The Self-Driven Child

Ch. 8: "Seven Principles" for Supporting Student & Teacher Autonomy in Schools

• Ned Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 50

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In this episode, I’m joined by my dear friend and co-author, Dr. Bill Stixrud. We dive into a topic that’s been at the heart of so many recent conversations: how schools can do a better job supporting students’ mental health, motivation, and overall well-being.

Bill and I have spent a lot of time lately visiting schools, giving talks, and listening—really listening—to what kids are telling us about their experience in today’s education system. We’re talking chronic stress, anxiety, and a relentless pressure to perform that’s robbing too many students of joy and curiosity. In this episode, we explore why this is happening, how schools got here, and most importantly, what we can do to change it. From the science of autonomy to the powerful impact of rethinking homework, we unpack real strategies that can make school a place of growth, not just grades.

 

Episode Highlights:

[1:07] – A student’s bold question about homework and mental health gets a thunderous response.
[2:25] – Why we took a hard look at public schools in our new book’s bonus chapter.
[3:29] – The critical role of autonomy in mental health and intrinsic motivation.
[5:03] – Two big opportunities for schools: more voice and healthier environments.
[6:16] – Striking data: mental health outcomes are worse during the school year.
[8:14] – Students share how their lives revolve around impressing college admissions officers.
[11:00] – Why school often ignores what neuroscience says about how brains actually learn.
[13:32] – A principal shadows students for a day—and is shocked by the experience.
[14:30] – The importance of downtime and unstructured moments between classes.
[16:33] – Three steps for teachers to reflect on the purpose and impact of homework.
[18:28] – Low intrinsic motivation is linked to nearly every mental health issue.
[19:34] – A bold shift: one district makes homework optional and ungraded.
[22:17] – How over-emphasizing homework can backfire on learning and wellness.
[23:14] – Reducing content, adding autonomy: how med schools improved outcomes.
[24:56] – Can we build schools that foster joy, not just performance?
[29:47] – Inspire, don’t require: how one school reimagined homework.
[34:31] – Collaborating across schools and communities to create real change.
[36:14] – Parents can respectfully ask for the evidence behind educational practices.
[38:21] – Radical downtime, meditation, and how calmer minds lead to better learning.
[39:59] – Final thoughts: Let's reframe schools as places of growth, joy, and human development.

 

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. And

Bill Stixrud:

this one girl, after we finished in the Q and A said, Because homework causes so much stress and contributes so much anxiety and sleep deprivation, should teachers be held accountable for the mental health problems that all this homework creates, and she got this thundering standing ovation, literally, the stage was shaking. 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?

Ned Johnson:

There's a lot to be said about schools. There are also a lot of things to say that we might make a little bit better. Bill and I have had the chance the last few weeks to be talking to schools all over the place with the launch of our new book, The Seven Principles for raising a self driven child, and the opportunities to remind ourselves both of the things we like and the things that might be a little bit better. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. So Bill, in the bonus chapter after the seven principles, we have chapter eight, where we we kind of, we kind of give schools, particularly public schools, a little bit of a hard time, huh? Yeah,

Bill Stixrud:

yeah. And I think that, yes, I think that's right. And I think for good reason. It's not that it's anybody's fault, but I think that schools generally are not working in a way that many people are happy with.

Ned Johnson:

We have the the the podcast that dropped just last week was Janae Henry wood, who's a learning expert, Chief, chief learning officer, I think, with transcend Academy, who makes the point that we think of schools as being sort of, sort of, they just fell from natural rights, they just descended from the skies, as opposed to being designed. And her point then is, if schools were designed to be what they currently are, they can be redesigned, which I think is a, is a is really a hopeful message. And I think we have some thoughts on things we might redesign a little bit. Can you talk folks through, kind of the animating concerns of well, because we think sense of control is just so important for young people developing lives and healthy nervous systems. What are the ways that schools are maybe missing an opportunity to help foster the development of healthy sense of control?

Bill Stixrud:

Well, my first few thoughts netter number one, if the two main things that we focus on about the self the sense of control, is that it's the key to mental health, because every anxiety, depression, every kind of mental health problem is rooted in a low sense of control. If you're anxious, your thinking is out of control, you'd like to stop worrying, but you can't. If you're depressed, you got no sense of control. And also, the sense of autonomy, or control seems to be the key for that intrinsic kind of self driven motivation that we want to see in kids, as opposed to kids who don't work very hard, or kids who work slavishly and obsessively in ways that aren't healthy and sustainable. And if you think about that, then and ideally, I mean, I remember reading almost 40 years ago, some of the first attempts to apply brain research to education, that the ideal internal state for learning is relaxed alertness, and then the ideal environment for learning is high challenge but low threat. And so when we see that kids are so stressed in school, you see the level of anxiety and depression these studies that we refer to in the book of how stressed and unhappy kids are in school, where the majority of high school kids now say that the predominant feelings they experience in high school are feeling stressed, tired and bored, not exactly relaxed and alert, not exactly high challenge, low threat. So I think that, and also that if we know that autonomy is the key to self motivation, and we know that as kids, sense of control. School gets lower every year they're in school. Something's not right here.

Ned Johnson:

One of the points we make in this chapter is that there are really two opportunities for schools to support this development of autonomous and competence and a healthy sense control. One both the subjective sense of autonomy, of giving kids more voice and choice, of of having to say over the curriculum, of having to say how they're taught and how they're tested. And it's not putting kids in charge of everything, but it's just not having them be feeling voiceless and just, you know, along for the ride. And then the second sense is really in practices that support healthy brains, right? You know, everything from school start time to decrease in the pressure to well, a bunch of things we'll talk about in this conversation, including our friend Stewart's lab and Dr Stewart's lab, and I should say, and some of the stuff that he came out, research that he did in Ohio. Do you want to talk a little bit more about some of the statistics? I mean, one of the things that was really striking to me is research that shows that young people are more likely to have suicidal ideation, suicide attempts and completed suicides during school days than weekends, during the school year than during the summer. Yeah. And so I think a lot of folks, ah, kids these days get off my lawn kind of thing, and little more than that, yeah,

Bill Stixrud:

no, it's true. And this study I mentioned earlier that was actually, is this huge survey that Yale did. It came out in 2020 so it was done before the pandemic, where I think they surveyed, I think 23,000 high school kids across the country, and the majority of feelings, 75% of the feelings that students reported experiencing in school were negative. As I said, the predominant feelings were feeling tired, stress and bored and Ed. You mentioned Stuart Slavin, who is a pediatrician, and for decades, has been a medical educator. And Stuart went into the last decade or so, he's been looking at adolescents as well. And he went into these three suburban high schools in Ohio, high achieving high schools, as he does. He gave these kids measures of anxiety and depression, and just found strikingly high, like 70% of the kids have either an anxiety disorder, depression is strikingly high, maybe 65 something like that. And then he asked the kids, you know, why are you so stressed? The most striking thing was that the top 12 out of 30 factors of the kids cited all had to do with school, academic pressure and performance. Fear of not getting to college, fear of disappointing my parents feel, of letting my not living up my own expectations, the excessive homework, that kind of stuff, it had nothing to do with social media. Had nothing to do with global warming or the environment or what's going on in our culture. More generally, it was all stress, academic pressure, which which coincides with our experiences recently of talking with kids in high schools who say, I am my grades. You know the kids I tested who felt happy the day they got into high school. They get they got college. And the girl who's when I asked her, How are an enemy and a friend alike? So they're both your competition. Okay, great. And the high school kids you talked to recently,

Ned Johnson:

yeah, yeah, there's a really neat, really, just a terrific and both academic and, I think, a pretty healthy culture public high school just outside of DC, and was actually curious. I was invited in there because a group of students there had done a big, basically a big conference last year as a bit of a clap back against Jonathan Haidt and the anxious generation, and in the same ways that Stewart found in Ohio State, you think it's all social media, and they had a lot to say on it. So I was, you know, checking in with these kids and, you know, asking, talking to class after class after class. And this one student raised her hand. She said, You know, I think of every single minute that I spend in my day, I put through the filter the lens of what would a college admissions person think about how I'm spending my time and how I'm spending my effort, and every head through the room was, was was not in an approval. And when you think about a healthy sense of control, I mean talk about an externalized locus of not is this good for me? Is this what I want to do? Is this meaningful to me, my friend? But what is some person who I don't even know, think about how I'm spending my time. And then there was another young woman who had moved here, her family from Spain, and she came here, and she's into all kinds of really neat student, you know, into outside of school, into art and a really good athlete. But she said, Here, she said, nobody does anything for fun. None of these activities are for fun. They're they're all, does this look good for college? Does would that be better for college? And they're and they're thinking of dropping this and joining that, not because it's more meaningful to them or because they like it. You look good at it, but, but which of these will look better for college? And you know, we were we when we're in Ohio? What? A month ago? Lecture. And we gave that talk about how the brain craves autonomy. And our friend Jeff there, the super superintendent at school in Ohio, made in his presentation a point that we really need to shift our thinking from thinking about schools as places of learning towards thinking of them as places of human development. And I was just I was so happy to hear that, because that's a message that we've been making. You know, really, since the self driven child came out, that we are, for those of us, and kids included, who think about the greatest outcome of high school and adolescence as being the college that you get into, we're squandering years of brain development, you know, on the altar of colleges that make a little but not a lot of difference, and creating all these problems that you mentioned before of anxiety and depression and really developing brains that are used to being used to being tired, bored and stressed as their default resting state. And that's that's sure not what we want to be doing to teens as they develop their brains.

Bill Stixrud:

You know, I'm just thinking now that we also in, I think in October, gave a talk about the fact that if you look at the way most, especially most secondary schools operate in many elementary schools as well, you'd never know that anybody there has learned anything from neuroscience about what the brain needs in order to function and learn well, to feel good, to develop well. And I think that we need a stronger focus, as we say it, on creating healthy brains, as opposed to just cramming stuff into kids hats and giving them skills. It's not that knowledge and skills aren't important. It's just that we see so many kids who do extremely well in school and become really successful and career wise, who are just miserable. And I think that they've sculpted brains. It's just harder for them to be happy, harder for them to enjoy their success. And

Ned Johnson:

one thing that I was in as I was reflecting on having this conversation today, I was thinking about that point of knowledge and knowledge acquisition, and the model that we used to have of, you know, teachers is kind of the sage on stage, that they were the ones who held all this knowledge. And, of course, the internet and Tiktok for heaven sakes have have them for better, for worse. One can also say that they've sort of democratized information, that it's no longer you need Professor Johnson or professor stick to share that information, because it's, it's the proliferation of information with the internet is so so just radically altered the landscape of learning from what it was, you know, Khan Academy and everything else, from what it was decades ago. And so I go, I keep going back to that idea of, how do we create school as a place of human development? It was funny. We were, I forget where we were. You had some some parents say, Yeah, but we've got to prepare them for real life. And you observe, said, there may be few places less like real life than a typical high school class, where we have 34 kids sitting there stationary, you know, grouped by age rather than talent or interest, all being talked at by and large and told the things are important that they may or may not give a fig about, as though they're all going to march in the same direction, as opposed to 123, scatter and go and go in the direction of where your natural interests and natural talents lie and required to ask permission to go to the bathroom. Oh, I forgot that part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you imagine, if you're working, you had to, like, buzz your boss to go to the bathroom?

Bill Stixrud:

Not exactly, no, that'd be hard. But no, I am the boss. I don't want

Ned Johnson:

to be. I don't know if you go buzzing me yet. Can I go to the bathroom. My gosh, just

Bill Stixrud:

thinking of Mike Nicholson, our friend, Mike Nicholson, who whose outfit, the inspired education, is dedicated to increasing students agency and sense of autonomy in school and working with schools all over the country. We're part of the Fortunately, we're part of this. This team of people that's working on this Mike encourages administrators and teachers to shadow kids in school. And recently we this a principal and 10 of his staff shadowed these high school kids for a whole day. At the end of the six hour school day, the principal came back to his office and said, there's two words that describe what I experienced today. It sucks. There's just this non stop. You're just having blathering on and on and on and no downtime. And that's

Ned Johnson:

no downtime is like a really big deal, yeah, in my view, because when we think about really learning is not about the teaching, but the reflection on what was taught, and if you're rushing from one thing to the next to the next, it crowds at any opportunity for meaningful reflection. My wife teaches an independent school, and they're looking at the the schedule in incoming years. And this consultant they have, so they're really, we should we should get rid of passing time. They should just go. Immediately from one thing to the next, and my wife is shaking her head like this doesn't make any sense at all. And we have friends who teach at a school up in Connecticut, independent school where they have 10 minutes of passing time, where most schools have, like, four minutes. So it's this rush, rush, rush from one thing to the next, and knowing that rushing, of course, increases your stress, your urgency, but increases your stress, which probably doesn't put you in a place of relaxed alertness when you show up for the next class. And these friends of ours said, when they moved to a 10 minute passing time, said it completely changed the energy so that I could, I could hang out for a couple minutes after class and ask my teacher this, and it didn't need a note, and I had time to go the bathroom and also to, you know, do something else for five minutes. And it wasn't just rush, rush, rush rush, rush throughout the whole darn day. You feel like you're running from connection to connection, afraid to miss your plane in the airport. Yeah, so in the self driven child, we talked about bringing a sense of control to school, and what things that students can do, from getting enough sleep to making choices, and how parents that can can support their kids, you know, as a consultant around the school and not the homework police. And we didn't really lean that much in at that point to what schools themselves should be doing. But in this chapter and the seven principles for raising self shipping child, workbook we do and whatever it's worth talking through a little bit, some of the recommendations we have for teachers and administrators who you know, arguably, they want great learning environments for their kids, but, but as you pointed out, they may be part of the system that they didn't make, and maybe a little bit unsure. You know, they may feel low sense of control to make meaningful changes,

Bill Stixrud:

right, right? I think that's right. And I think that certainly in terms of probably the main thing, I think in a self driven child first book, we would said the first thing is, support autonomy. Support autonomy. Support autonomy. And that's probably true. And we talk about various ways that that teachers can start by saying, I got an assignment here. I watch your feedback on it, because I don't want you to waste your time. If it's not helpful. I don't want to do I don't want you to do it. And just starting there or saying, you know that here's a project here, and I want to give you several choices. How you demonstrate to me what you're learning. You can create a song. You can do you can do something artistic, you can write a paper. You can give an oral presentation. Kids different ways to demonstrate what they learn. I love, and I was so struck that working on a new book that I just happened. I don't know why, but I was on the CDC website and noticed that they have a whole section on promoting autonomy in adolescence. Is it because they see as a public health issue? Because the evidence is so strong the supporting autonomy in young people, it benefits their learning. It hugely benefits their emotional development.

Ned Johnson:

I love you. You had dropped that line on me the other day that I so adore that dysfunctional intrinsic motivation is a trans diagnostic facet of psychiatric symptomology. To get that right, you

Bill Stixrud:

did. You got a perfectly real people. Words

Ned Johnson:

screwed up or poor or low intrinsic motivation is going to show up. And as you mentioned before about anxiety and depression and eating disorders and substance use disorders and schizophrenia and just all across the board, because brains that are if you have a low intrinsic motivation, you feel really stressed, and if you feel really stressed, you just have a proliferation of mental health disorders or an exacerbation of existing ones. Yeah,

Bill Stixrud:

so kind of a big deal. Autonomy is huge because, because of its relationship with mental health and motivation, and also this, used to think about my experiences, especially the I think the most elite high schools in my experience in 40 years is that they're toxic for 80% of the kids there. And it says that by to do well, it almost requires the schools, almost require kids to be chronically sleep deprived and stressed and and I think we take the tack, we take the make the point in this book, this new book, that for many kids, school is the primary source of their suffering, kind of consistent with, you know, stewards, labyrinths and so I think, think that autonomy can go a long way, but, but if you think that given how stressed teachers are and how teachers are leaving droves, and given that stress is contagious, we have to think about, how do we calm down the atmosphere in school and make it less threatening, make it less boring and less so kids actually don't feel stressed and tired and bored most of the time. I'm thinking

Ned Johnson:

about when we're again, we're back out there in Ohio, and the superintendent, Jeff Brown, was talking about what he and his administrators and faculty and all the way down with the changes that they've made over the past year since you had consulted with them, and they've been looking hard at their processes. And he floated and said, you know, for us here, you know we are making homework optional, ungraded, and I think both of us nearly fell out of our. Chairs. It's a recommendation we've been making for quite a while, but we'd yet to have someone have the courage. And I don't know what other word to use, other than that, to actually do it. Yeah, and you know, if I, if I can riff on that for a moment, I think about the benefits in sort of three ways. First is that, if the purpose of homework is to support learning and we're grading it, you know, as an output rather than input. What are we doing? Right? You told the story about a client of yours who super bright kid who's getting a and all of his tests both sort of allergic to doing homework, and so he got 100 on his math, but he's got a C in the class because he's not doing the homework. And, like, Wait, if the purpose of homework is to support learning, and he's already demonstrating mastery. Like, why? Why would you do that? I also think, to your point about the the energy, what the experience is for teachers, right? And the experience for for students. But I'll start with teachers. If, if I'm trying to use homework to support Ned, you're trying to support Ned's learning in French or math, whatever, and you're looking for sort of a gotcha, ism, and I'm trying to be perfect, so I get the grades as opposed to and then you really don't know how to factor in a way that's efficient, right? Or you really don't have an understand the passe composite. Can we talk about this, where I'm trying to basically with perfect, perfect marks on my homework. In many ways, I'm trying to hide that there might be a problem, and then teachers have to spend, I don't know they're really looking for. They have to be grading homework in ways that requires a great deal of precision, and therefore, we're just wear wear and tear on them, because you're gonna have to fight over homework grades, as opposed to, this is pretty good. Bill looks like he knows what he's doing here Ned. Let's talk about this, right? And I just have so many students who are they're up to all hours of the night making sure that their homework is perfect, because they know that they're going to underperform on tests, right? And so they need to Bank A million points on homework so they can get a, you know, afford to have a grade that's sucky enough. And you sit there and think, no, wait a second, perhaps, perhaps, if they weren't so stressed about doing their homework, and can engage in ways that they actually learn from it, rather than trying to be perfect, and they didn't stay up till all hours of the night to be perfect, they might actually learn better and then do better on tests simply because, again, they've learned better. Yeah,

Bill Stixrud:

that's just a thought. No, no, it's a great thought, Ned, and I'm just, I'm thinking to our friend, Stuart Slavin, when he was the University of St Louis. St Louis University, the assess that the mental health is he always is of incoming medical students a few years ago, and was alarmed, but by how much anxiety and depression there was. And so he did an invention, you got you got the whole faculty on board, where they taught 10% less material. Required the students to be in class 10% less give them a very brief course on cognitive restructuring, basically, how to think differently, to the not to be so perfectionistic. And the kids had a full day in the week pursue some independent projects related to some interest, medicine related interest, right?

Ned Johnson:

Or he said, or they could sleep more, they could go to the gym, or they could catch up on a home. They could spend that time in ways that they felt they needed, or in ways they felt were meaningful to that if I recall,

Bill Stixrud:

and the kicker is that the anxiety and depression each decreased by 80%

Ned Johnson:

Yeah, did he say they were the first year students that around exams, the depression rate had been like 54% and then went to four four Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's just,

Bill Stixrud:

it's unbelievable. And also, they did better on their step their step one exams, that it's even said previous years that they'd spent less time in class, had less material crammed into their head, they're just going to forget, and their brains worked better, and they felt better, they learned better. And for me, that is just so instructive about what we need to do. I mean, we said the self healing child, if we were teaching kids, we'd much rather teach them for four hours, if they'd slept for eight than to sleep. Teach them for eight hours they slept for four given how much of learning and memory occurs while you sleep, right? And so, I mean, I'm just thinking about how much that the various chapters in our new principles workbook just are related to each other. I mean, some you know, we talk about giving kids an accurate model of reality, that where you go to college is not the most important thing in your life. That kind of thing about having healthy expectation and the motivation, the consulting, all these things that that I think really relate to, not only for parents and kids at home, but also what we can do in school. Yeah, the radical downtime. And then I think that that what you're saying the focus has been so much, in part because of all the standards these, all the standardization the public schools, we have to teach, we have to cram this way, to cover the material where kids is just exposed to stuff, but they just, they have no idea what it means. They don't forget. They don't remember it.

Ned Johnson:

I keep, if I keep thinking, were I an English teacher, which I'm just not. Totally not. But were I an English teacher, the thought that jumps to mind for me would be that every Friday is free reading Friday, and you can read anything you want, so long as it's like, you know, not, not safe for work. You know, it can't be on a phone, but you can read any book you want. You don't have to read about them sign. You can do, read the the homework that we've assigned. Or you can read anything you darn well please. And just to have kids sit there for 45 minutes when they're not on their phone, when they're not being pressuring, read newspaper, read a comic book, read, you know, Maya Angelou, whatever you want, whether it's you know, whether it's silly or profound, because it's what you want to do. And just to have an experience. But like what Stuart was saying, where you can spend time on something that matters to you and just relax in it. Yeah, yeah. Let me go back to a moment, and I'd love to share with this for folks who are listening, who are educators, we have an exercise in the book every chapter and the seven principles has reflections and has exercises, kind of challenges for folks to try and the kind of foundational one that we have in this chapter on education is around homework. And there are three steps to this. The first is to ask teachers to reflect upon the homework assignment that you're going to give. What's the purpose of it? Not, not, none. What's the purpose of it? Are you trying to deepen a lesson? Are you trying to give kids an opportunity to explore something before you teach it? Is it something that's connected to some, you know, standards, you know, state or school standards? Is it to just give more practice on on something that's been particularly thorny, so, so that when you're crafting that assignment, both the nature of it and the length of it, it's done in a way that's that's thoughtful and purposeful, ideally, your home goal is not just to you know, fill them lives with busy work. Step two is communicate to that to the students. And do they have the same understanding around this homework that to do? Do they have in mind? What you have in mind? And then step three is after they've completed the assignment and you've looked over in whatever way you look over it, just to reflect, was it worth it? Was it worth your time crafting this? Was it worth students time in doing it? Do you think they got out of what you hope they would get out of it? And just as is, kind of like mindful, you know, teaching, you know, what's the purpose of this? I always, I think I've told you the story before, but I enjoy too much not to share it when I was when I was in high school, I went to tiny public high school in rural Connecticut, and I mostly because I was a little bit more academic, I had the good fortune of usually getting just really the best teachers in the school. And my math teacher, Mr. Dudek, was a really good math and star good he was a really good guy, and I like math, had a pretty good head for it. Mr. Dudek did not believe in giving in anything other than a. You get a B plus, but you couldn't get an A plus. So I had like a 9567 or whatever in his math class, because, again, he taught it well, and I learned it pretty well, but I didn't really have an incentive to go like all out more than that, because it wasn't like it was going to move my grade at all, and I felt like I mastered it. But he did collect our homework every Friday. Now I didn't do the homework. I didn't feel that I needed to, because he taught it well, and I learned it well enough to get a 96 on things. And so the every Friday, he'd come around and ask for the homework. And as is true of all good relationships, ours was founded on mutual dishonesty, where I would pretend that I had done it, and he would pretend to believe me, like, oh, and then where's your Oh, yeah, I've been working. I didn't finish it yet. Yeah, I was, I was working on those problems for the for the math team. Of course, I was on the math team and and he said, Oh, okay, okay, okay. Can he just sort of shake his head and walk away? And people around me are looking it's like, what is going on here, man. And it was in hindsight, it made complete sense from my perspective that I didn't do that homework because I already, you know, I understood it while and I mastered it. What I should have done, though, is taken that time he should have told my French teacher and just piled the homework on me, because I French was not as easy for me, and I really never did master it. And if I'd have a teacher who would explain to me, if you practice this, this is what you're going to get out of it, I was kind of doing it. I got an A on things, but I never really learned it well. And I just I go back to Jeff Brown and thinking about tree changing schools into place of development. And if I don't care about learning French or math, you can't make me, but if I do for you, as the teacher, say, well, Ned, if you, if you do this, here's what I think, here's how I think it'll help you. Here's what I think you'll get better, and here's how think it'll deepen your learning. And you know, your your call, whether you want to do it or not. Gosh, wouldn't you know it's like working with a personal trainer. You can't make me go on the machine. But hey, net, I'd really like you to work on this, because I think a greater range of flexibility will help you. Oh, oh, tell that story you're reading about physicians in medicine. Oh,

Bill Stixrud:

yeah, in Dennis yeagers book 10 to 25 he references research where, basically, if you treat people respectfully, especially adolescents, if you treat them respectfully, they have more influence. So they're. Physicians say you have the particular disease you need to you need to take this medicine. Whatever it is, the compliance is much lower than if you say the I think you have this condition here, I'd like you to consider taking this like that. You take the force off the table, as we talk about in our own parlance. And if I can mention one other thing about this, this wonderful superintendent, Jeff Brown. He is right. Oh my god. And I were at a conference maybe six weeks ago where Jeff gave a presentation and said, our homework motto now is inspire, don't require, which then I haven't sub driven child. And of course, we were happy to see that our work showed up, had an influence there, and a high school kid presented and say our homework motto, inspire don't require meaning. Inspire kids to learn at home to if you aren't too tired, you aren't too stressed, to practice this stuff, here's an assignment. I think it'll help you, but don't require it, and don't grade it. It was very cool. But what Jeff did, he's very compelling guy. The school board, everybody in this, the whole faculty. They read the self driven child, and then they had, they had meetings about it, and the whole staff read it. And so you got the whole school board on board, given how much scientific evidence there is, they read the subject child, so they understand all this. All understand all the science behind it. And then Stuart and I lectured to the whole faculty a couple times before the start of the last school year to try to get everybody on board. And that's what happened at Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles, where when receptor from child first came out, where the Head of School bought 750 copies of the book so that everybody in the school community would be on the same page. This is the science that this supports. This here's the clinical experience that the support, but that's the way systems, systems change. I mean, we got to get kids on board. I mean, I'm just thinking that when talking with the homework policy now, yeah, he's thinking about that girl in Illinois who were taught we're giving a talk called create a life that you want to high school kids. And there's an assembly of 1000 kids, and this one girl, after we finished the Q and A, said, Because homework causes so much stress and contributes so much anxiety and sleep deprivation, should teachers be held accountable for the mental health problems that that all this homework creates? And she got this thundering standing ovation I've never literally the stage was shaking. Immediately

Ned Johnson:

ran for student council president. Yeah, it was

Bill Stixrud:

unbelievable, the energy and the passion about the pushback, about so much homework, and we said, of course, the teachers are it's a system that's not working well for kids. We look at educational outcomes, you look at mental health problems, it's not working very well, but it's not it's not their fault. But that's where this is. And we get kids on board. We get parents who understand that the science of this, and just know that what's happening through kids is not sustainable.

Ned Johnson:

Yeah, we have that. We have that beautiful kind of vicious circle that could be turned around and become a virtuous circle of kind of stress, right? That stress in the community. We then kind of lean on teachers, and then then they lean on parents to get them so parents get stressed, and they lead on students. And then that proliferates throughout the district, which comes back in the community, and it goes around and around and around. And so in some ways, everyone is both complicit and victim of the system. And what the at the end of this chapter, Bill, we end with some suggestions, and a few of them you've already touched on. Of, you know, following Stuart slavins line of reducing the workload. You know, the literature on later start times is kind of, you know, unequivocal, and why? Wildly, you know, unlistened to, right? But we also talk about, to your point, about, about problem solving teams, you know, one getting your teachers, administrators and parents, students work together. They're so they're all on the same team. And I think that's one thing that Jeff did such a good job these wasn't pollution created and then and then sold to this group of stakeholders or another, but rather kind of made slowly, collaboratively, so everyone had a shared sense of what the challenges were and what the opportunities are. And so then there was buy in, and that's one things that I love about Jeff, and frankly, good leaders everywhere. You know, we're even around like cell phone policy, you're going to get better compliance, much like you mentioned with the medicine. We evolve in the process of people who are going to be affected by the outcome, yeah. And

Bill Stixrud:

we treat that, whatever objections they have, respectfully. And then here's, here's the evidence for this and like that. Yeah. And I think that. So one of the recommendations, it certainly support autonomy, and another one is just ask for the evidence. You know, well, because, because, because schools, it was schools, let's say, you know, we use evidence based practice. And they certainly they do now, and like, if you got a kid who has dyslexia, they use evidence based practice. Right, right writing. But certainly there's no evidence for 720s, high school start time. There's no evidence that that teaching kids to learn to read in kindergarten is a good idea because kids learn to read better when they're seven than they do when they're five, more mature brain and so there's talk talk a lot about that in the subject in childhood, but in this chapter, we just talk about just if something's not working, we encourage parents to ask for the evidence. Where's the evidence that my kid needs to do this, the homework? Forget. I mean, if you're an elementary school kid who is in third grade and they have two hours of homework, I mean, it's ask for the evidence, because there doesn't exist. Yeah,

Ned Johnson:

and I will generally encourage people to also do that respectfully, rather than like, well, where's the evidence for that? Because to say, help me understand here. Because I I understand this differently, and I'd love to know what it what you're know and understand about this process as a way to try to, you know, I think it makes sense to assume that what's the line that I'm forgetting who the consultant was, who said, Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance. You just, you just don't know right? They, they're not. We're not trying to do wrong by by kids or by parents or by teachers or by administrators. But if we don't know we we can end up with some policies that might be different. And

Bill Stixrud:

administrators are. They're under tremendous pressure too. I mean, we're talking to somebody recently who works with school heads and superintendents administrators, and there's just, it's just such a stressful time for everybody, yeah, but because, and because, if you want schools to be more peaceful, more calmer and more conducive to learning and mental health, we need calmer people. And we we need more radical downtime, as we talk about in it in our book. And we also, we recommend that there's a section in the last chapter on encouraging parents to resist pressure from teachers, for example, to to your kid needs to work harder in this because it worked on. Or you need, you need to every kid. You need to be checking his portable portal, or you need that kind of thing where it gets kind of it's just inconsistent with our view that we want kids to understand who's responsible for what, and we want parents to be as support as they need to be, but we don't want to suggest that somehow parents are supposed to be able to make their kids do their work like that. Yeah,

Ned Johnson:

I mean, and especially for parents who have kids with ADHD or learning disabilities, you know, who aren't organized yet and and who need more support, right? That's if the organization is not their thing, they probably need some scaffold and some backstopping. And the advice that I always give to parents is, even if you've got a kid who's just everything's falling out of his backpack all the while and is getting dinged for missed assignments, is to simply ask, Hey, would it be helpful? We sat down and looked at your portal, you know, every Sunday, maybe a couple times a week, just to see whether anything that you just lost track of. I mean, when I was at that same school talking about Jonathan height, the kids had either seven or eight different learning portals they had to navigate from keeping finding what their homework was for where they turned it in, for where they learned this, for where they learned that. And, my goodness, I mean seven learning portals when they don't even have seven classes. I mean, you know, I know my Trapper Keeper wasn't exactly the model of elegance I was in school, but, but it was in one place. It was in one place. So, yeah,

Bill Stixrud:

well, yeah, for me, I'm thinking of another study of medical students that just came out a couple years ago, where these medical students Loyola University in Chicago and had the opportunity to learn Transcendental Meditation, which Ned and I both practice as an elective, and they meditate during the year, and they have the group meditations, and they have lectures about TM to learn some more about it. And there's a study came out the students who meditated twice a day that not only reported better learning, but much better mental health, but they said that on average, they gained two to five hours more productive time during this during the day, during the day, now, during the week, two to five hours a day, a day, due to their increased energy and metal clarity and and I think that so the idea that one of the basic ideas I'm just putting that together with Stewart study, where they decrease the amount of material taught to increase them, they just change The balance. They change the energy in the program where the emphasis is not, here's the standard, we're going to cram, cram, cram, cram. That's not how the brain learns and remembers. And I think that if we really focus on the brain the need, as you said, for periods of downtime during the school day, that we really schools can really become the major source of growth and joy for kids. That's I'm just thinking the art to schools model, you know, educating joy for girls. You know, why? Why not? You know what? Why not? We'll get better results, right? By the way, why not focus on making schools a source of growth and joy? I love

Ned Johnson:

it. Yeah. Well, for all of you who are listening, whether you're your parents or educators or young people, if anyone's any young people, listen to this, and I think I can say with some confidence that we all have a collective interest in kids engaging in school in ways where they're interested, they're curious, they're excited, they're joyful, as Bill described, because they're going to learn better, and it's a better learning environment. It's a better teaching environment. Parents don't have to worry about it all the time, and I know that all of us have a collective interest in having a good ROI on tax dollars and tuition dollars, and most of all, on the time of adolescent brain development, so that we can get the best outcomes for every kid who's going through a school, public or private. If you are an administrator or a concerned parent or faculty member somewhere at any school, and you'd like to have us talk with you or your faculty, we'd love to do it because, like you, we have the best interest. Our interest is in kids learning well and being well, 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 at prep matters.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, at