school and then descending, and with the autonomy, it makes me picture the Heisenberg uncertainty principle right where, if you're trying to measure the location of a particle of light, you can either know its location or its direction, and when you measure the location, you change the direction, right? So how's the kid doing in school? We measured, he's getting an A, but we just chipped away a little bit more and a little bit more, a little bit more at that, that intrinsic motivation, because he's now responding to the extrinsic.

Bill Stixrud:

It's interesting too, because Micah, there's a chapter in a book written in two. 1008 on students perceived control, and it just makes the point that not only does their sense of control get lower, the perceived control of their own lives gets lower every year than school, along with their academic motivation, but also their perceived competence. Because early on, school is about working hard to learn stuff, and then as soon as soon as you start getting graded, school becomes the Not, not your own assessment. I really, I really worked hard. I'm getting this is, how well are you doing compared to other kids? Oh, it's such a good point. And then Mike, you you've contrasted how much kids are assessed with how much teachers are assessed. Can you

Mike Nicholson:

good memory on that? Yeah, it's really interesting. So in Ohio, we're a union state, and so there are their union contracts for with educators, and in most, if not all, those contracts between the educators in the district is often a provision about how they are to be evaluated. And makes sense. I don't I don't decry that. I think there should be some protections around that, because evaluation run amok isn't good for anybody. But if what we just described with the kids and the frequency and the volume that they get evaluated were the protections for the kids, the adults have meaningful protections. That makes sense, but we don't have any protections for the kids. Let

Ned Johnson:

me ask one more question, then I let less people think we're being the bleakest landscape. The good news is that you also know about some some sources for optimism. As you know, getting closer to spring, what we you know because, of course, you know, you're not just cataloging issues, but trying to find solutions. And you know a lot about those. So I want to pivot to those in a moment. But because there are people listening say, Well, I can see that, you know, that's what's going on in this crazy corner of Ohio or someplace. But where I am, I know you've looked at these, you know, across many, many school districts in many, many states. Can you just just, but put one more, you know, pin in this talk about your analysis of school handbooks.

Mike Nicholson:

So a lot of this has to do with culture. A lot of this, you know, the air we breathe, the land we walk on, the aura that we're in. A lot of this culture and the American School Board Association have, you know, mask, different mass communication pieces can be artifacts of those culture. Not not they don't say the whole thing about the culture, but they could be an important indicator of it. So if you look at a mass communication piece coming out of school districts, they're often one. Could be the student handbook. It's it's often given out at the beginning of the year. It's one of the few mass communication pieces that we often ask for a parent signature on to be sure of receipt of it. So I started looking about, I don't know, seven years ago. I started looking at handbooks when I was doing these strategic plans, as we're doing, what was called the current state analysis. And I decided to do a thematic analysis on it. And the thematic analysis was on two themes. Two of the themes I was looking at, to contrast to compare, was growth and learning, learning growth. So I picked, I selected 26 keywords related to that theme of learning and growth, hope, practice, risk taking, creativity, innovation, those types of things. And then I looked at 26 keywords related to control an order, looking at policies, procedures, regulations, all those types of things. So people may quibble about what, which, what make up of the 26 keywords, but I think the the directionally, it seemed to really highlight what we suspected was going on when you look at the weight and look at the density of those themes, you'd have the density of control and order over growth and learning on multiples of 789, above that is dense in terms of language in there. So the message, in essence, what we're conveying out to the public, to our community in the beginning of the year when impressions are being made, was about this culture is really about control and order, much more than about growth and learning, at least by way of what the handbook was conveying. And again, that's not an end all or be all, but it's you know, you think, if you're trying to create impressions, then begin the year and you this mass communication piece, you try to take advantage of that and convey what what are we? But I have not come across any handbook that ever showed that the density of the growth and learning outweighed the density of control and order.

Ned Johnson:

Wow. And I think, to your point about culture, I think about the work of John and Julie Gottman, and in order to have a positive relationship, you know, for the ratio of positive interactions or positive words to negative needs to be five or one or better. So if I'm like, you know, thanks, Mike, those really good blah, blah, blah, you know. And then I'm like, a, you know, sourpuss cranky pants, because I wake up on the rocks of the bed one Tuesday. Okay, you're not like, you're like, wow, Ned's having a day, as opposed to, oh, he's always, you know, giving me a hard time, where what you're describing is for every you know, love the curiosity, curiosity you're looking for, your growth and development. You know, figuring out what matters to you. We have seven times or eight times as many words to talk about penalties and ramifications and requirements. You

Mike Nicholson:

know, I don't know if it was a style or Socrates that we are what we repeat. And cultures, cultures, you know, culture is the personality of the organization and what, what aspects of the culture do we repeat? And I think that handbook gives one indication of that. We also do an exercise that in our work with school districts about what are those things that we figured the kids see repeated time and again. And that's a really interesting exercise.

Bill Stixrud:

Mike, what kind of changes have you seen in schools and students when teachers kind of buy into this, this goal of increasing student autonomy? You

Mike Nicholson:

know, it's interesting bill in the districts that we've worked with, what's one, one anecdotal trend is that we, we tend to see the more seasoned veteran, higher quote, unquote, reputation teachers lean into this work, which, which is, I almost think of David Brooks second mountain book. When I see that that they're at that point in their career, they wanted to see something different. They want to see something more hopeful. And so that was really kind of interesting to see. And

Ned Johnson:

that's one nighting, right? That's exciting that the people who really are, you know, have the most credibility and perhaps the widest view on things, are most open to that's, I'm thrilled to hear that. Yeah,

Mike Nicholson:

yeah. Anecdotally, that's what we're seeing. And quite clearly, at least that 10 districts in Ohio that we're systematically working with, they, I think they quit their quickly affirmed bill and what and what this not to say it's, it's, it's free sailing. It's free because they're bumping disproportionately. They're seeing many more affirmations. The challenges they see are the challenges of the system. Are the challenges of the history. Because many, many teachers work with tech tend to be secondary, not Elementary. Many of them tend to be even more up in the high school, more so than the middle school, though we do see quite a few middle school and so by time they're working with kids, is to start giving them more intentionally, more bandwidth, more latitude to make meaningful decisions about their own education. Again, they see disproportionate more affirmations, but they also see challenges, and it's something that you guys, I've shared with you guys, and we've seen this in the literature. The more successful the kids see themselves as students, the less likely they want to take control of their own learning, talk, talk.

Ned Johnson:

Say more about that. I mean that to me is, I mean, in hindsight, it's, Oh, I get that makes sense, but, but initially that's like, holy smokes. The best students want to, like, just keep doing what they're they, you know, tell me what to do, and I'll tell me what hoop to jump through, and I'll jump through it. It's working for him.

Mike Nicholson:

Yes, yeah. And people say that. People say, Oh, they figured out how to play the game. This isn't the game, though. We are conditioning our kids, and you guys received say very appropriately, we're conditioning their brains. We're conditioning their behaviors. The kids leave us after 12 years, just being in a very dependent state. That has ramifications, serious ramifications, when they leave high school. So I understand when people say, well, those kids who just learn how to play the game and they and it's working for them, is it really working for them? I mean, I think this, this gets to this, the superficiality of our accountability system, when all the indicators are it's working for them, it's not working for them.

Ned Johnson:

And future leaders who got used to a lack of autonomy and creativity and just jumping and that they're going to well replicate the system, right?

Mike Nicholson:

Well. And one I just want to point to that when we when we got this data back of the first time we did what's called our 3d survey, we had to check the data three times because we thought this has got to be backwards. We got to be reverse coding. These these variables. Now it was, it was. And then we looked in literature, and the literature affirms this. We see the same phenomena happen in the animal kingdom and then the plant kingdom. One of the original sins of agriculture is mono modern culture. We've taken such control of our crops that we've stripped them. They become so dependent on the farmer that they we've stripped them of their ability to generate their own food and fight off disease. We see this in Animal Kingdom with overzealous pet owners and zoos. The animals grow dependent. In any system that's over controlling its membership tends to become dependent. What

Bill Stixrud:

can teachers do that doesn't require change in the whole system?

Mike Nicholson:

You know, I often say, and the work we do, we see two tracks for this. We say there is still freedom defined within the status quo. Sometimes I'll say, we gotta look in the couch cushions, we gotta look in the corners. We gotta bring a flashlight out. But there are spaces we can find some autonomy. So I think there are still places. And sometimes we sometimes. In our in our work, in the school systems, people become because, again, our teachers are in the same system, right? This is not throwing stones at anybody our system. Our teachers work in the same system that we find our kids. So they find that they don't often feel like they have much control. So So sometimes in that in that narrative, we make our conditions maybe sound even worse than what they are. And so we do find that there are still some place to find autonomy that we can identify for the teachers and the kids. But the same time, we got change the status quo too. So while we're while we're working the change status quo, let's find, again, what I call in the seat cushions, in the dark corners. Let's go grab those places of autonomy that we can give kids. We have three areas that we find that we can give autonomy. Let me give you one example. We can give kids more choice related to the curriculum, which might sound absolutely like a foreign language to people, even even if we're in school, even if we're in subject areas where we can't give the kids the choice of what they're learning. The curriculum is already defined. We have total control over the curriculum access, over how we access the curriculum. So a quick example, I'm working with a 10th grade socialized teacher, and the socialist teacher says, Mike, these kids, I can't give these kids self directed learning SDL, which is the pedagogy for student agency. I said, why is that? He said, I gave them the juiciest topic, which is a red flag itself, and I gave them the juiciest topic, but I kept, we kept what. We kept going with it. We kept going with it. And I said, Well, what were you what were the concepts that you were teaching? He said, fair representation and election integrity. I said, So, how were you teaching that? And he said, the most interesting topic. And I said, What's then? This is 10th grade social studies. He said, gerrymandering. Now as a 58 year old growing up in Ohio, or is a 50 year old, 58 year old in Ohio? Okay, I now I'd find gerrymandering pretty interesting. I'm not so sure as a teenager, but nonetheless, so I take that and I go back home, and I fire up AI, and I ask AI. I said, what are all the ways that we can either facilitate election integrity and fair representation, or we can challenge it and blunt it? 12 ways came up. 12 ways, misinformation campaigns, raising the voter ID standards. I mean, all different. So there's an example where his access to learning about fair representation election integrity was a doorway this big, called gerrymandering. There were 12 ways the AI offered that we could have given kids choice about how they want to learn about these concepts. So that's a quick example, and that can exist in any subject area where we have a mandated curriculum, we have control over the access, even if we don't over the curriculum. So that's one area. Is curriculum, classroom conditions is another one. We've identified 11 ways that we can share our time with kids about the circumstances of their learning, the conditions of their learning, ranging from who I work with to what resources I use, to how I what the physical environment the room is, all the way to homework, all the way to homework. Let's make homework optional, and there's a great argument for that here from the most unlikely subject area math.

Ned Johnson:

So we just lost about a third of our audience, but, but that's all the math teachers are like. Now wait a second,

Unknown:

but let's let

Ned Johnson:

I'm actually gonna I'm smiling. I was talking with our mutual friend Jerry putt, who's this incredible educator and principal out here in Virginia and and we're talking about homework. And when I was in in high school, I took AP calcus My senior year, and a really good teacher, and I really like math, and I was better at found it easier than most folks did, and my teacher would never but he wouldn't give an A plus. So I'm like, I had a 95 like, I don't need to kill myself to get in that. Like, it doesn't really matter. I'll go do something else. But Mr. Dudek required homework, and I'm thinking, Why do I have to do this? You teach it really well. I understand. Why do I have to do this? So every Friday he would come around and collect the homework, and every Friday I would pretend that I had worked on the homework, and he would pretend to believe me. Because, you know, the foundation of all relationships is, you know, mutual dishonesty looks something like this, you know, Mr. Dude, I yeah, sorry, you know, I was, I didn't get that done. I was, I was, you know, I was working on stuff for the Matthew, of course, I was in Matthew, because the big nerd. And he go, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Next time I said, Oh yeah, yep. And I pretend to tell the truth and he pretend to believe me. We did that the whole darn year, right? It's like, what was the, what was the point right now, French, I probably should have had like, six hours of homework at night, because I was right. But tell me about the case study with math and homework. So

Mike Nicholson:

the argument made for making homework optional is it's not like for those who are concerned about it, it's not like the kids get off scot free again for those who are concerned about that, because if the student needs to do it's going to show up. What? It's going to show up whether he need to do it on the assessment, on the summative, if he didn't mean

Ned Johnson:

it, meaning, if I get a bet, if I, if I, if I bomb my test, I probably need to do the homework that I didn't do, right,

Mike Nicholson:

right? And what, and what, a great natural consequence, right? And that's, that's, that's one thing that you know is about this automies, how can we plug into more natural, not artificial consequences. Lot of

Ned Johnson:

people mistake things that are natural consequences, that are really, quote, unquote, logical consequences, right? So, you know, I take a test, I bomb it, I get the feedback from the teacher. That's a natural consequence. This doesn't need to involve parents at all, which makes a lot of them twitchy. But anyway, back to you. That's

Mike Nicholson:

true if, if this, if the student does well on the assessment and didn't do the homework, that's kind of a responsible decision. He probably found a better way to use his time. I mean, that's so that. So that's why it doesn't get doesn't have to get more complicated than that. It's just we, we think we're teaching responsibility by requiring homework when, when, in essence, it's kind of interesting. Wasn't that more of a responsible decision, if he did well in the assessment, not to waste his time on the on the homework?

Bill Stixrud:

And I think when people people say, well, homework, doing homework builds character. I'm a neuro psychologist who see a lot of kids who are not good students, who don't like homework, and it tears their character apart because become chronic liars and avoiders.

Ned Johnson:

Yeah, interesting point. Just so

Bill Stixrud:

having seen so many students over the years who they get A's in their tests, and they get C's in the class because they're turning their homework, and by the logic, just confuses the means for the end, they never need to do the homework, maybe a complete waste of their time to do it, and that's why our motto has been for teachers to inspire kids to learn at home, but not require homework. Not graded. Grade A paper, grade their task grades, grade some things that they work on, but not grade the nightly stuff. That's that we think they'll have them to learn if they don't need to do it, or if they find a better way to do it, does that make sense to you? Mike, yeah,

Mike Nicholson:

definitely. And this whole thing of grades has just become a cancer in schools. I mean, at one point it might have had a proper role, but it's gone way beyond. And talk about control, grades are like the ultimate form of external control, which, when you have that much external control, it squeezes out much possibility for internal control, intrinsic control,

Bill Stixrud:

and we're just Mikey, you and Stuart Slavin and I were met with those students in Ohio last summer, summer, 23 and mainly high school kids, some a few middle school kids, but some high school kids. And basically they said we are our grades Ned. And I gave a talk to 1000 high school students, and one kid said, Are you saying that we're more than our grades?

Ned Johnson:

Yeah, and I was Mike, I was looking at your 3d survey right when you asked question, what is the top motivator for students? Parents said adult relationships. Educators said adult relationships. Students said grades. What is the top stressor for students? Parents said, have enough time. Educators said, have enough time. Students said, grades, small disconnect there. Exactly,

Mike Nicholson:

exactly. It's, you know, it's interesting as as I pulling together some more material for for the support in school districts, and just going back and again, a lot of this stuff that we're talking about isn't radically new, but I think the urgency for doing it, perhaps is hitting all time highs. But I don't know. I came across Lawrence Steinberg work. He's a he's from, is it temple? No, not temple. Temple. Yeah, this temple is temple, distinguished psychology professional temple, and he say he identifies agency and communion as a psychosocial agenda during adolescence. He said, That is the developmental agenda during adolescence. Proper formation of identity and autonomy during the teenage years constitute much of what this of what the kids should be developing. And you can imagine what a tough hole that is for students when they're in that type of environment in school. So how can we, how can we, how can we support them in being more facilitative of that development versus what we've laid out? You know, here to heretofore, in

Bill Stixrud:

light of that Mike, you know, I was stunned last summer when I just, I don't know how I found it, but on the CDC website, it has a section on promoting student autonomy, presumably, and all the advantages of doing so, presumably, because the CDC says it sees it as a public health issue and primarily related to mental health. If this is the one of the basic drives of adolescent is to become independent. You practice autonomy to become independent, and we thought it's worked that increasingly every year, what does that do to development? Maybe that's why kids are so unhappy and so impressed, and maybe that's why young adults are twice as unhappy as high school kids are because of what happens to the brand over those years.

Mike Nicholson:

You know, I was going to go back to. Building on what Bill said, and going back ned to a question you asked earlier, at least a point. You know, yes, the the environment is kind of rough, but what does it look like in some of those schools that have that have actually gone down this direction? Yeah, so I want to, I want to point out a high school out in Colorado Springs called the village. It's a public high school. It's not a charter, it's not independent. It's a public high school, and they have created space. And that's what a lot of this is about, is how do we create space so students can practice decision making? Which agencies have direct function of decision making? That's the problem is that we've made every we've made virtually every meaningful decision School for the kids, what they learn, when they learn, when they switch to class, when they can eat lunch, if they can go the bathroom, blah, it just goes on and on. So this school made space for kids to make decisions, because they moved all their core online, and then they've created so they can, the kids can go after their core at when it when it makes sense for them, as how often as they want they're gonna they is their only requirement is just to finish the class by the end of semester. They go whatever pace, and they can tap in whatever system they want from the teachers. And then all their electives are in person. But they choose the electives that they and the teachers decided. This is in a school district of 22,000 kids. There are multiple high schools in this school district. This is for those who care along conventional measures. This is the highest performing high school. It was a dying online program nine years ago. It now has 520 kids and a wait list about 300 kids. Kids are voting with their feet, the kids and you know, that's one nice example of it. I think we're gonna see more and more of this, because I think people are seeing that the way we have things set up isn't really hitting on all cylinders.

Bill Stixrud:

And I'll just mention anecdotally, Mike, that I've talked to several teachers over the last several years who decided to make homework optional and ungraded, and they said that my kids have done at least as well, or if not better, on any kind of standard measures, as when I was forced into new homework, he said, there's some kids they don't do it, but a lot of them need to do it. They find other ways to learn. And so I just think that you're working on something that's just so important. And so it's an uphill battle, but it's really important work,

Mike Nicholson:

and let's just come back to Ned's point too, earlier about what's the what's the upside, what's the bright side of this work? Yeah, when you give kids the space to go after the learning, the things that interest them, things that things they have questions about, things that they are interested in, and you give them space, I often say kids come to school with their own curriculum. We just set it aside for the state and the district curriculum. They come with their own questions, their own experiences, that their own curiosities. When you week, when we can light that fire again, not only does it light the kid up, but it's contagious. It lights the teachers up, and that's why they came in the profession. So if we want to talk about, you know, teacher engagement, when I talk about teacher job satisfaction, this is a very direct way to help address that is when we can light the kids up again, we're going to light up the teachers again. I love

Ned Johnson:

that. You know, one of the things that all that that Amy brought up, and you, I've heard you make the point before, is that for folks who are worried about this, like we're gonna have the inmates running the asylum, we don't have to hand over the keys to the kingdom and every decision to kids. It's just that when we deprive them of any we're really stuck right so kids don't need autonomy in every single facet of every corner of their life. And in part, because at a young age that tends to make they can be overwhelming, it's but that we can turn things around, including for kids who are just avoiding school by giving them some chunk of agency somewhere in their life, in a way, in a way that's meaningful. So people can very much tiptoe towards this without a wholesale redesign of the entire school experience, exactly,

Mike Nicholson:

but it

Bill Stixrud:

looks like you were gonna say something. No, I just, I just really agree with what you said, Ned, and I think this is an excellent point. And I'm just thinking in our own lives, certainly there's constraints in what we do. I mean, as a psychologist, I'm bound by certain ethical principles, a certain thing I can't do if I want to keep my job as a psychologist, but I choose that. That's my by my own choosing. The challenge is, kids are required to go to school. This is thought of their own choosing. But I do think that our experience certainly is. We've talked to we went to Ned you and I visited a school where kids had half the day middle school kids, your kids had half the day to work on their own self selected projects. And it ranged in this, this rural community, ranged from building kind of high tech chicken coops to kind of mathematical stuff that I didn't understand. What the kids said was that it just makes the whole school day so much better. Knowing have that we have this to look forward to, it motivates me more to work hard in the morning, knowing that I have this to look forward to. And we talked to several kids who are nice, who went on to high school, who came back and talked about how. Meaningful it was they had the obvious part of their school they devoted to stuff they cared about. They were just stuff that they wanted to learn.

Mike Nicholson:

Bill, you Bill, that's such that's such an important part. Because for much of the history of our schools, we've much set up schools where the kids have to come and they have to care about what the schools put in front of them. What a great message to turn that around and say, well, the school's gonna stand behind what you care about.

Ned Johnson:

It's a great point. And make one more quick point on that, and then I'm gonna run away from you. Mike bill, a couple three years ago, observed and shared with me that, as a psychologist, he can say that most mental health is changing thinking from I have to do I want to. And the way that bill just described it, and certainly, the work that you're doing with all these educators across the country is you're changing school from something that kids have to do to something that they want to

Bill Stixrud:

exactly, you know, it's beautifully put. I was just thinking that the difference is that you need to versus I'd love to see you do this. Oh, I love that language. It's not coercive. There's so many ways, and just the way we speak to kids that can that like you talk about our second book, where we talk about the language of forget, example, the parent consultant, where we talk about non coercive language and just communicating to kids in a way that's it's much more effective than demanding them, but it's an art, and you have to kind of practice how to learn how to do it's not hard. It just takes a little practice. But when you, when you change it from from demand to there's some choice, or I'd love to see you, or what would happen if you tried it this way, for whatever it's worth.

Mike Nicholson:

Bill, to your point, imagine if we ever, if we ever do a thematic analysis of the language used throughout the day, how much of his controlling language versus Invitational language

Bill Stixrud:

my net? I remember when we talked to Katie McPherson about this, and she's saying that that we asked her, because she loves the self driven child her first book. And she says, I asked her, what, what do you apply most often in your work with school faculty and leadership? And she said, just the nuts, just the idea of how controlling that administrators are, or coaches that their language or the kids, and how that kind of feels threatening, because that kind of language feels threatening to kids, which shuts down the prefrontal cortex and they don't learn. And I

Mike Nicholson:

had, I had a high school principal down by the West Virginia border who said he really enjoyed this work and thought it was one of the most hopeful pursuits he's been able to experience and encounter. He said, he said, even for the kids in my school who are succeeding, they're succeeding out of fear. They're not succeeding out of out of desire. Yeah, yeah.

Ned Johnson:

So I'm going to pick up on Bill's language of I'd love to see you so Mike, for people who'd love to see what you and your merry band of educator renegades, I'm teasing, are up to where? How can people follow you? How can they because I'm sure this is compelling, both to educators and parents, because we all want to do right by kids, and feel like we're working with them, not on them. So what's the best way for people to connect with you?

Mike Nicholson:

So there's a couple of different ways. One is, I have a website, www learn inspired.org so they'll see a lot of work there. And also we've about a month from now, we have our fourth National Conference on Student agencies. The only one we know of that's focused on student agency. Last year was in Winchester, Virginia. This year it's in Columbus, Ohio, or just the east of it. Next year it's gonna be Los Angeles. So we have 30 we have 30 plus experts from around the country come in and share their perspectives on what they've learned about giving kids more meaningful control over their educational lives. So that's another way that they could, they could sample and learn about this work.

Ned Johnson:

I love it. I will put that in the show notes for folks. Mike, thank you so much for joining us.

Mike Nicholson:

Oh, thank you for having me. I love it. Thanks. Great stuff. Let's keep the partnership going.

Ned Johnson:

You got it? 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 root 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, Oh, 350.